Valvehas complied with a request by South Korea’s Game Rating and Administration Committee (GRAC) to remove a mod from Workshop that “distorted historical facts” (originally reported byThisIsGame, and translated byAutomaton West).
The mod in question was forMount & Blade: Warband, a medieval RPG sandbox from TaleWorlds Entertainment. The mod itself had nothing to do with Mount and Blade, however, and was instead a bizarre, full recreation of a brutal event in South Korean history using Warband’s engine.
The mod, entitled Gwangju Running Man, is a total conversion mod which turns Warband into a recreation of the Gwangju Uprising. This event was a student-led protest of the anti-democratic policies of Chun Doo-hwan, a military dictator who led South Korea from 1980 until 1988.
The protesting students were fired upon by the military, resulting in between 600 and 2300 deaths. In the aftermath of the massacre, the military labelled the event as a violent riot instigated by communist sympathisers working with North Korea.
Chun Doo-hwan would eventually step aside in 1988, allowing his hand-picked successor, Roh Tae-woo, to contest a free and fair election in 1987. Although Roh won the election, he was eventually exposed and subsequently jailed for bribery, mutiny and treason. Likewise, Chun was charged with a litany of charges, including treason and attempted murder.
While recreating such a dark day in the history of South Korea is already questionable, the aforementioned mod rewrites history and depicts the protestors as armed and violent. The author’s political intentions are evidenced by the mod’s cover image: a picture of Chun Doo-hwan.
South Korean press suspects the author is Chinese, as many of the reviews are written in Simplified Chinese. An alternate theory is that the Chinese reviews are intended to obfuscate the true culprits, South Korea’s own far-right political groups.
The mod was initially banned in South Korea, but GRAC coordinated with Valve to have the mod banned globally.
This is an interesting move for Valve, as the company is usually hands-off with moderating its platform. The company even acknowledged the importance of the event for Koreans.
