Gaming the censors: A new way to tell China’s untold stories
Susie Wu is a freelance journalist and editor based in Hong Kong and Taiwan, working with Initium Media, an independent Chinese news outlet. Learn how the JournalismAI Skills Lab helped her create a narrative game that bypasses censorship to reach audiences inside China
For journalists covering China from the outside, the challenge is twofold: gathering stories and getting them to the people who need them most. Susie Wu knows this struggle intimately. After working as editor-in-chief at Initium Media in Hong Kong, she relocated to Taiwan following the 2020 National Security Law. During that period, she witnessed many peers across Hong Kong media being detained, and to avoid potential issues, the outlet relocated its headquarters to Singapore.
“We were blocked by mainland China about nine years ago,” Wu explains. “You cannot cover China from inside and you cannot cover China from outside. And whenever we try to write a story, we cannot reach our target audience.”
The frustration runs deeper than access. During a rare visit to China, Wu found that everyone repeated the same government-approved narratives. The stories that matter, namely, how ordinary people actually live, remain untold and unheard. She decided to tackle this problem with the help of the JournalismAI Skills Lab, a programme supported by the Google News Initiative.
The solution
Wu’s breakthrough came through an unexpected medium: a narrative video game. Players unlock fragments of a character’s memory, solving puzzles to piece together a life story. The character, a 40-year-old woman in a coma, gradually reveals memories that reflect real events in contemporary China.
“In China under censorship, you can tell stories about gods, ghosts, anything but yourself,” Wu says. “We have so many stories but none about ourselves.”
The game format allows Wu to embed journalism within fiction. A memory of meeting someone on the subway might reference actual events; the news becomes personal, woven into ordinary experience. It’s a way to say what cannot be said in a news piece.
The path wasn’t smooth. During her initial pitch to Skills Lab mentors, Wu struggled to articulate her vision. “I was everywhere. My thoughts were everywhere,” she recalls. The feedback was discouraging, but it hardened her resolve. She consulted friends in both journalism and gaming, addressed the practical concerns raised, and committed to proving the concept could work.
By the final showcase, the same mentors were impressed. Wu had transformed from someone who couldn’t sell her idea into someone who could demonstrate it.
The game currently contains a limited number of memory fragments, but Wu plans to expand it. She has also shared insights from the Skills Lab programme with her colleagues at Initium, inspiring parallel experiments with AI tools.
Key takeaways
Communication is harder than you think. “The world is full of misunderstandings. What you think is clear and straightforward often isn’t – whether you’re talking to people or to AI.”
AI amplifies the human behind it. “Like any tool, AI is only as good as the vision, curiosity, and imagination of the person using it.”
Community sustains motivation. “At the Skills Lab programme, I met so many brilliant, imaginative, and ridiculously fast-learning folks who gave up their Friday happy hours just to figure out how AI can make newsroom life a tiny bit easier. Watching that kind of nerdy energy honestly makes me think my love for journalism might survive another decade.”
