Originally published at: Streaming site Twitch to allow "artistic nudity" and other sexy things | Boing Boing
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Ultimately, Twitch doesn’t want to be a mere gateway to OnlyFans and similar sites. It wants the horny gamer dudes and the women they follow to stay there for the peep shows. They can’t rush the process toward that goal, but this is another step toward it.
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…so a Twitch streamer can be nude or whatever, but a twitch streamer can’t play a video game featuring the same thing the streamer could they themselves enact?
That seems weird especially on a platform that is in theory about watching people play video games.
It is also an improvement because one of the things I actually do on twitch is watch people paint miniatures, and some painters feel the need to use green stuff to hide the “sex areas” of models lest they get their feeds demonetized by twitch. They may continue to do so if they actually were the ones that were uncomfortable and used Twitch as a morality cover. They may also continue to do so if they want to use Twitch live and wrap the session up into YouTube for “Residual income”.
(mini painting makes so little money that professional supplement their income with having people pay to watch, and giving out tips as they go, and frequently giving classes…it is a skill that at it’s highest levels is true art and pays less then minimum wage unless you manage a side hustle along side it…while I would’ve to be able to paint well I am so very glad it is not the talent I rely on to put food on the table!!!)
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It’s really a difficult question isn’t it?
What I have seen there was a few vtubers already putting these new vague rules to the absolute test (to the absolute surprise of no one haha). All while notable Kick streamers like XQC and Adin Ross (a site who loose moderation rules are easily comparable to X’s because they don’t give a fuck about advertisers because Kick’s only real one is for an online casino which is under the same corporate umbrella) are mocking the debacle on their streams.
Because i’m neither a woman nor a Twitch streamer I don’t exactly know how to convey what’s going on on that site with women or how people see women (both scantily clad and the opposite) who do stream on there. I don’t know how to word in a way that doesn’t make me look out of touch so I won’t get yelled at here haha. But a streamer there named Juniper had some thoughts about the perception of women there two weeks ago (many days before these rules loosened) at around the 2 minute mark
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If Twitch wants to make a partial switch toward this more lucrative segment, they’ll do themselves a big favour by putting a lot of resources into human moderation and strict no-tolerance policies toward harassing behaviour. That will to a certain extent protect women who want to continue streaming as gamers from the usual creepers and overgrown adolescent boys who’ll expect every woman on the site to be selling sex (which, to be clear, is fine too).
Of course, that costs money, so they’ll just go with age-verified categories and trust their users not to make the site unsafe for other users and content creators who continue to come there for the games.
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This will open things up for art modeling, which is welcome. Currently, Meta platforms are very nebulous and arbitrary about what is permitted, with professional art models often getting warnings or bans even when they show censored poses. Even paintings and drawings often run afoul of the automated moderation – the more realistic your work, the more likely it is to be flagged. Figure photography is out, and there has been no way to offer streams of art instruction for life drawing on Meta.
There are numerous groups offering Zoom modeling sessions that could benefit from this, and this could supercharge some of the online art instruction groups.
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I believe nudity in games is allowed so long as it’s not ‘sexualized’ nudity or if it is (a-la BG3) it can’t be the focus… so pretty much the same rules the streamers themselves are held to.
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This seems likely to go over poorly with the…fine…folks who cope with the gap between their streaming results and their streaming aspirations by blaming the techniques that others use to be more entertaining than they are. Probably not a 1-to-1 overlap with the ones who got real worked up about ethics in game journalism; but not a sentiment you need to dig too deep to find.
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Well, that’s confusing. What does “incidental” even mean in this context? If the nudity is intrinsically essential to the plot it remains “entirely prohibited”, but if it was just added to boost sales and is totally irrelevant to the plot - in short, if it is gratuitous nudity - then it is OK?
It sounds like they are (in theory) gunning for the fairly specific usage of “incidental” to describe things that are connected to or caused by something something else; but significantly less important than whatever that thing is. Merriam-Webster’s “being likely to ensue as a chance or minor consequence”.
I assume that they were gunning for something that wouldn’t, say, ban the significant slice of well regarded contemporary RPGs that have romanceable party members or NPCs; but are primarily RPGs(or analogous situations in other genres; BG:3 has just put RPGs in the spotlight at the moment); but don’t want allowing that to allow you to green-light just anything that somebody used Ren’Py to prepend 5 minutes if dialog tree to.
I’m not sure how that will look in practice: nuance is expensive and scales poorly; which leads one to assume that the actual criteria applied will be simpler(probably just percentage of overall length; perhaps weighted by perceived intensity and by the existing reputation of the game for either being a Serious Game or for being degenerate pornography with a thin veneer of visual novel decision tree).
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Depends on who’s creating it.
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