Journalism and sexism in the games industry

[BruceVC]

 

Valve did this now? What on earth do they hope to gain? Valve has made questionable decisions before but I've never known them to be downright idiotic.

They want to remove the problematic games.

 

Of course, the fact that Steam has such huge market percentage is more problematic than a distributor not selling a game, but that's been covered on other places to death.

 

 

We should be supporting Steam in this decision, its the right thing to do. Why should Steam want to be associated with a game like Hatred? They can find another distribution mechanism for there game. They want to make a game with such controversial themes, this is the price you pay

 

Well done Steam

[Meshugger]

^You should become a standup comedian with such insightful and satirical prose.

 

But great news: the guy behind plebcomics got his job back. Great social justice done by the very people fighting against these Social Justice Warriors; kinda like that song by Alanis Morisette.

 

 http://plebcomics.tumblr.com/post/105298951388/today-has-been-one-hell-of-a-day-i-get-a-huge

[Meshugger]

Ken Levine on having no comments:

 

https://twitter.com/fartchives/status/544652017533476864/photo/1

[Blarghagh]

Bruce, While I support Steam's right to make this decision, I do not support the decision. At all. First of all, Steam has Postal 1 and 2, Manhunt, a bunch of GTA games with a new one being re-released on Steam. As far as I can tell, Hatred is not really any worse or more "controversial" than those. So it cannot be anything other than a move to pacify the press. It's not a decision made based on the merit or content of this game as you imply - it is simply a response to other peoples responses.

 

Then there's the slippery slope argument, if you start removing games because they are "controversial" (especially when you have an essentially monopolic grip on digital distribution) then where do you stop? "Sexual content, such as the Apple store dropping the amazing and forward thinking Papers, Please* for non-existent sexual content (the nudes are entirely nonsexual). Sexist content? Racist content? Defined by who? If I have a villain who I demonstrate to be a terrible person by making him racist, do I suddenly run the risk of losing the best platform by having "racist content"? What if my game is the A Clockwork Orange of video games but is banned because it's violent? Like the personal account of a developer that was posted a few threads back - it wanted to make a serious Holocaust game to educate people from first person perspective how horrible it was, but it never got made because using the Holocaust for "entertainment" was deemed bad, despite a trillion movies on the subject.

 

I don't understand why this game is "controversial" in the first place. Is Falling Down controversial? God Bless America? They have similar subject matter. Stephen King's Rage? Lolita? If they are, I haven't heard anything about it. It's just because people still believe the absolute tripe that video games cause people to be violent. Who defines what is "controversial"? Keep in mind that in Tom Sawyer, there is a lot of racism... it's controversial now, but it was much more controversial at the time of release because it had made the black characters too human! If this line of thinking was prevalent then, it would have been banned for not being racist enough, let alone anything else that showed black people in a positive light. When you start censoring art, whether the art is tasteless or not, you are going down a terrible road and it's going to lead you straight to 1984.

 

Of course, what chafes me most is the all out hypocrisy of it all. I can dump unfinished games made entirely from illegally obtained assets and code on the Steam store (and this has happened) and it won't get curated because "that's not what we do, it's up to the consumer to choose what he wants" but a game is violent? Even though the Greenlight response is overwhelmingly "yes, the consumer wants it", that violent game's gotta go off. Either curate the bloody store or don't, this just makes Steam look like spineless jokes who will cave to the slightest amount of peer pressure.

 

*Note that Papers, Please was praised by the press hating on Hatred and they condemned the action then. What's the difference?

 

Sorry if this post is more rambly than usual, I am very sick right now.

Edited December 16, 2014 by TrueNeutral

[Longknife]

We should be supporting Steam in this decision, its the right thing to do. Why should Steam want to be associated with a game like Hatred? They can find another distribution mechanism for there game. They want to make a game with such controversial themes, this is the price you pay

 

Well done Steam

 

 

 

Would you agree that the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, Lolita, Sweeney Todd, The Color Purple, Heart of Darkness, and Otto Dix's "The Trench Warfare" are also controversial?  (Fun fact: the last of that list was banned by the Nazis for being too gruesome)

 

Not trying to compare this game to famous works of art, but I am trying to say that art is about pushing limits. Not purposefully pushing limits and attempting to be edgy, per se, but art knows no boundaries. Any comedian would tell you a comedian's job is to cross the line. Are jokes about the holocaust off limits? No, actually, no they're not. The ends justifies the means with comedy, so if you can make em laugh with a joke like that, by all means, but if it falls flat and offends, you f***ed up. It's simply a notoriously troublesome subject matter where the odds of pulling that laugh off are clearly stacked against you, but does it happen? Kindly look up any Epic Rap Battle video with Hitler vs. Darth Vader, I think you'll find the videos are outrageously popular despite Hitler very clearly cracking jokes about the holocaust.

   But comedy is not an exception here. No, comedy is just one art form, and it's not that there are no limits exclusively to comedy, it's that there are no limits to art in it's entirety. You can make art about ANYTHING.

 

 

Just today, I came across that Youtube video of Egoraptor doing a "Did you Know Gaming" on No More Heroes. The video sparked GamerGate discussion because apparently EgoRaptor is anti-GG and the video provided trigger warnings for the game. And you know what...? I caught myself thinking about how No More Heroes (both 1 & 2) was a game(s) that absolutely surprised me by making some profound statements within it's brief little story. It comes across as some gruesomely violent hack-n-slash that's trying to be edgy, but no, it actually executes it's look very very well. That was a game I WOULD consider art, and you know what that game has?

 

-Depictions of violence against women. Beautiful women, ugly women, young women, old women.

-Depictions of violence against the disabled. One of those beautiful women is missing a leg.

-Stories of incest and rape

-Discussion of violence against women as a real-life hot-button topic.

-High levels of violence in general, sometimes to very gruesome degrees.

-A degree of sexualization of some of the female opponents Travis (the protagonist) must face and kill

 

Don't believe me?

 

 

 

 

My point is that if you censor art, you potentially miss out on the gems. Yes, games like Call of Duty are absolute ****. They're contrived storylines of glory in a setting where....****ing South America wages war against the USA by hijacking our high-tech orbital missles...those clearly are not art and those clearly aren't winning any awards. But we need those to exist. We need to allow for the bad so that the good can exist also. The moment we start trying to pick and choose what can and can't be, all we are doing is limiting art based on our own subjective beliefs. All we are doing is holding art back and stagnating it. No, you will not like or understand every song or every book you read, but that doesn't mean they deserve to be burned. It means you just need to leave those books to the people who enjoy them and go find something else you yourself would enjoy reading instead, and then read it. It's the same exact thing with video games.

Edited December 16, 2014 by Longknife

[Blarghagh]

Right! Huckleberry Finn, not Tom Sawyer. My bad. Thanks Longknife.

 

 

[Ganrich]

On the Kevin Livine comments - The journos want their ability to critique to be allowed without any critique allowed on their own work. So the question arises "Who watches the watchmen?"

[Longknife]

Happy twist ending: the ridiculous Youtube comment I quoted? I'm currently in it's comment chain discussion (DYKGaming's vid on No More Heroes) talking about GamerGate, and people are actually very supportive and hearing me out. In a nutshell it seems like a lot of people who are neutral, on the sidelines and ignorant to much of the issue, and all they need is some more details as to what GamerGate has done and they're far more receptive to it.
 

[Fighter]

We should be supporting Steam in this decision, its the right thing to do. Why should Steam want to be associated with a game like Hatred? They can find another distribution mechanism for there game. They want to make a game with such controversial themes, this is the price you pay

 

Well done Steam

 

No. We can decide for our selves what's appropriate for us and what's not. We absolutely should not support this. Steam is too big and too important to let the moral police decide what choices an individual is permitted to have.

 

Explain to me why is it necessary that your opinion gets to decide for other people?

[kirottu]

People having reasonable discussion by Youtube comments? GamerGate truly brings out the bizarre out of internet. 

[Longknife]

 

We should be supporting Steam in this decision, its the right thing to do. Why should Steam want to be associated with a game like Hatred? They can find another distribution mechanism for there game. They want to make a game with such controversial themes, this is the price you pay

 

Well done Steam

 

No. We can decide for our selves what's appropriate for us and what's not. We absolutely should not support this. Steam is too big and too important to let the moral police decide what choices an individual is permitted to have.

 

Explain to me why is it necessary that your opinion gets to decide for other people?

 

 

 

And yknow what? Devil's advocate here:

 

Well first lemme give a disclaimer in that I know very little about Hatred behind it's goals and what the premise was, so maybe there was some news that'll debunk what I'll say, but....

Who's to say Hatred would not be capable of some profound meaning or statement? As I understand it, it's about a mass murderer going on a killing spree due to his hatred of society and goes on a "genocidal crusade."

 

Have we seen characters like this before? Yes actually. Infact Obsidian has touched on this:

 

Caesar and Ulysses.

 

Caesar hates the corruption of the NCR and thinks said corruption could lead to the end of humanity as we know it. As such, he is willing to commit genocide and kill off countless lives in the name of purging the human race of those that would think more selfishly. Ulysses? Ulysses is so jaded, so crestfallen and so pessimistic about the fate of humanity and it's future that he doesn't see a future in the NCR, doesn't see one in House, and he can only bring himself to hope the Legion could succeed, though he is still admittedly very pessimistic about it working out. And what does he do? He's willing to launch a nuke because of this.

 

  And quite frankly, these are - for my money - two of the most interesting characters in the entirety of Fallout New Vegas. Should they be banned because they'll condone genocide? Over my dead body; these two are some of the most artistic characters in video games I've ever seen.

 

Quite ironically Caesar in particular also condones a code of censorship, believing any dangerous thoughts or teachings should be forbidden or weeded out, and he would be one of the first characters SJWs would jump on due to the inequality of genders within his society and the amount of atrocities his Legion has commited. Just thought I'd bring that up too for bonus points.

 

 

 

But yeah, point is that unless the developers of Hatred have expressed something debunking my claims otherwise, I see no reason why Hatred as a concept is incapable of having any artistic spin or merit. To claim otherwise would be nothing but blind, ignorant prejudice in the form of censorship from "dangerous" thoughts and concepts.

 

 

EDIT:  Looked into it a bit and found the devs basically saying "yes we want senseless violence the video game in protest of the overly politically correct tone you see in the industry today." So just for clarity, no they probably won't be making any profound statements as they chose the opposite route of protest via blatant antagonization. My point still stands however that a profound statement can arise from -ANY- concept.

Edited December 16, 2014 by Longknife

[HoonDing]

Apparantly Hatred has been removed from Steam Greenlight.

Half-Life 3 confirmed.

[BruceVC]

Bruce, While I support Steam's right to make this decision, I do not support the decision. At all. First of all, Steam has Postal 1 and 2, Manhunt, a bunch of GTA games with a new one being re-released on Steam. As far as I can tell, Hatred is not really any worse or more "controversial" than those. So it cannot be anything other than a move to pacify the press. It's not a decision made based on the merit or content of this game as you imply - it is simply a response to other peoples responses.

 

Then there's the slippery slope argument, if you start removing games because they are "controversial" (especially when you have an essentially monopolic grip on digital distribution) then where do you stop? "Sexual content, such as the Apple store dropping the amazing and forward thinking Papers, Please* for non-existent sexual content (the nudes are entirely nonsexual). Sexist content? Racist content? Defined by who? If I have a villain who I demonstrate to be a terrible person by making him racist, do I suddenly run the risk of losing the best platform by having "racist content"? What if my game is the A Clockwork Orange of video games but is banned because it's violent? Like the personal account of a developer that was posted a few threads back - it wanted to make a serious Holocaust game to educate people from first person perspective how horrible it was, but it never got made because using the Holocaust for "entertainment" was deemed bad, despite a trillion movies on the subject.

 

I don't understand why this game is "controversial" in the first place. Is Falling Down controversial? God Bless America? They have similar subject matter. Stephen King's Rage? Lolita? If they are, I haven't heard anything about it. It's just because people still believe the absolute tripe that video games cause people to be violent. Who defines what is "controversial"? Keep in mind that in Tom Sawyer, there is a lot of racism... it's controversial now, but it was much more controversial at the time of release because it had made the black characters too human! If this line of thinking was prevalent then, it would have been banned for not being racist enough, let alone anything else that showed black people in a positive light. When you start censoring art, whether the art is tasteless or not, you are going down a terrible road and it's going to lead you straight to 1984.

 

Of course, what chafes me most is the all out hypocrisy of it all. I can dump unfinished games made entirely from illegally obtained assets and code on the Steam store (and this has happened) and it won't get curated because "that's not what we do, it's up to the consumer to choose what he wants" but a game is violent? Even though the Greenlight response is overwhelmingly "yes, the consumer wants it", that violent game's gotta go off. Either curate the bloody store or don't, this just makes Steam look like spineless jokes who will cave to the slightest amount of peer pressure.

 

*Note that Papers, Please was praised by the press hating on Hatred and they condemned the action then. What's the difference?

 

Sorry if this post is more rambly than usual, I am very sick right now.

 

 

 

We should be supporting Steam in this decision, its the right thing to do. Why should Steam want to be associated with a game like Hatred? They can find another distribution mechanism for there game. They want to make a game with such controversial themes, this is the price you pay

 

Well done Steam

 

 

 

Would you agree that the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, Lolita, Sweeney Todd, The Color Purple, Heart of Darkness, and Otto Dix's "The Trench Warfare" are also controversial?  (Fun fact: the last of that list was banned by the Nazis for being too gruesome)

 

Not trying to compare this game to famous works of art, but I am trying to say that art is about pushing limits. Not purposefully pushing limits and attempting to be edgy, per se, but art knows no boundaries. Any comedian would tell you a comedian's job is to cross the line. Are jokes about the holocaust off limits? No, actually, no they're not. The ends justifies the means with comedy, so if you can make em laugh with a joke like that, by all means, but if it falls flat and offends, you f***ed up. It's simply a notoriously troublesome subject matter where the odds of pulling that laugh off are clearly stacked against you, but does it happen? Kindly look up any Epic Rap Battle video with Hitler vs. Darth Vader, I think you'll find the videos are outrageously popular despite Hitler very clearly cracking jokes about the holocaust.

   But comedy is not an exception here. No, comedy is just one art form, and it's not that there are no limits exclusively to comedy, it's that there are no limits to art in it's entirety. You can make art about ANYTHING.

 

 

Just today, I came across that Youtube video of Egoraptor doing a "Did you Know Gaming" on No More Heroes. The video sparked GamerGate discussion because apparently EgoRaptor is anti-GG and the video provided trigger warnings for the game. And you know what...? I caught myself thinking about how No More Heroes (both 1 & 2) was a game(s) that absolutely surprised me by making some profound statements within it's brief little story. It comes across as some gruesomely violent hack-n-slash that's trying to be edgy, but no, it actually executes it's look very very well. That was a game I WOULD consider art, and you know what that game has?

 

-Depictions of violence against women. Beautiful women, ugly women, young women, old women.

-Depictions of violence against the disabled. One of those beautiful women is missing a leg.

-Stories of incest and rape

-Discussion of violence against women as a real-life hot-button topic.

-High levels of violence in general, sometimes to very gruesome degrees.

-A degree of sexualization of some of the female opponents Travis (the protagonist) must face and kill

 

Don't believe me?

 

 

 

 

My point is that if you censor art, you potentially miss out on the gems. Yes, games like Call of Duty are absolute ****. They're contrived storylines of glory in a setting where....****ing South America wages war against the USA by hijacking our high-tech orbital missles...those clearly are not art and those clearly aren't winning any awards. But we need those to exist. We need to allow for the bad so that the good can exist also. The moment we start trying to pick and choose what can and can't be, all we are doing is limiting art based on our own subjective beliefs. All we are doing is holding art back and stagnating it. No, you will not like or understand every song or every book you read, but that doesn't mean they deserve to be burned. It means you just need to leave those books to the people who enjoy them and go find something else you yourself would enjoy reading instead, and then read it. It's the same exact thing with video games.

 

 

All those examples you guys mentioned, like Lolita, are  considered great works of literature. They are multi-levelled and nuanced and discuss real societal themes and issues. They encourage debate and it would be a travesty to see them banned

 

Hatred is none of this, its just game with a deeply flawed design where the developers want to be controversial and appeal to people like you guys who will buy there product

" in the interest of freedom of expression". Its a con..don't fall for it.

 

Also we aren't even talking about censorship here, Valve has every right to not distribute any game for whatever reason. They not saying you shouldn't play Hatred or it should be censored by others. This is there business decision and its something we should accept as its not like Valve doesn't distribute many games, this is really the first time I have heard about it ?

[BruceVC]

 

We should be supporting Steam in this decision, its the right thing to do. Why should Steam want to be associated with a game like Hatred? They can find another distribution mechanism for there game. They want to make a game with such controversial themes, this is the price you pay

 

Well done Steam

 

No. We can decide for our selves what's appropriate for us and what's not. We absolutely should not support this. Steam is too big and too important to let the moral police decide what choices an individual is permitted to have.

 

Explain to me why is it necessary that your opinion gets to decide for other people?

 

 

Look the reality is are you the best person to decide what games  Steam distributes? You guys have no filters and I doubt anything would be considered inappropriate

 

Also when it comes to real censorship you right it can be very subjective and hard to manage. But this is not this type of example, you just need to accept that Valve does know more about these things than most of us and they made the right decision

[Chilloutman]

I always jiggle when Volo mention you as nazi Bruce, but you really have some problem you cant grasp...

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

^You should become a standup comedian with such insightful and satirical prose.

 

But great news: the guy behind plebcomics got his job back. Great social justice done by the very people fighting against these Social Justice Warriors; kinda like that song by Alanis Morisette.

 

 http://plebcomics.tumblr.com/post/105298951388/today-has-been-one-hell-of-a-day-i-get-a-huge

Gal actually. Kinda funny that SJWs seem to target women so much. The offending material:

 

 

There's more with more salty language, but it does capture tumblrism pretty well.

[TrashMan]

This work is "worthy" and should remain.

This is "crap" and should burn.

 

This kind of thinking DISGUSTS me.

[TrashMan]

 

Look the reality is are you the best person to decide what games  Steam distributes? You guys have no filters and I doubt anything would be considered inappropriate

 

Also when it comes to real censorship you right it can be very subjective and hard to manage. But this is not this type of example, you just need to accept that Valve does know more about these things than most of us and they made the right decision

 

 

> Implying there MUST be filters

 

> Listen and believe

[Keyrock]

Valve, of course, has the right to allow or disallow any game on their own platform.  That said, this is a chicken**** move by them, especially since it goes 180 degrees against the very purpose of Greenlight.  The whole point of Greenlight was to take the decision making process out of Valve's hands for smaller/lesser known/indie games.  Greenlight's entire purpose was to let the customers decide for themselves what should and shouldn't appear on Steam.  The customers spoke, they overwhelmingly supported the game appearing on Steam, yet Valve shut it down anyway.

Edited December 16, 2014 by Keyrock

[Malcador]

We should be supporting Steam in this decision, its the right thing to do. Why should Steam want to be associated with a game like Hatred? They can find another distribution mechanism for there game. They want to make a game with such controversial themes, this is the price you pay

 

Well done Steam

Why is this the right thing to do ? Manhunt is on Steam, too.

[Meshugger]

 

 

We should be supporting Steam in this decision, its the right thing to do. Why should Steam want to be associated with a game like Hatred? They can find another distribution mechanism for there game. They want to make a game with such controversial themes, this is the price you pay

 

Well done Steam

 

No. We can decide for our selves what's appropriate for us and what's not. We absolutely should not support this. Steam is too big and too important to let the moral police decide what choices an individual is permitted to have.

 

Explain to me why is it necessary that your opinion gets to decide for other people?

 

 

Look the reality is are you the best person to decide what games  Steam distributes? You guys have no filters and I doubt anything would be considered inappropriate

 

Also when it comes to real censorship you right it can be very subjective and hard to manage. But this is not this type of example, you just need to accept that Valve does know more about these things than most of us and they made the right decision

 

 

Pray tell Bruce, then why is Postal 1, Postal 2, Manhunt and GTA V distributed on Steam? They have by your standard, the same filth. Either you are dumber than i think you are, or your trolling is really starting to show.

 

//Edit: You seem to appeal to authority that some works are considered art are meant to be preserved and some should not. You do know that this is considered a logical fallacy, don't you?

Edited December 16, 2014 by Meshugger

[Malcador]

Apparently some people were posting how they wanted Sarkeesian in the game to kill, perhaps that was why Valve decided to not bother with it. What they needed to do was dress up the mass murdering a bit more.

[Volourn]

"We should be supporting Steam in this decision, its the right thing to do. Why should Steam want to be associated with a game like Hatred? They can find another distribution mechanism for there game. They want to make a game with such controversial themes, this is the price you pay

 

Well done Steam "

 

Are you a SJW nazi parody? I can't believe a human being can believe this nonsense. Oops, I can. Please mansplain to me why YOU (and Valve) should be allowed to decide what games my neice should be allowed or not allowed to play? Why do you hate her so much? Why do you belittle her so much? Why do you want to control her? Why should YOU or ANYONE decide what games she can play, what movies she can watch, or what books she can read? That's evil.

 

 

"This is there business decision"

 

No, it isn't.  It's a nazi decision making a moral decision.  This game was greenlighted like every other game on Steam.

 

It is also very much  censorship.  It is   someone making the decision for other people on what games others cna play. I also guarantee you Steam doesn't give a crap morally about the game. They haven't cared for months about this game. No doubt they were harassed by evil anzi SJWs to ban the game.

 

EVIL.

 

More evil than the game's own serial killer.

 

 

WHY DO YOU HATE MY NIECE, BRUCE!?!

[Fighter]

 

Look the reality is are you the best person to decide what games  Steam distributes? You guys have no filters and I doubt anything would be considered inappropriate

 

No one is the best person that's the point. I would not decide for you and no one should decide for me.

 

Also when it comes to real censorship you right it can be very subjective and hard to manage. But this is not this type of example, you just need to accept that Valve does know more about these things than most of us and they made the right decision.

 

No. You're only saying that because that is the decision you agree with. Valve isn't some magical entity that "knows best" and no one should accept anything without logical and consistent justification. They are a distribution platform, not society's nanny.

 

And thanks for confirming you are pro censorship. Makes things more clear.

[BruceVC]

Valve, of course, has the right to allow or disallow any game on their own platform.  That said, this is a chicken**** move by them, especially since it goes 180 degrees against the very purpose of Greenlight.  The whole point of Greenlight was to take the decision making process out of Valve's hands for smaller/lesser known/indie games.  Greenlight's entire purpose was to let the customers decide for themselves what should and shouldn't appear on Steam.  The customers spoke, they overwhelmingly supported the game appearing on Steam, yet Valve shut it down anyway.

 

Well I'm glad you recognise Valve has this right. Because you guys espouse freedom of expression and freedom of speech but you don't seem to accept Valves right to not distribute a game? Unfortunately this is an example where the customer isn't always right, Valve received complaints and they made a perfectly understandable decision to ban this game. Lets not read too much into it, its not like Valves core business will be impacted so neither will our Steam gaming experience