Harry Potter mobile game glitch conjures criticism online

The hugely successful mobile game Harry Potter: Magic Awakened has sparked controversy, with screenshots showing the abnormal facial expressions of the game's female characters while dueling, which the game studio claims is a technical glitch.

With the game's built-in close-up screenshot feature, players found that the female characters in the dueling scenarios showed protruding tongues when being hit.

The screenshots aroused widespread criticism online as people noted a similarity with the expressions of overly sexualized female characters found in erotic manga－especially given that the characters in the game are meant to be around 12 years old.

On Sunday night, the game's studio responded on micro-blogging platform Sina Weibo that it is aware of the bug in the animations of witches under attack. The reason, it says, is that the characters' tongues are not processed for the dueling scenes and the glitch makes them protrude through their chins.

The same account posted on Monday stating that the bug had been fixed and that the studio has rolled out several in-game benefits to all players as compensation.

The hashtag "female characters in Harry Potter" rose to the third place on Sina Weibo's trending list on Monday, with a total of more than 200 million views, and "Harry Potter mobile game responds that the protruding tongue is bug" reached the eighth place with 86.9 million views.

The game, developed by Chinese internet technology company Net-Ease in conjunction with Warner Bros' video game label Portkey Games, was officially released on the iOS and Android platforms on Sept 9.

Online forums had discussions about the abnormal facial expressions since early this month, but debates grew more heated since Saturday night, with a video on short-video platform Bilibili entitled "Harry Potter: Magic Awakened－Is this for real?"

The uploader says in the video that, having seen a video of male characters showing a serene expression while under attack, they tried taking screenshots of female characters, but were "utterly disgusted" to find that the female characters have their tongues hanging out in each image.

"If this really is a bug, I'm willing to apologize for accusing NetEase of deliberately designing such an expression that insults women and children," the Bilibili user wrote in the comment. "But as I have said when I first uploaded the video, even if it's a bug, even if it's a careless mistake, it is a huge disrespect to players to allow the expression to pass layers of inspection."

Screenshots comparing the different facial expressions of male and female characters were widely circulated on Sina Weibo since Sunday. Many players demanded the game studio provide an explanation and claimed to have deleted the game.

Alongside questionable female facial expressions, other issues have been addressed by players, including vulgar names of players and societies in the game and the greater choice of default profile pictures for male accounts than female ones.

The studio's Sina Weibo account posted a letter of apology on Tuesday, elaborating on the cause of the bug and why it appeared only on female characters.

"The studio uses the same set of development strategies in the modeling of male and female characters. In dueling scenes, both male and female characters have the probability of such an abnormal performance. The probability of this kind of bug happening to male and female characters is fifty-fifty," the studio wrote. "Based on the fact that female facial expressions are richer, the design of female models is relatively more complicated, with exaggerated expressions. Hence, when the bug appears, the female features will be magnified by an additional one-third compared to male faces. It is not because the female characters were given a different treatment."

The studio also said in the letter that the mistake has unveiled its negligence in the modification and testing of the models' movements, and that it will continue to check and modify its designs.

According to data from Sensor Tower, a US-based provider of mobile app market intelligence, as of Nov 4, the game had generated revenue of more than $228 million since its launch, making it the second-ranking Harry Potter game in terms of global player spending across the Apple app store and Google Play.