The group responsible is “Collective Shout”, the same org has targeted Steam before.
There are calls on social media now to contact Mastercard, Visa and co. and file complaints.
The group responsible is “Collective Shout”, the same org has targeted Steam before.
There are calls on social media now to contact Mastercard, Visa and co. and file complaints.
I’m aware, I promise you that, I’m not saying games make you violent or awful. That argument has been annoying me to hell and back my whole life. To be honest I’ve not heard the argument for video games made for porn games before, but yeah, fair. So yeah. I don’t like those specific rape/incest games, they’re kinda yuck to me, but you do you.
Out of curiosity do you think there should be a line? Where would it be? Maybe like only explicitly illegal content is ever removed? (I wanna say thats how ao3 works) Or is steam having final say your preference? What if steam decided to make changes on its own?
If I had my way, I’d just have filters and tags, and let steam manage their storefront. I might disagree on how they do it, but that’s up to them(or it should be). It just feels weird and loopholey that a payment processor is making this sort of overarching decision.
The only line is depictions involving real people without their consent. A flexible line is a exploitable one.
It is very clear that MasterVisa will use any and all excuses to eliminate queerness from existence, and my perverse games will be the excuse.
For me the line would be fictional-vs-non-fictional. So if a game contains photos or videos of actual people being hurt or abused IRL, that is illegal. But anything fictional is fine. For shocking/kinky stuff, there might be some special tags, and tag-based extra warnings like “this game contains scenes of …, do you want to open the page?”. So when you find and open any game with certain tag you get a warning corresponding to this tag. After confirmation it might remember your consent and enable some flags in the options to not bother you next time. But you can go into the options any moment and hide it all again if you decide you don’t want to see this kind of stuff in future. Also, before you enable/consent to this content, it probably shouldn’t be randomly recommended to you.
So I think that’s all pretty fair, of course including the fact that it should all be legal too.
Does the paradox of tolerance concern you at all? The idea that if you let shitty people have a say they’ll eventually use the bit of tolerance you give them as a tool to take away tolerance of others.
Basically, in theory if you let the nazis have a political party they might win and ban all the other parties, so to keep it fair arguably you should ban them first.
Now applying that to games that are pretty obviously hate games, like the ones the other commenter mentioned, the raping women into obedience game, or a game where you kill a bunch of gay people, the implication is that those games should be banned.
I kinda just wanted your thoughts on the concept. Like for example a game where you play as a school shooter. All good?
Sorry if this is a little philosophical, I just honestly wonder where the line should be for the least amount of harm.
I personally feel the correct way to deal with this in current society is to counter propaganda takes instead of trying to silence them. But even better would be to move away from nation-states altogether to more decentralized forms of societies. Compared to even 100 years ago, nowadays we have a lot of technology that makes off-the-grid living much more accessible: efficient solars, modular building, biotoilets, 3d printing, starlinks, etc. The biggest thing that still requires a lot of infrastructure and governing is healthcare imo.
Those are not necessarily hate games, but they can be. Rape can be a crime and it can be a kink. And it’s a very popular kink among women themselves. There are whole genres of consensual noncon porn, where people roleplay rape for fun. Big part of BDSM is also all about enjoying those twisted power dynamics. Yet something like this can definitely be a hate game as well done by someone having strong feeling of hatred towards certain groups of people: be it women, gay, trans, black, etc. I’m not sure I’ve ever played actual games like that, and I also would expect them to be low-quality slop, but either way, if you think someone’s trying to push some hateful propaganda through the game, you’re free to call them out, leave negative review, write a post or record a video criticizing it.
I gotcha, I get it being a kink, and you have a fair point in that public feedback helps call out the sort of things that aren’t made in good faith. I think I still like the idea of obvious hate games being taken down, but its always going to be somewhat subjective, so its hard to enforce that kind of thing without screwing over games that don’t deserve it.
Definitely not something payment processors should be in charge of lmao
Thanks for talking with me about this :)