Summary
If you’ve been keeping up with the raging discourse around the controversial South Korean PlayStation exclusiveStellar Blade, you’ve likely already heard about theHard R graffiti. If you haven’t, here’s the summary: Stellar Blade uses a couple of repeated graphics throughout the game. One of them is just the word ‘hard’, sprayed onto walls. There are also shops where you’re able to find an information broker called Roxanne, indicated with neon signs of the letter R. In one unfortunate place, the graffitied word ‘hard’ was placed next to a neon R, creating the phrase ‘hard R’. The graphic was patched out before release and replaced with the word ‘crime’.
‘Hard R’ is a phrase used in the West as a euphemism for a racial slur referring to Black people. As a person who lives in Asia anddoesspeak English as a native language, I know lots of people who have never heard the phrase ‘hard R’ in their lives because they either aren’t familiar with or aren’t particularly interested in racial tensions in other continents. Even in the West, the term is confusing as it can also mean particularly violent movies with the R rating, sometimes known as Hard-R movies.
It is unlikely that a team of Korean game developers would know this, because it’s a racist phrase in a language that they don’t speak. A statement from PlayStation to IGN already said as much.
The placement of two graphics near each other in Stellar Blade resulted in an unintentional objectionable phrase. Shift Up had no intention of creating offensive artwork and will be replacing the graffiti for the Day 1 patch.
Despite the pretty obviously unintentional nature of the phrase, the same group of gamers that has been positioning Stellar Blade as a cudgel againstgaming journalists who hate hot womenis now crying that the game has been censored and Shift Up has betrayed its principles. Like most, maybe even all, journalists, I am anti-censorship, and I’m sure this isn’t actually censorship.
For Shift Up to be betraying its principles, you’d have to argue that it intended to include a slur in its game, knowing that it would be offensive and would likely damage its standing with PlayStation. It’s clear this is not the case, it did not intend to be offensive, and it is simply rectifying a mistake that could be offensive to players. The people saying this is censorship are claiming that Sony forced Shift Up to remove the reference. There’s no evidence that Sony did this, and if Sony did want to censor the game, it would have done so way before release day.
It’s crucial to remember that for such a controversial game, Stellar Blade is actually very apolitical. You’re allowed to have your opinions about sexy video game characters and what they represent in your imagined culture war – I certainly have plenty to say about how Eve is depicted in the game – but projecting that onto Shift Up’s developers is pretty silly.
As much as players may claim Stellar Blade upholds values that the general right-wing, anti-DEI sect of gamers espouse, that’s simply not true. The game isn’t right-wing, nor is it left-wing. According to previous statements and interviews, Shift Up’s CEO really just wanted his main female character to be hot. The developers have never said that they are anti-censorship, that slurs should be allowed in games, that all women in games should be sexy, or that they have any kind of political agenda at all. We can view the game as a reflection of modern politics, especially in how it’s been perceived by audiences, but Shift Up itself has never claimed to have any political leanings at all.
That’s not to say that Shift Up hasn’t leaned into the controversy as part of its marketing – announcing that the gamewould be ‘uncensored’ in all countriescertainly fanned the flames, despite the fact thatit’s unclear what would have been censored in the first place. But to extrapolate this into a full projection of Shift Up’s politics is pretty misguided. Maybe they just don’t want to be known as the studio that left a slur inside their game. That’s not censorship, it’s just business sense.
Stellar Blade
WHERE TO PLAY
Stellar Blade is an action-driven game from Shift Up, originally revealed as Project Eve. It follows the aforementioned Eve as she battles the alien Naytiba invaders, in a bid to reclaim the Earth for humanity.
