Originally published at: Steam offers an offensive videogame on homelessness | Boing Boing
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Tasteless, but I have seen far more tasteless games on Steam.
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Having spent some time in L.A. recently, I think Steam should require anyone wanting to download this game to watch videos like the ones you posted. Steam should also donate all of its cut of the revenue to Housing First charities.
This isn’t the first time that entitled techbros like Koksza thought that homelessness made for hilarious entertainment.
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Steam gets the headline, though I’ll focus my ire on the game company CEO Koksza, who assures us the game is “humorous yet non-offensive,” and features a world defined by “silliness” like homelessness, hypothermia, and starvation. He then cautions us “Just don’t get sucked in by the negative emotions." It’s like he anticipated, wanted, and pre-defended against the only rational response of disgust that this game exists.
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Well, at least the game’s title is reflective of its content.
Sure, I still have a problem with Steam promoting such Garbage to my inbox, though.
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Seems Steam has a hands off approach to what gets into the offering stream. From the Wiki…
Up until 2012, Valve would handpick games to be included onto the Steam service, limiting these to games that either had a major developer supporting them, or smaller studios with proven track records for Valve’s purposes. Since then, Valve have sought ways to enable more games to be offered through Steam, while pulling away from manually approving games for the service, short of validating that a game runs on the platforms the publisher had indicated.[193] Alden Kroll, a member of the Steam development team, said that Valve knows Steam is in a near-monopoly for game sales on personal computers, and the company does not want to be in a position to determine what gets sold, and thus had tried to find ways to make the process of adding games to Steam outside of their control.[193] At the same time, Valve recognized that unfettered control of games onto the service can lead to discovery problems as well as low-quality games that are put onto the service for a cash grab.[193]
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I mean, if we can’t exploit some of the most vulnerable among us for cheap entertainment, who can we exploit?
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Alt Headline: Florida man makes video game.
(According to his LinkedIn, anyways.)
Yep, anyone who pays an entry fee now gets to have their games on Steam. It’s led to an explosion of zero-effort shovelware (and outright scams) and gross games that wouldn’t have made it past a curator.
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If you don’t want a walled garden, sometimes you get stupid products. I don’t think it’s steam’s fault that this happens. Everyone has limits and lines and things that cross those lines. I’m sure any game promoting any queerness are games that some parents think steam should remove.
I get not liking the game, but I don’t necessarily think Steam is in a position where they could “be right” on this. If they remove it, (and other games that other demographics of people find are offensive / bad ) then they become a walled garden and we decry them for that. If they keep it, then they’re promoting hateful and offensive videogames and we decry them for that.
What options does Steam realistically have here?
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Personally I find any game where killing is the goal is offensive. That makes me a minority in the game world.
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Within the context of Steam’s stated goal of switching from being a curated storefront with content restrictions to essentially a platform for payment processing and game distribution with no restrictions (though that transformation is ongoing), they don’t have a lot of options with things like this. On the other hand, Steam has retained some content restrictions, but they just don’t actually spell them out and they unevenly enforce them.
Back in 2018, Valve claimed they were dropping restrictions, saying “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.” (“We decide” is doing some… interesting work there.) But they’ve blocked some (legal) adult content, some kinds of hate speech, etc., since. What they blocked could be seen as “trolling,” I suppose, given the ambiguity and subjective nature of what constitutes “trolling.” It’s an inexcusably sloppy approach, though. Itch.io is an open platform for selling games where they spell out what kind of content isn’t allowed (no hate speech, basically), and manage to do a better job enforcing that, despite not being a multi- billion dollar company.
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Yea not kool…I get it ,its a problem I have a female transient who literally swears the ftontvof my apt building us her toom and bathroom not joking.i wanted to to just b so mean but then one rainy very cold nite i got home and she was trying to stay dry and warm under a few inches of space that wasnt wet with 1 blanket.my heart broke for her and i went and got more blankets and stuff for her.alil compassion goes along way
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Steam is the games equivalent of YouTube at this point. Everyone in that field has to use it, but its glaring problems and lack of oversight, with that oversight only happening when major controversies arise so that Valve can cover their asses, make it a horrid experience.
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I’m struggling here. I find this game distasteful, along with a lot of other stuff that gets posted to Steam these days. But I have also seen the opposite extreme of Apple’s walled garden approach where they’ve shut down politically-oriented games, or arbitrarily decided one day that it’s not OK to depict guns in your marketing. And I was upset when I saw that Apple was using itch.io and its wealth of LGBTQIA-positive content from small creators as a cudgel against Epic in the recent Epic vs. Apple court battle.
I’m in favor of deplatforming hate speech (which this arguably qualifies as, but it would take an argument to settle it) and explicitly illegal content, but I think that minimal curation outside of that may be the way to go. Valve themselves have talked about how when back when they curated content, they would probably have passed on a lot of smaller, quirkier games that wound up being incredibly well-loved (can’t find the interview, but the interview mentioned Stardew Valley as a game that they would have skipped, and that’s a personal fave).
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I think it would be much better if the folks that made “this war of mine” took a swing at this. Or anyone else that would rather than aiming at humor aim at putting you into the shoes of someone homeless and showing how hard that situation really is. Bonus if you can haul yourself out of homelessness but only if both skill and luck align.
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Not only is this offensive for all the reasons noted, but it’s also a cash-grab trying to ride the coattails of Hobo: Tough Life, an urban survival game on Steam with positive reviews. I haven’t played it myself, but as I understand it, its intent is to raise awareness of the difficulties homeless individuals face on a daily basis, and surviving is, well, difficult. As one would imagine.
So, not only do I say fuck this developer, I say it twice and really, really mean it.
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Good grief, I’m ashamed that I’d forgotten about that game.
I had to stop playing it when my people started killing themselves out of desperation, despite everything going my way up until one crucial point.
Beautiful and hopeless, and I never want to play it again. It’s worth everyone’s time.
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thanks for sharing
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Yeah, sorry about that, I didn’t know how much of the text/pictures from the Wikipedia page would show up in the preview on the post.
