Ah, the issue of political correctness. I find it a bit worrisome that political correctness is dealt with almost entirely in absolutes, i.e. wholesale rejection or wholesale embrace of it. And the argument for freedom of speech that can and should be made is supremely important, in my opinion.
Opinions are exactly that. There are no right or wrong opinions, but without a doubt there are certainly offensive and hateful opinions (recently I stumbled across a blog where someone seriously voiced their opinion that LGBT people belong in work camps - for most strata of liberal, progressive Western democracies an incredibly appalling opinion, and certainly for me as well) and people are justified to judge, challenge and voice their disgust with such opinions. But "political correctness" is more than that - it implies the sanitation and presentation of facts to omit or refurbish politically sensitive details. It implies, in a way, a policing of reality according to a pre-conceived message you want to fit to it.
At the same time, political correctness is, in my observation, fostering an idea of moral supremacy and righteousness, where people are taking their own ideologies and world views as universal fact, leading to the idea of a One Right Worldview, all divergences from which are equalized to be "wrong" and therefore, evil. This is sometimes known as manicheanism, and it’s as dangerous as all ideologies who claim full gnosis and pursue its expansion aggressively.
Of course, if someone fights for his right to "be a jerk", i.e. to maintain an unpopular opinion, that person has to expect to be judged for it by the opinion of others; freedom of speech certainly works both ways and if someone has an opinion that others feel particularily appalled about, it is within their own freedom of speech to react to it and to judge. But I can’t approve of the discrediting of freedom of speech as a value and as a valid argument in this debate, and organized witch-hunts with the goal of silencing opinions.
As for the "Oriental" issue, I personally think it’s for the better. As has been discussed extensively before my post, the game loses hardly anything and gains a more welcoming atmosphere for players. Ultimately yes, the source material and the Victorian Era were much less socially progressive than we are, and even though some players might for roleplay or immersion reasons not mind the bigotry and understand it as a game construct and not as a personal attack (I am both a sexual and a racial minority and while I don’t love bigotry portrayed in the media, I can understand it if it is done for the sake of writing, much like I can respect a medium lacking minority characters because the story it tells can and needs to be told without diversity sprinkles) the atmosphere in Fallen London really hasn’t lost anything because of, for instance, the laissez-faire approach to player race and sexuality, or in this case from dropping a somewhat offensive term for several Asian peoples.
As for why I don’t like what I termed "diversity sprinkles" here is that they are a well-meant but ultimately misguided way to force diversity into a medium which in the end comes short of creating a compelling, sovereign character: you do end up with a character exemplifying whatever diversity identity you wanted to bring up, but at the cost of the character basically being a tag, somewhat two-dimensional; not Prima, who happens to be black, but the black, who happens to be called Prima.
tl;dr: I think Failbetter are really awesome in the way they deal with sensitive issues like this but "political correctness" as an ideology really ought to make you cringe, or at least, think.[li]