Does China owe its bad reputation in the video game scene to its weird censorship policies, to the fact that the country has gone as far as to consider games virtual opium, or to the word of mouth that claims Chinese hackers are taking over Western video game servers, a trend that sure does seem to mimic some conspiracy theories popular in dark corners of the Internet such as 4chan Facebook? There's no way of knowing for sure. What we do know, however, is that the evolution of China's role in the video game landscape is filled with unexpected twists and turns that we should all know about.

中国在电子游戏领域的坏名声是因为它奇怪的审查制度，实际上那个国家将游戏视作电子鸦片，或者，是因为传言中的中国黑客正在攻入西方国家的电子游戏服务器，这一趋势似乎在模仿了一些阴谋论，流传于互联网上的阴暗角落，比如脸书上的4chan。我们无从得知究竟如何。然而我们知道的是中国在电子游戏领域里的角色变化充满了我们应当知道的曲折。

4 It all began as a copyright all-you-can-eat buffet

故事从一个任意吃的自助餐式的版权开始的

One particular aspect of China is the, say, aloofness when it comes to copyright law. This is why we get stuff like World Of Warcraft theme parks that popped up without Blizzard's knowledge, let alone approval.

中国特殊的一面是对于版权方面的漠视。这就是为何在暴雪不知情的情况下，会出现《魔兽世界》主题公园的原因，更不要说许可了。

The creator of Joyland, the beautiful park we see above, claims that “it's not based on Warcraft, it's based on animals”. Interesting, though it's not as if he needed to spend the millions that his lawyers probably required for such a bulletproof defense because China is historically very lenient with all instances of copywronging American properties. An even more interesting example is that of 300 Heroes, a MOBA that's an obvious League Of Legends ripoff that replaces its characters with, well, 300 characters from basically every popular property in existence minus the actual Spartans from 300.

美丽的公园Joyland的创建者，声称那不是基于《魔兽世界》的，而是基于动物世界。有意思的是，·他看起来不需要花费数百万美元来请律师，因为中国对于抄袭美国的知识产权很宽容。另一个更有趣的例子是300英雄，这是一款MOBA游戏，一个英雄联盟的抄袭品，并且将其中的角色替换为，好吧，300个来自其它流行游戏的角色，并减去了实际的300个斯巴达人。

The game quickly generated controversy for featuring Shrek, but does it? Does it really? Upon closer inspection, we can see that the creature we're accusing of the crime of being Shrek is also wearing a mask, which means that a) he can be anyone, really, and b), the devs didn't just take Shrek's model from some other game, they actually went through the trouble of making an Incognito mode Shrek just for the game.

这款游戏很快就因为《怪物史莱克》而引发争议，这样吗？真是这样吗？通过仔细检查，我们可以看到我们所指控侵权的、是史莱克的怪物同样戴着一个面具，所以这意味着1那可以是任何东西，2开发人员并非简单从其它游戏中剽窃了史莱克，他们实际上的解决方式是为游戏制作了一款隐藏面目的史莱克。

Now, this is funny when we’re talking about a huge video game getting ripped off by a bonkers game that poses absolutely no threat to it, not so funny when hackers clone games then get the original versions banned and replaced by their own.

现在，我们谈论一个知名大游戏被一个远不如它的游戏剽窃，当黑客克隆了游戏，并将原始版本替换为他们自己的版本。

3 China's gamers became sweatshop workers for shady American companies

中国的游戏玩家成了美国阴暗公司的血汗工厂工人

China's recent economic boom paved the way for literally hundreds of millions of gamers, many of whom are still in need of the extra cash to make ends meet. This created something called “gold farming”, which is LARP-speak for having people work in a game to make fake game money for players who didn't want to engage in the grind required to reach the highest possible levels and get all that shiny gear. It quickly became a booming market, one that gets China quite a bad rep. Interestingly, Chinese people aren't the ones to blame, as many of these multi-million dollar-making ventures are/were helmed by slimy Americans who, at best, got ridiculously rich while paying dimes to their workers whose lives were just a bit better than those of people working on sweatshops. Yeah, playing games for a living isn't all that much fun when our lives depend on having to repeat the same task nobody else wants to perform even once. No problem says Goldman Sachs, the company that invested $60 million in one of the said companies (before it went mysteriously belly up).

中国的经济爆炸为数亿玩家铺平了道路，许多人仍然需要额外的收入来维持生计。他们创造了一种叫做“黄金农场”的东西，这是LARP术语，意思是让人们在游戏中工作赚取虚拟游戏币，给那些不想花工夫干累活来达到高等级和获得闪亮装备的人。这行迅速成为火爆的市场，这使得中国的形象很差。有趣的是，中国人并不是唯一应当被批判的人，因为这些百万美元级的生意中许多都是由虚伪的美国人把持的，他们这些极端富有的人向他们的工人支付一丁点儿钱，使这些工人的生活水平仅比在血汗工厂中的工人好一点儿。为了生存而打游戏并没有那么有趣，因为这个时候是我们为了生存而不断重复那些别人甚至都不愿意做一次的任务。投资了其中一家公司（在其神秘破产之前）的高盛公司说没问题。

That's a pretty funny ending to that story, but the people behind these ventures, people like, say, Steve Bannon, didn't abandon ship before making awful discoveries like the now-kind-of-obvious-one of learning that there's a lot of hatred in video game communities. He quickly used his newfound knowledge to rally and propagate his hateful beliefs. It's totally plausible that we wouldn't have had Trump in the white house if it hadn't been for the country that he so loves to hate.

这件事儿的结尾很有趣，但这些企业背后的人，比如Steve Bannon，在他们发现这其中的糟糕问题之前并没有撤资，其中一个较为明显的是玩家社区内有着许多的仇恨言论。他很快利用他的新发现的知识来拉帮结派和传播他的仇恨信念。如果不是特朗普那么喜欢为国家发表仇恨言论的话，我们就不会选他入白宫了，这是完全合理的说法。

2 They began making better ripoffs

他们的仿品的质量开始变得更好

Even those who've never played it are likely to already have seen characters from Genshin Impact on display in a sexual or non-sexual capacity somewhere on the Internet. It's one of the most played and most lucrative games in the world, and one that even many Zelda fans claim was totally ripping off Breath Of The Wild. So, let's take a look at a random image from The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild:

甚至那些没玩过的也早已看过来自原神的角色出现在互联网一些色情或非色情角落。这是世界上玩家最多最赚钱的游戏之一，甚至许多塞尔达玩家都说这款游戏是在抄袭《荒野之息》。那么，让我们来看看《塞尔达传说：荒野之息》中的一张图随机的图片：

Oh no, it's even worse than we thought. It's a ripoff with even better colors.

噢不，这比我们想象的还要糟糕。它是一个有着更好配色的抄袭品

Now, that's but a screenshot, which is far from enough to pass such a judgment. No way there's at least over 11 minutes uninterrupted of footage displaying very curious similarities, right?

现在，这只不过是一张截屏，远不足以做出这样的判断。不可能有至少11 分钟的视频都显示非常相似是吧？

In all fairness, Genshin has more than enough value on its own and is far from being in the same league as crap like 300 Heroes, but it must be kind of tough for Zelda devs to come up with one of the greatest games of all time and then seeing it earn less than its mysterious bastard twin brother.

公平地说，原神本身就非常有价值，远不是《300英雄》这样的垃圾能比的。但是对于塞尔达的开发人员来说，想出了有史以来最伟大的游戏，却看着它的营收不如它的神秘双胞胎兄弟，内心一定很艰熬。

1 They're currently making games that look better than anything made in the West 他们目前正在制作看起来更加好的游戏 The time to doubt China's power to play on the big table with America and Japan when it comes to earnings has died long ago, and the doubts that new Chinese development teams can come up with incredibly immersive experiences should soon follow suit. We have the Unreal 5 engine to thank for that, as Chinese devs seem way ahead of everyone else when it comes to the looks of various upcoming games. First, there is Wukong Black Myth, a new action-adventure title that looks so good it almost feels like one of those fake Sony CGI trailers that are too good to be real.

在收益方面怀疑中国是否能与美国和日本同行竞争的时代已经过去了，但是对于中国能否给玩家带来沉浸式的良好游戏体验的质疑将会到来。我们要感 谢虚幻5引擎，在各种即将推出的游戏的外观方 面，中国开发者似乎远远领先于其其他人。首先有《黑神话：悟空》这是一款新的动作冒险游戏，好得像是索尼的虚假cg宣传，好得让人难以相信。

That looks just breathtaking, and it's not even anywhere near the final product. While we wait for it to finish cooking, we can take a look at Code: To Jin Yong, another hauntingly beautiful AAA game from another company we didn't even know existed.

看起来令人叹为观止，而且它还没有最终完成。我们还在等它完成，我们可以看看《代码：致金庸》另外一款来自我们没听说过的游戏公司的3A游戏。

The future of Chinese games looks so bright that we'd be lying if we denied being hyped even for the ripoffs we might be seeing in the future.

中国游戏的未来如此光明，以致于我们如果对于即使是未来出现的抄袭作品否认感到兴奋， 也是我们在撒谎。