So I think the comments have already more or less made it clear that no matter how this argument is cut, the solutions will be problematic, and no one solution is going to be satisfactory to everyone.
Freedom of speech is a valid point, as is the question of who gets to decide what is and is not art. I don’t think very many of us would want to ban pornography, but then there remains the question of how the games treat women, which is sometimes deeply entitled and misogynistic, and other times the capacity for harm is questionable.
The problem is that those determinations are hard to make. For instance, “fan service” is par for course for even pretty mundane games in Japan, and nobody bats an eye at it, but Japan is also struggling with some serious issues regarding gender equality so just because it’s okay by their standards, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s “OK” objectively, and that’s not really relevant to standards elsewhere in the world. We don’t look at child brides in other parts of the world and say, “oh, that’s okay, that’s just their culture” because the practice is universally hurtful to the people.
We probably can’t lump all the same games in together. Many years ago when I fancied myself a funny person, I would write comedic reviews of various Japanese dating sim games. There was a pretty clear dichotomy present and you could tell which ones were meant to be considered satire, which were easy to poke fun at because they were already making fun of the absurdity of their own genre. The games that I couldn’t review (or get through) were the ones where it was obvious the creators were not being satirical, and the games were meant to pander to some pretty dark urges. There’s just nothing funny there, and games like that were a big part of why I made my departure from that particular area of writing.
Then there’s the problem of a lot of Japanese media sexualizing teenagers or younger. That’s a problem too, but it isn’t the same thing as actual child pornography. Child pornography necessarily requires the abuse of an actual child. Drawn depictions are problematic too, but we can’t consider them equal because one of them is a depiction of actual abuse, while the other is something that someone has imagined. However disturbing it might be, it still didn’t happen.
And that’s just talking about the cross-cultural problems. The TRP crowd from in the US and various places in Europe have latched on to these formats and artistic styles. This is probably because many of them already have a predilection toward those styles from consumption of other media, but also because it’s useful to them as a sort of camouflage. They’re co-opting another culture’s norms and artistic style to act as a sort of cover for the fact that they’re not Japanese, and the things they’re creating exist almost exclusively for misogynistic purposes. The hope is that people will simply dismiss it as “yet another weird Japanese game” when in reality what they are creating are generally what amount to misogyny “training” and straight up rape simulators.
When it comes to Steam’s decision, I don’t know if it’s correct, too narrow, or too broad. I haven’t gone sifting through Steam for games with sexual content and evaluated them, so I’m going only off the the Steam-agnostic things that I know. There are games that have sexual content peripherally though, and other games with large collections of mods to add sexual content to games that didn’t have it. I find a lot of Japanese popular culture to be problematic because of their depictions of women and children. I also think that’s a separate problem from non-Japanese developers co-opting those problematic elements and amplifying them for the purposes of catering to/training new misogynists, and as a way to make games whose entire point is sexual violence.
I guess my point is that this is a complicated problem and I don’t know the correct answer. The only thing that I can really be sure of is it’s Steam’s platform, so they kind of get to do what they want, and that this problem is way, way, way bigger than Steam or Valve or video games themselves.
That, and I really fucking wish the misogyny would stop. It’s everywhere, in everything, oftentimes even in things that are making some effort not to be misogynistic or sexist, etc. Things cannot stay this way. We endanger the entirety of our species and planet by allowing them to be this way. I think that’s what the people fail to understand. These divisions are infinitesimally small compared to the odds against us surviving even just another thousand years. If more people could see that, if they could see how terrifyingly small humans are, and how we are literally the only thing in that universe that gives a shit whether or not we survive, maybe they’d stop focusing on things like gender, sexuality, and politics, and instead work to help us all survive.
