Voices: Boycotting ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ will only achieve one thing: more controversy

The Harry Potter universe is exceedingly inconsistent. To paraphrase Dimension 20’s Brennan Lee Mulligan: what kind of omnipresent, all-powerful society of demigods builds its society around the bylaws of one high school?

If these guys can produce virtually anything they could ever want or need from scratch, how are the Weasleys “poor” in any way that matters? You can blink in and out of existence at will, but you still use owls – nature’s slowest bird – to deliver your mail?

But man, did I want to live there growing up. Honestly, if you sent me a Hogwarts letter in the post today, there’s still like a 30 per cent chance I’d go along with it – just in case.

So when the next best thing was announced – Portkey Games’ Hogwarts Legacy, in which you play as a fifth year student attending Hogwarts in the late-1800s – I was pretty psyched. The Harry Potter franchise hasn’t been the best, lately, but it doesn’t take much to reignite my interest in a long-dead nerd franchise (looking at you, The Mandalorian).

The game became available for PS5 users who pre-ordered the game a few days ago, and goes on general release today. But while it’s the sort of thing that would usually be an insta-buy for me, there were two pretty big barriers to purchase.

The first is fairly obvious: if you’ve heard anything about this game, it’s probably in light of the fact that people are boycotting it in droves.

This might well be due not only to Harry Potter creator JK Rowling’s well-documented comments on trans issues, but also because, when asked on Twitter “how she sleeps at night” after losing fans due to the controversy surrounding her, Rowling responded, “I read my most recent royalty cheques and find the pain goes away pretty quickly”. She has previously said she is not transphobic and “does not consider” herself “cancelled” after criticism of her trans views.

I’ve written about Rowling a few times, now – and in my view, no matter what the specifics of her beliefs on trans people, her careless rhetoric at the very least helps to exacerbate the issues that they face.

But when it comes to boycotts of big cultural products like this game, you tend to find that not only are they ineffective – since most people tend to prioritise their own entertainment over taking large, complicated moral stances – but the people trying to reinforce the boycotts tend to come across as scolds.

That tends to be the case no matter how reasonable or legitimate your stance is: whether you’re standing up for a marginalised community, or trying to stop people from reading Dr Seuss because you think he’s too “woke”.

There’s also a much blander issue at play: due to the attempted boycott, nobody is actually being honest about whether or not this game is any good.

Official video game reviews are notoriously pretty unreliable, and most the time the best way to know whether something is worth purchasing is via word-of-mouth. Reddit threads about the game – or independent reviews from smaller YouTube accounts – are a way better barometer of a game than official sites.

But that isn’t the case here. Trying to find a discussion of this game from a party that isn’t invested in those wider issues is next-to-impossible at the moment. It’s either the best thing since Skyrim, or the worst since Kane and Lynch. It’s being review-bombed in both directions by people who haven’t even played it.

I guess in that sense the boycott might be working, since it might make people hesitant to drop £60 on a game they know nothing about. But on the other hand, the controversy around this game has created so much free advertising for it that Warner Bros could probably replace their entire advertising budget with a few inflammatory Twitter comments.

Here’s the thing about JK Rowling: she hasn’t done anything decent with the Harry Potter IP for about 15 years. Pottermore was a confusing mess, The Cursed Child read like fanfiction, and those Fantastic Beast movies feel like they were directed by Neil Breen.

On the website for Hogwarts Legacy, the developers state in definitive terms that she had no involvement in the creation of the game (though they also stress that “as creator of the wizarding world and one of the world’s greatest storytellers [sic], her extraordinary body of writing is the foundation of all projects in the Wizarding World”).

Controversies like this are what keep her relevant. A game that she had absolutely no hand in has become not just another battleground of the culture wars, but a forum for every anti-trans activist to roll out their usual spiel for a brand new, receptive audience. “Hey kids, you know those mean people who won’t let you wave a wand or ride a hippogriff? Have I got some interesting ideas to share with you about them”.

It’s an impossible position to be in: you can’t just stay quiet and ignore the elephant in the room, because it feels like a form of surrender. But fighting back keeps JK Rowling in the spotlight, and preps the stage for that very particular contingent of her followers.

For what it’s worth, I played the game before I wrote this. It’s pretty good. They really go out of their way to be as inclusive as possible – character creation isn’t restricted by gender, the accessibility options are very generous, and there’s even a transgender character – to the extent that at one point I said out loud to myself “yeah mate, I get it”. It looks great, and while the gameplay is pretty simplistic that isn’t necessarily a bad thing; not every game needs to be Dark Souls.

There’s a ton of stuff to unlock and collect (which is the only reason I play video games), and the armour system is genuinely really clever, allowing you to keep the attributes of one piece of equipment while making it look like another that you already own (meaning that if you find the Furry Pink Top Hat of Poison Resistance, you can keep its stats while still wearing your trusty Peaky Blinders flat cap).

The story is the real standout: while it’s no God of War, it’s engaging enough that it’ll make you realise how badly this franchise has been squandered since 2007. I haven’t cared about Harry Potter for a long time, so it was nice recapturing some of that excitement about the wizarding world that I haven’t felt since I was a teenager.

Should that be enough to make you put your morals aside and buy it? Of course not. If I didn’t have the excuse of writing this article I probably would have passed too (oh well, the damage is done, I guess I have to complete it now). But it’s worth being honest.

There’s no right answer to whether or not it’s okay to buy this game, or what it says about the individual who does, or even if having the conversation in the first place is missing the point. What is clear is that it’s become another shot across the bow in an endless battle that shouldn’t need to be waged in the first place.