Social Justice Journalists Outraged Over Refusal to Censor Games
A game that allowed you to play as an active shooter was pulled from the Steam Store and many on the left started praising Valve for doing so. But the game wasn't pulled for being offensive, it was pulled because the developer was banned from the service.Following this Valve clarified they would allow any game on Steam so long as it was legal and not trolling. Naturally the Social Justice left is furious over this refusal to censor legal content.But why did Valve do it? Are they really standing up for free expression?SUPPORT JOURNALISM. Become a patron athttp://www.patreon.com/TimcastSupport the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On June 6th, a game called Active Shooter was set to be released on Steam.
For those that aren't familiar, Steam is an app store for PC games.
Now, this game, Active Shooter, would allow you to play as a school shooter or as a SWAT team member responding to a school shooting.
Naturally, a ton of people got pissed off.
They said the game was offensive.
The game's insensitive, and it shouldn't be allowed to be sold.
So Steam ultimately complied and took the game down.
Or I should say, they never allowed the game to launch in the first place.
But following this, they made an announcement as to what games they were going to allow on their platform, and it would seem that they're taking a rather libertarian approach.
So long as the content is legal and isn't obvious trolling, they're going to allow it.
Now a lot of people are surprised, because this is kind of the opposite approach most platforms take when it comes to community guidelines, And things like hate speech.
You know, Twitter, YouTube, they'll just ban you and take you down, whether it's legal content or not.
So, is Steam actually resisting censorship?
And if so, what is their motivation for allowing almost any content on their platform?
Before we get started, let me say to anyone who wants to support my work, head over to patreon.com forward slash TimCast, where you can become a donor supporting my work.
Any amount helps.
Most of what I do is funded by you guys on Patreon, so please consider giving whatever you feel comfortable today.
First, let's take a look at the Active Shooter story, this from CNN.
Active Shooter video game is pulled from Steam gaming platform after backlash from shooting survivors.
A much criticized video game that would let players shoot up a school has been pulled from a digital storefront just days before its release.
In a statement, Valve spokesman Doug Lombardi said the game's developer and publisher is a man who had been banned from Steam last fall when he was operating under a different name.
Lombardi described the developer as a troll with a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation.
Valve discovered the man was the developer behind Active Shooter when they began investigating amid controversy surrounding the upcoming game, Lombardi said.
So the important distinction here is that the game wasn't pulled for being offensive, It was pulled because the person who made the game was banned from Steam.
Now, I'm sure a lot of people who oppose hate speech and things like that were glad to see the game go, but it didn't go for the reasons that they probably thought it did.
Because following this, Steam made an announcement as to what games are actually allowed.
In an official statement from the Steam blog, it says, Who gets to be on the Steam Store?
Recently, there's been a bunch of community discussion around what kind of games we're allowing onto the Steam Store.
As is often the case, the discussion caused us to spend some time examining what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how we could be doing it better.
They state, We've decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal or straight-up trolling.
Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see.
As I stated earlier, this is kind of the opposite approach that many social media platforms take.
They tend to just side with the mob and delete things and tell people, yeah, you can't do that, even if it is legal content.
So why is Steam siding with the gamers here or the community?
And how do you think the media responded?
Well, Business Insider said, the world's largest gaming service, Steam, is giving up on regulation and turning over 200 million users into guinea pigs.
In the article it says, this past Wednesday, Valve executive Eric Johnson published an explanation of how Steam will handle content going forward.
We've decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam store except for things that we decide are illegal or straight-up trolling, Johnson wrote.
Put more simply, Valve will no longer police its own service.
Instead, Valve is creating tools for its 200-plus million users to police their own experience.
Rather than owning up to the responsibility of operating a service with over 200 plus million users, Valve is washing its hands and abdicating responsibility to its users.
CNET said, Valve is standing by the values that made the internet
terrible.
Commentary, while the world is figuring out how to moderate and curate
contents for its audiences, Valve is leaving it up to the user.
I can also say, using the same logic, that Valve is using the same values that made the internet
great.
The ability for anyone to have a voice and to publish things so long as they aren't illegal, and to an extent, the internet allowed trolling.
So if Valve is gonna ban trolling, then they're actually not siding with values that made the internet terrible.
They're actually standing up for freedom of expression and free speech.
An article from Rock Paper Shotgun said, Valve's abdication of responsibility over Steam is the
worst possible solution.
An article from Variety says, Itch.io founder weighs in on Valve's new Steam policy.
And he said, A platform that allows everything, unless it's illegal or
straight up trolling, is ridiculous.
Please keep your malicious, derogatory, discriminatory, bullying,
harassing, demeaning content off Itch.io.
Our ban buttons are ready.
From Polygon, Valve gives up on responsibility.
Anything goes as long as you give Valve a cut.
And then we have Kotaku.
Steam's irresponsible hands-off policy is proof that Valve still hasn't learned its lesson.
In the article, they say, Critics fears that Steam will become a cesspit of gross content aren't just hypothetical.
Steam isn't just a store, and Valve has already done similar things with other portions of Steam, often to disastrous results.
So I'm not surprised to see so many digital outlets being shocked and outraged by this.
Because it tends to be these digital outlets that are activists for the left, because it fits their particular political agenda.
Now, I can't say why Steam is doing this exactly.
I mean, they published a blog about it, and there's a lot of speculation over what's really going on.
You can see all of these articles I just showed you saying that Steam refuses to take responsibility, and I don't think that's the case.
Steam is obviously just interested in running a successful business, so there's a few reasons why I think they did this.
For one, they're probably thinking about their customers.
Are customers of Steam likely to support some media company or just use the platform as they see fit?
Yeah, Steam's probably going to say, look, if gamers want to play these games, we're going to sell them to them.
It's not our responsibility to tell them what they can or can't buy.
And by siding with the media over an issue like this, they would just be turning against their own user base.
That makes no sense.
But when we look at it from a political point of view, it would seem like the smart choice for Steam is to take the approach that many people on the anti-SJW side have been advocating for.
If we break it down very simply, In terms of GamerGate, you had video game players and you had the digital media outlets.
So why would Valve care what the digital media outlets think when their core users are gamers who probably align with one side of the debate?
In which case, they're gonna say, you know what?
Let them have their content and we are not going to censor our platform.
Lest we lose customers.
But, a lot of people said, what does trolling even mean?
This story from PC Gamer, AIDS Simulator and other games removed from Steam, Valve clarifies trolling policy.
Just a day after Valve announced a new Anything Goes policy for Steam, simplistically, as long as the game is not illegal or trolling, it will be allowed.
It has removed AIDS Simulator, ISIS Simulator, Suicide Simulator, Asset Flip Simulator, and Triggering Simulator from the platform.
Valve's statement clarifies its definition of trolling somewhat, and it might be inevitable that some degree of an I-know-it-when-I-see-it attitude will have to be taken when determining what crosses that line.
But the big-picture approach remains vague.
For one thing, will games which generate outrage in a more coded way not count as trolling?
And does intending to generate any kind of outrage count as trolling?
People are outraged about a lot of things, including good things.
In a best-case scenario, the removal of these games and their developer, Bunch of Dudes, means that the absolute worst, most derogatory games won't be welcomed to the platform, as the sloppy wording of the announcement suggested to us.
But trolling remains a hazy term that other developers might work harder and less obviously to push.
And I have no doubt that's something that Valve will be forced to confront in the fairly near future, one way or the other.
So maybe Valve's language about allowing anything other than trolling is actually just a clever way of saying they reserve the right to ban whatever content they want.
It's entirely possible that they're going to police their platform the exact same way that Twitter and YouTube police their platform, because if something makes people outraged, that must be trolling, right?
And that's where things get murky.
So for now, we really don't know what Valve is considering doing.
But I will say that by their statement that they're going to support content so long as it's legal and not trolling, they're kind of siding with the anti-SJWs on this one because that is a much more libertarian approach to content than we've seen from basically any other platform.
It's interesting to see the escalation of what could be an aspect of Gamergate, right?
The culture war has expanded dramatically.
There's now academics involved, there's now the intellectual dark web, there are street battles with Antifa and free speech advocates, and now we have Valve stepping up and siding, whether intentionally or not, with one faction, with one side of this culture war.
There are many different factions, but they're taking the freedom of expression approach and defending a gaming platform.
So it'll be interesting to see how the culture war continues to develop as businesses must make allegiances to certain principles.
In this instance, it's obvious to me that a gaming company is going to side with gamers.
The most politically vocal gamers tend to be for free expression, so there you have it.
Valve said, hey, we're with these guys.
Why?
Because they give us money!
It's really simple, isn't it?
Money speaks loudly.
And Valve probably doesn't want to shoot themselves in the foot, but let me know what you think in the comments below.
Is this really a victory for free expression and for gamers?
Or is this just a clever way of warning their policy so that they can get rid of whoever they want and just call it trolling?
