A Chinese FMV game that puts you in the role of a man exacting revenge on a series of 'gold diggers'—statuesque women who con lovelorn men out of vast sums of money before vanishing into thin air—has plunged China into an exhaustingly familiar bout of gender tumult. The internet is alight with discourse about gender, misogyny, and cyberbullying; the game's creator has been banned from social media; and even national media outlets are getting in on the action with takes. See? We're not so different after all.
Revenge on Gold Diggers (via Sixth Tone) released last month, and puts you the immaculately groomed shoes of Wu Yulun—a chap who once found himself on the business end of a gold-digging (or 'pig butchering,' as the parlance goes in China) scam and has since dedicated his life to getting his own back.
The game opens with fictional headline after fictional headline about innocent men getting bamboozled out of tens of thousands of dollars by modern-day sirens as the camera pans across a giant, Pepe Silvia-esque conspiracy board implying the existence of some grand, women-led criminal conspiracy to defraud hard-working men of their cash.
"To tell if a man loves you, just see how much he spends on you," goes the narration, citing a fictional relationship guru. "After a whirlwind 41-day marriage, she demanded 10 million yuan, ultimately driving her husband to his death," it continues, as newspapers whip across the screen.
The gender politics here are, well, foul. The game presents a world in which exploitation is the sole preserve of women, where men are always hard-working, romantic, and gullible, and where every woman is suspect as a result.
Although the game's creators said they went out of their way to create "grey" characters and that the point of the game was to open a discussion, it's hard not to see the game, with its rightly-guided protagonists and scheming lady villains, as a kind of sexist wish-fulfillment about putting women 'in their place.'
It's not great, which is no doubt why it sparked controversy almost the second it launched and climbed into Steam's global top-sellers. "Not anti-fraud but misogyny," denounced one Chinese news outlet. "I feel a game like that merely fans hostility between men and women," one anonymous woman told the BBC. "It casts women, once again, as the inferior gender who have to somehow find ways to please men to earn their livelihoods."
Arguments raged on Chinese social media and the game's creator, Hong Kong director Mark Wu, was even banned on the video platform Bilibili after release. As the takes flew, the game even changed its name a day after release, from 'Lāo nǚ yóuxì'—gold digger game—to the more clinical Emotional Fraud Simulator (the game's exe retains the more dramatic 'Revenge on Gold Diggers' English title). It did not work; the discourse rages on.
Which is unsurprising, not just because the internet is the internet everywhere but because Emotional Fraud Simulator intersects with real-life tragedies. Last year, Chinese streamer Pangmao (Fat Cat)—real name Liu—took his own life. Initial reports blamed the streamer's girlfriend, Tan, who was said to have exploited Liu out of hundreds of thousands of yuan to "pay bills, start a business, and for luxurious things," in contrast to the streamer's own humble lifestyle.
Tan was besieged by Chinese internet users who accused her of driving Liu to his death, quickly becoming an online hate figure. That is, until the police announced that Tan was not financially dependent on Liu, that the pair had each sent significant sums of money back and forth, and that there was no evidence indicating Tan played any role in Liu's death. Instead, it seemed that the doxxing campaign against Tan had been sparked by some of Liu's surviving family members, who bore a grudge against his girlfriend.
And yet Emotional Fraud Simulator acts as though the initial version of the Pangmao story was the true one. The game opens with a young man about to leap his death while tearfully blaming his money-grubbing girlfriend, the protagonist's screen name is 'Benmao,' and users quickly noted—as pointed out by Sixth Tone—that the first character in each of the game's chapters reveals a hidden message: "May the world never see another Pangmao." It's difficult not to see the game as having—at best—a skewed view of reality, and at worst a regressive political agenda.
