{"id":34139,"date":"2018-07-20T20:59:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-20T20:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/322607"},"modified":"2018-07-20T20:59:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T20:59:00","slug":"pubg-corp-apologizes-removes-offensive-japanese-mask-from-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/07\/20\/pubg-corp-apologizes-removes-offensive-japanese-mask-from-game\/","title":{"rendered":"PUBG Corp apologizes, removes offensive Japanese mask from game"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>PlayerUnknown&#8217;s Battlegrounds<\/em> developer PUBG\u00a0Corp. has apologized for an\u00a0in-game helmet depicting the Japanese rising sun flag found\u00a0in the mobile version of the battle royale game after Korean and Chinese players deemed the design to be offensive.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The cosmetic item featured the Japanese rising sun flag, which is reference to the country&#8217;s imperial army and its World War 2-era military aggression.<\/p>\n<p>To a Western audience the design\u00a0may not seem insensitive, but in Asian countries\u00a0it carries connotations of far-right ideology and ultra-nationalism.<\/p>\n<p>It has since been removed from the mobile game, and players who purchased the item pack have been issued refunds\u00a0and told the item included &#8220;a previously undetected bug&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to finding rising sun imagery in <em>PlayerUnknown&#8217;s\u00a0Battleground<\/em> mobile, the bot \u2018Unit 731\u2019 was also discovered, which is a reference to\u00a0a division of the Japanese army that developed chemical weapons and conducted human experiments on Chinese and Korean prisoners of war. This name has also been removed from the game.<\/p>\n<p>PUBG Corp. (whose parent company is the Seoul-based Bluehole) issued an apology for the helmet\u00a0via\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.koreatimes.co.kr\/www\/tech\/2018\/07\/134_252274.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Korean Times<\/a>, stating: \u201cWe apologize for causing concerns over a pilot mask item. We will conduct an overall re-examination of our image production process to prevent such a recurrence. We will enhance procedures to scrutinize game items before their release and hold the person in charge responsible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PlayerUnknown&#8217;s Battlegrounds developer PUBG\u00a0Corp. has apologized for an\u00a0in-game helmet depicting the Japanese rising sun flag found\u00a0in the mobile version of the battle royale game after Korean and Chinese players deemed the design to be offensive.\u00a0 The cosmetic item featured the Japanese rising sun flag, which is reference to the country&#8217;s imperial army and its World [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}