In World of Warcraft (WoW), the undead Forsaken—often simply referred to as the Forsaken or Undead—is a playable character race. This self-aware race/faction consists of intelligent undead. In the game's lore, they were killed by a violent ruler and subsequently resurrected as part of the "Undead Scourge." However, they eventually broke free from the oppressive ruler to earn their freedom and independence, which initially seemed like a blessing. As former humans, the Forsaken are haunted by memories of their time blindly serving the Scourge (authoritarian regime), an experience marked by indescribable terror. In the world of Azeroth, they face significant challenges and disadvantages because of their unique identity, excluded and doubted by allies as well as shunned and rejected by their families from the past.
Remember what it means to be the Forsaken. We are neither the living nor the dead. We will be forgotten by both. We have returned to a world we once left behind, yet we can never go back to the days when we were truly alive, nor can we return to the people we once loved. We exist as both a state of being and a curse, which is why we forget the past, and the past forgets us.
The Forsaken, also known as the Undead, is a race character option available to players in WoW. Widely known among WoW players, the Forsaken serves as a symbol of censorship in China. Typically depicted with rotten, broken limbs and exposed bones, they are, however, mended in the China server, which alters them into slightly pale characters. In the game, representations of the undead— models and scenes of death and bloodshed, including skeletons, corpses, flesh, and blood—are censored and modified using less graphic, "harmless" models.
Many Chinese players are active in today's WAN-based online games. This large-scale phenomenon can be traced back to the events on China and Taiwan servers: during a four-year period startingin 2008, due to issues caused by The9 Limited, the Chinese agent of WoW, and the censorship imposed by the Chinese government, many Chinese WoW players bypassed the Great Firewall to play on Taiwan servers. Their influx caused server overloads, prompting the Taiwanese agent to add more servers to accommodate the demand. However, once The9 Limited launched new expansion packs in September or when the game passed censorship, these Chinese players would often disappear. Consequently, Taiwanese players began to refer to them as "locusts," as they would swarm in suddenly and leave many empty servers behind.
Due to a combination of complicated factors involving various agents, such as The9 Limited, NetEase Games, and Blizzard Entertainment, along with censorship from the Ministry of Culture and the National Press and Publication Administration in China, Chinese players have migrated between different game servers. This migration, shaped by the censorship, evokes the image of "the Forsaken." In the game, the Forsaken are compelled to act due to inricate political, commercial, and regional political issues. They represent people and elements that have been forgotten, referred to by different names in various contexts, such as the Undead, the Scourge, and the Forsaken. In this sense, the censored characters, objects, Chinese players, NPCs left behind on empty servers, and the overlooked data of Taiwanese and Chinese players are all epitomized by the Forsaken.
I played with a Chinese player once. In the game, we tackled different tasks to try to level up. The task was to find a missing soldier, and during the process, we could only find incomplete, bloody remains of the soldier, who appeared to be eaten by monsters. Then, the Chinese player said, "so this is what this task looks like. I could not really see him (the missing soldier) in the past." In his memory of the game, the soldier's incomplete body was just a piece of rock, whereas the real soldier was forgotten in the censorship model, never be found.
About the Project
This project focuses on the online community and continues the artist's previous exploration of the exchanges and interactions between Chinese and Taiwanese game players, political conflicts, and the censorship system. The earlier project, Intrusion, investigates the intersection of the digital realm and real-world geopolitics, along with interactions with Chinese players, highlighting a conflict-ridden landscape in the digital world.
This latest project originates from two years of field surveys conducted in the digital world, focusing on online games, internet media, and online communities of Chinese and Taiwanese players. The project emphasizes the intricate digital landscapes shaped by online games, animations, comics, and internet novels. By creating a post-internet film, it aims to reflect Asian digital events in real life. The film's structure is inspired by the proliferating reels on TikTok and YouTube, and imitates the narrative style of Chinese internet novels, adopting the form of short videos to create multiple visual segments that can be combined into a cohesive feature film.
This film encourages audiences to contemplate digital cultural conflicts and contradictions, urging them to re-evaluate the boundary between virtuality and reality, and to explore the intersection between the digital world and real-life politics, thus developing a more comprehensive form of internet ethnography.