To be clear - I like and appreciate lots of manga. But augmented-eyes kicks the character in to a completely uncanny ditch of unsexyness for me. Similarly, I can’t relate to people who say they find Bugs Bunny in a dress a turn on and I can’t see eye-to-eye with people who want to marry the Eiffel Tower or screw their cars. Takes all kinds, I guess - no skin off my back. However, I like how my garden gnome is looking today.
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OH FUCK ME! I’m a misogynistic ASSHOLE cuz games have tits
Yeah, I don’t think very many people are saying that, and nobody is going to be upset that you played a game with cleavage in it. There’s nothing wrong with sex or sexy things, the problem is the context in which the things are presented.
It’s not a question of sensitivity, it simply a question of fairness. Women are OBJECTIVELY used as objects in pretty much every form of media, they are consistently implied to be less important than men, and are often only present in media to be an onus for a male character to do something.
This creates problems that ripple through society, and has helped to create several generations of people who are incredibly sexist without even considering it. We’re sitting right now at a point in time where the people who have been getting the short end of the stick have a platform in which to speak about it (the internet) where they can’t be easily censored. The “sensitivity pendulum” isn’t real, it’s just a matter of exposure. These problems have existed long before video games, before rock & roll, before television, before the goddamned Gutenberg press. These problems are ancient and must be addressed if we have any chance of continuing to exist as a species. The only difference now is powerful men have a lot more trouble silencing the masses of women who have been expected to sit quietly and accept “their place” and it makes you uncomfortable because it makes you feel like you’re being accused of something.
Well, it only becomes an accusation once you’ve been made aware that you’re doing it. From that point on, it’s on you. If you defend your previously oblivious sexist behavior and try to justify it, well you’ve crossed into willful misogynistic dinosaur territory. If you are made aware of it and say, “oh shit, wow, it’s been here the whole time, I need to change the way I think about some things” then welcome to the future.
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Which is why I recommend checking out games created by women and LGBTQ community members. Most of these are low-budget visual novels, some are lowfi remixes of existing genres. Christine Love’s Digital: A Love Story universe is well worth playing through.
We need more works helped and created by women. I for one, hope Christine is able to continue publishing to Steam.
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I think these are the two most important points in this whole comment thread.
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It’s not Valve’s decision not to publish “child porn” (as you put it) that could lead to these bad things.
It’s the willingness (on all sides) to let them address it imprecisely as “adult material.”
The publishers have an incentive to do this because they hope to shield their market (for sexualized artistic depictions of children) by association with less unpleasant adult material. Valve has an incentive to do so because the resulting vagueness enables arbitrary and self-interested policy enforcement.
No-one’s saying Valve can’t do what they want with their walled garden (a term literally in the post!) They are just being criticized for acting in bad faith, having been given the opportunity to do so by the bad faith of the anime smut peddlers.
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I feel like this is saying “Let the women deal with these issues” when we suggest the solution is to find games authored by a specific subgroup. But:
I wholeheartedly agree - and we should support games created by minorities or underrepresented classes, full stop. Just not as a solution to this issue. To solve the issue of female objectification we should be pressing the majority to change their ways. A culture shift is needed here, and that’s only going to come from within, IMHO.
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I think you’re invoking a slippery slope; Shkreli’s behavior was of a completely different moral category: gouging medical patients for massive profit. That’s vastly different than banning titty games.
In its actions and subsequent retraction, Valve’s only sin as far as I can see is being incredibly ambiguous about a very far reaching policy decision which would have affected a fairly sizable portion of its developers.
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IIRC, reported here and elsewhere first when the UK changed its laws to make no legal distinction where you’re making a moral distinction here, I’ve seen since that US law now no longer makes that legal distinction either. Drawings of children being abused are just as illegal as pictures, no IRL victim required.
So there’s that…
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It varies by state.
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Ah. Still, by virtue of lowest common denominator, it still would potentially have an impact on Valve’s decisions regarding this kind of content.
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I wouldn’t really call it a moral distinction. I think both are abhorrent, however, one of them is documented proof of abuse, while the other is not. Regardless of what the law says, if it fails to take into account the material difference between the two, the law is incorrect.
Generated images which sexualize children are not okay by any stretch, but it makes no sense for the law to treat them as though they’re they’re equivalent crimes any more than it would make sense for the law to consider burglary and home invasion the same thing. Both involve someone entering a home against the wishes of the owner, but home invasion necessarily includes some form of assault and/or battery.
It’s not a perfect comparison, but we’re talking about pedophiles here, so there’s not a lot of things that would be. Either way, I don’t think it’s beneficial to solving the overall problem of sexual abuse and child pornography if we enact laws that are knowingly ignoring material differences. Worse yet if the false equivalence was codified into law for primarily political reasons. (I don’t know if that’s the case or not, I’m speaking generally.) I don’t know if the distinction was removed because it would curry public favor, but if it was, then that’s a whole problem in itself.
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Huniepop, as a game, does NOT suck. It’s the best matching pieces puzzle I’ve played with actual strategies and a ramping difficulty. To be sure, though, it’s a porn game.
Unless you’re talking about visual novels only. Some barely qualify as a game and some are not games whatsoever. Also, they’re not all porn and some do some really interesting things. I’m not a huge fan, but I’m weeb enough to know what’s out there.
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Exactly. We have to show people that these biases exist, and why they exist, and we have to find a way to shift the perception that those things are “normal.” Simply “voting with your wallet” isn’t going to fix sexism or racism, voting with your wallet is a neo-liberal capitalist idea that typically accomplishes very little. At best, it wins a cursory gesture, a public apology, mandatory sensitivity training–all things treat the symptom, not the cause and which are often delivered with noticeable resentment. “We are sorry you felt our…” is a great example, that’s a blame shift, that’s saying “well, it’s your problem, but I guess we’re sorry that you got upset.” It’s almost worse than nothing.
The propensity toward bias, regardless of the target, is something that’s buried deep within our evolutionary history. A lot of people use that as an excuse to say, “so that’s just how it’s gotta be!” but that’s not at all the case. We constantly deny tons of other vestigial evolutionary behavioral impulses. If we hadn’t learned to do that, society as a whole would have never progressed much beyond the early agrarian period. What we need to affect is a fundamental change in the way people view those basic impulses, regardless of how they choose to manifest, and convince them that choosing the thing that is best for everyone, rather than the thing that’s best for them alone or their immediate surroundings is the better choice. That notion subsumes way more than just bigotry, it changes the way people think about war, about work, about how humans in general should be treated–everything.
It’s not impossible, and the reality is we are slowly but surely winning that battle. That’s why the worst of the worst are panicking so much as of late. They are scrambling to discredit us, to cement things like bigotry and Eurocentrism into peoples’ self identities, to just scream and cry and say anything in the hopes that it will get people to stop listening us–to make them so afraid that they think any change to the status quo is someone else taking something away from them.
They wouldn’t be doing that if they weren’t pretty damned sure they were losing.
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To be honest, I haven’t played a matching pieces puzzle since… well, before the internet was a gleam in its father’s eye. But yea, I was thinking of visual novels and dating sims. They are objectively terrible, and their hundreds of millions of fans are all wrong to disagree.
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I’m not comparing Shkreli’s actions with Valve’s, I’m saying that the logic presented in the comment that was a reply to of “we can’t apply moral judgements to Valve’s actions because that might affect their profit” is the same logic that allowed Shkreli’s actions to happen.
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Band name!
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My only concern regarding this decision is when (not really if) they’ll hit other titles that are sexual in nature (barring the obvious references to the Witcher series, I think they’re safe since it’s a AAA title) that don’t have problematic sexual depictions. It’s just inevitable that Valve will want to clean house on those things which can lead to legal peril. I see this decision as a good lesson in not centralizing your distribution channel in terms of online content/games since more often as publishers will inevitably become willing to police content on their platforms as is their prerogative.
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I wonder if this is third party/bot activity? Like someone decided that they don’t like all of the anime titty games on their steam store page so they setup their botnet to file thousands of reports to Valve claiming they are pornographic. And of course being Valve they don’t have actual people working on it (the actual people are in a sweatshop making hats), so their system automatically flagged the games and sent the letters out.
A couple of days later it bubbles up the trouble ticket queue and some poor valve employee has to send out tons of apology letters.
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Lmfao, hilarious shit you have there.
Nobody loses a right to speech when a publisher declines to publish and distribute ones words or art.
Freedom of speech is freedom to speak, not a right to an audience.
Who gets to decide in what venues artists are, and are not, entitled to show their work? Hint, it’s not solely the artists.
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