The <em>Hogwarts Legacy</em> Boycott That Wasn’t
When Hogwarts Legacy was released in February, the verdict from video-game sites was close to unanimous: The latest spin-off from the Harry Potter series was a heartless mess, the product of a bigoted worldview, and playing it involved an uncomfortable act of moral compromise—or at least holding your nose and reassuring yourself that J. K. Rowling was not directly involved.
The tech magazine Wired gave the game 1/10, and said its “real-world harms are impossible to ignore.” (These were left unspecified, but let’s presume the reviewer wasn’t talking about repetitive-strain injury from too many spell battles.) TheGamer declined to review the title at all, and suggested that readers should not play Hogwarts Legacy “if you care about your trans friends.” The British outlet Rock Paper Shotgun pointedly reviewed games by trans developers instead. The Mary Sue reported on an alleged fan boycott, in an article that began with the Potteresque incantation “Accio controversy!”
[Read: How J. K. Rowling became Voldemort]
Even the walk-throughs—those helpful guides telling players how to solve the game’s puzzles and guide to finding the magic keys scattered around Hogwarts. “The game has been embroiled in controversy due to transphobic remarks from Harry Potter author JK Rowling,” warns its readers, in an apologetic tone. Neither outlet joined a boycott of the game—walk-throughs are a reliable source of web traffic for months or even years—but both wanted you to know that they deplored it nonetheless. The headline of an article by the former Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo even the launch had become a “referendum” on the author.
