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Journalists are bypassing strict Russian censorship regarding the war in Ukraine by publishing and hiding information creatively within the video game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO).
Russia has censored access to Western media, hiding the full details and opinions on Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” that began on 24 February last year. However, many Western video games remain accessible.
CS:GO, the fifth-most popular online game in 2023, is a tactical first-person shooter that has an estimated 10 per cent of its player base made up of Russians.
Playing on this, Finnish journalists from the newspaper Helsinging Sanomat developed a custom map within the game called de_vonya, which appears to be a typical Slavic city not unlike what would be found in Ukraine, but it houses a secret room containing information about the war in Ukraine.
“Counterstrike of the free press. This room contains independent journalism that is forbidden in Russia,” is sprawled across one wall of the room.
The room contains numerous bits of information illegal in Russia, such as data on Russian war crimes, including the civilian mass graves that Russian troops left in Irpin and Bucha, as well as a map of Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilian targets.
The map has become one of the most popular maps for the month so far, according to cyber software company Malwarebytes. However, accessing the secret room is no easy task.
The map in question is a custom map, meaning it has to be downloaded manually from the Steam Workshop.
Once in, the door to the room is closed and cannot be opened by players in-game. The only way, therefore, to get into the room is to die.
In CS:GO, when a player dies, they are free to float around the map as a spectator. In this state, players have no collision detection and are able to clip through walls, allowing access to the room.
However, researchers from Malwarebytes found that this was easier said than done. As rounds of CS:GO are short, there is not much time for players to die, find the room and then clip in and read the information.
“Even with bots set to the easiest difficulty, three rounds had ended before I eventually found the room,” said Malwarebytes researcher Christopher Boyd.
Boyd also said that since the maps in CS:GO are based on skyboxes, which are like cubes wrapped in the background environment of the level, it is difficult to find the room by floating above the level for a bird’s eye view.
As a result, he said the “best” way to find the room is to “float around slightly underneath the floor and look for some flashing lights”.
“If you manage to do this before the level ends prematurely, you’ll be able to locate and enter the room,” he said.
Some of the images within the room are graphic, raising questions about Steam’s terms and conditions. Boyd said that the Steam Workshop has policies surrounding character models, weapon skins and other individual items, but it doesn’t for maps. As a result, it is hard to say whether the map will get removed.
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