toxicTom: This is an incredibly stupid article. It has exactly one paragraph that makes sense:
There are other problems with Valve's proposal. For starters, the company says that "trolling" will not be permitted on Steam even after this policy change takes place. You can bet that developers are going to test that claim in creative ways. And what constitutes trolling? Making low-quality games? Making parody games? Discerning between parody and malice requires some interpretation of a developer's intent, which, being impossible, only allows Valve to make more value judgments while pretending not to.
toxicTom: This basically destroys the argument (or rather rant) about "games addressing racism" they made above - because it's the same situation: If someone publishes a game which contains heavy racism, does this make the game "racist"? Maybe the dev wants to expose racism, maybe it's meant as a parody, maybe it's an historical/fictional setting where racism is part of the time and place?
Of course there will be stuff where the intent is pretty obvious, but there's also a huge grey area - and who's there to judge?
Steam obviously decided that they don't want to be judge anymore. It's a bold move, I give them that.
It's kind of like how i said before in response to people saying we shouldn't talk politics here: how do you judge what is and is not too far? How do you judge when it stops being about the game's politics and starts being about real politics? There's only one logical way to handle it: don't ban viewpoints. On nudity, is it "porn" if she's naked but we don't see her? Is it child porn if she's naked, but she has no visible features because they're obscured, but we see her face and reset clearly? Is she nude if we see everything, but the nipples are covered? Is she nude if we see anything, but her nipples were cut off in the last scene and thus she has them no more? Thankfully, something like nudity allows people to draw lines, since you can actually define explicitly what they are (as long as you don't go into things like "percentage of booby showing" (what if there's no way to accurately measure how big they are?) or "amount of pixels of boobage showing" (low res gets away, high res can't even have the smallest amount of clevage) since things can get obscure, then. Politics is even harder. How do you define what degree of "racism" something is? How do you define what the line is that defines intentions?
EDIT: And how do you explicitly define how political something is?
toxicTom: But the reality is, that Steam enforces - often even unnecessary - censorship on games in "preemptive obedience", esp. in Germany. "Low violence" versions of games were forced on German customers although there really was no need for it.
Leroux: How do you know it's Steam enforcing this in "preemptive obedience" and not the publishers playing it safe? I find the latter much more likely than Steam actually caring enough to censor games.
Google play rejected huniepop, but i found partially nude women in a chinese game i downloaded on google play, but you have to play for a while to even see it. I doubt anyone who plays the thing long enough to see it is going to report it. I do feel a bit uneasy about having played it, seeing as some of the women were very, very young in appearance. However, all the women were actually personifications of tanks, so i think this adds some obscurity.
