I think it’s hilarious we allow stuff like Postal or Soldier of Fortune without a question, where the whole focus is on going crazy and murdering a whole bunch of people.
But try to show a sensual human body, instead of one that’s ripped into small pieces, and oh my god, this is going too far!
Gender of who is murdered has a lot to do with it too. I don't think you'll find a video game where you predominantly kill women. The most infamous scene of murder in video games is the Call of Duty mission "No Russian" where you optionally commit terrorism at an airport. If you pay attention you'll notice they kill much more men than women, and made sure that despite pleasant weather none of the women were wearing dresses or skirts. Murder of men is a lot more digestible.
This genuinely baffles me. Who cares! It's a video game. It's pixels on a screen. True crime podcasts and movies are a-okay but when its a video game that's where the line is drawn?
I suspect all new frontiers are like this. There was probably a similar outcry over violence in films. And maybe violence in fictional books too. Both long lost from living memory.
It does feel different in a video game, because you're the one pulling the trigger. I played that CoD mission when the game came out, and I felt a bit sick in my stomach playing that mission out. But I'd probably have exactly the same feeling from violence in films if I wasn't so desensitised to it after growing up watching american movies and tv shows.
The people who care signed their names[1]. It's not a secret or anything.
Most of the signatories are associated with Australian anti sex trafficking and exploitation groups, although there are several UK signatories and a couple Americans.
A publication[2] by one of the signatories connects the dots. It's driven by the core idea:
"Pornography Use Shapes and Changes Sexual Tastes"[3] which is supported by "In a survey of men involved in online sexual activities, 47% reported being involved in practice or seeing pornography which previously was not interesting to or even disgusted them."[4]
I'm trying to steelman when I say I believe that the authors would agree that this also applies to games with sexual content.
To address your comment specifically, while I see the appeal of consistent moral framework. I personally believe that moral frameworks trade consistency for completeness and rarely accomplish either. You have to assume the value-perspective of the other in order to understand why consistency might take a back seat to some other value we could only speculate on.
It really should be obvious that the natural objection to "if they banned this then why not X" is "they haven't gotten around to it yet" and that the reason they can be more successful is also that they have put their money where their mouth is and also named themselves, something a counter petition will probably struggle with.
1) Why haven't they banned porn game X when they banned porn game Y? -> it's just a matter of time, they've already established that they can pressure to get game x banned, they'll get to game y eventually - also, note that it should be obvious it's much easier to rally support to ban "niche incest/non-con game X" than to rally support to ban "borderline mainstream harem game Y". This is what I was referring to specifically.
2) Why haven't they banned all porn games then they banned porn game X? -> it takes a lot more effort to move the needle here. It's not for lack of trying or lack of will, it's that it's obviously much harder to get traction when you've expanded now to an entire category that includes borderline mainstream titles that will finally get defenders willing to put in the same effort as them.
3) Why haven't they banned GTA when they've banned porn game X? -> First, they've tried!. 2nd, again, same principle -> activists aren't stupid, they know they can win the battle one game at a time, and that they can't win it in one gigantic decisive swoop (conveniently enough though, you can leverage this as well to ensure you have a nice long runway to continue to do your activism and keep it as a wedge issue to push at for a nice long time)
4) Why not ban true crime podcasts when they've banned porn game X? -> see again, look, many. many people listen to true crime podcasts, and many people have also objected to them as exploitative. but why does porn game x get banned and true crime podcast Z not? because, well, duh, again, the amount of effort needed to move the needle on something many people enjoy is that much more! i don't think they don't want to, mind you, but again, it's going to take a lot more effort to get to true crime podcasts when they have a thousand other porn game XYZ's they can to work on
And lets not pretend people aren't also trying to get books banned, again, it's being done at a more selective pace, book by book, not category by category. Why is <random niche hentai> banned and not <50 shades of grey>? well, who is published by a mainstream big publishier and who is published by a niche publisher that doesn;t want to get the whole hammer on them?
I'm still looking at the thread and see people bringing up other titles that haven't been banned as if that's a gotcha and it just baffles me. Like what do they think the activists would respond if they were called out on it?
"Oh we don't care about that we only had a grudge on this game in particular"
Or more likely
"Thank you for bringing this title to our attention, we will certainly try to have it taken down as well as it too is against the values we are fighting for"
Well this is exactly how it should work for any cause.
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding. I'm saying the fact that they've succeeded in getting some games removed while others of the same type still exist or that other similar things still exist is not because they are morally inconsistent but because they can't do this all at once
There are still taboos even for pixels on a screen, even for video games. It's a good thing. There should be.
Perhaps you're just saying that you're mostly comfortable with the depiction of some forms of violence in some contexts. But what about other scenarios though? Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!
What if it's a story but with very detailed descriptions? What if that short story is adapted into a video game but it's only a text adventure? What if we add artwork to it, but it's just pixel art? etc etc.
The ability and the freedom to explore the darkest parts of our psyche in a safe, controlled, and fictitious environment IS important. Even if we find certain aspects or fetishes repugnant and distasteful.
I find the idea that payment processors have enough power to dictate the morality of a game market concerning. Given the number of other NSFW fetishistic stuff that is still being permitted on Steam I don't buy the "chargeback" rational AT ALL.
>But what about other scenarios though? Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves?
Yes and yes. We have worse stuff in literature already.
> Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!
Yeah. Same thing. Should be ignored. If someone feels an urge to run around raping women and lynching slaves, I'd much rather they were sitting around at home playing videogames than doing anything else in their spare time. What do you want them to be doing, the traditional creep move of figuring out how to get into positions of power and influence?
In addition taxpayers shouldn't be footing the bill in the war on pixels; if the banks are taking a firm moral stand then clearly the government is involved and that means they're probably spending money on expunging victimless non-crimes which is a low.
What do you think is occurring when a player defeats one of the other cultures in Civilization by conquering their last city or conducts orbital bombardment on a enemy planet in Master of Orion until the population is zero? That's genocide as gameplay.
I disagree. there shouldnt be any taboos for pixels on a screen
i mean, i can understand a child porn game would be disallowed but we already have anime games where characters that look like children are nearly naked
GTA, Elder Scrolls and Fallout series all allow for violence against women and not just the mutual violence of combat or whatever. One small example in one game from a long-ass time ago isn't really a broader trend (not to say that society at large doesn't view violence against men and women differently in different contexts)
Then you have an open world game where you can do all sorts of insane stuff, but everyone loses their shit specifically over feeding suffragettes to alligators.
> Republicans literally argue it's better for the country to have school shooters and for survivors and parents to live with PTSD for the rest of their lives than to limit access to military-grade weapons.
Can you quote any Republican who has “literally argued” this or are you just spreading lies that make it easier for you to vilify and dehumanize people who disagree with you politically?
You could just ask, "why do payment processors pressure content vendors not to offer this kind of content". You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening, but there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. There are other explanations!
You can get a long ways just by assuming that the people involved in these transactions are utterly amoral.
> You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening
Credit card processors don't have to be puritanical. Instead, puritanical people simply have to be smart enough to figure out that the best way to deplatform content that they disagree with is by putting pressure on their payment processor monopolistic vendors.
Giving in to a pressure campaign by ideological people can be a completely amoral and smart business decision.
> puritanical people ... deplatform content that they disagree
so that begs the question - what if the non-puritanical people also pressure the credit payment processors to stop curtailing to those puritanicals? Why is it effective one way, but not the other?
Probably because people are willing to put their real names on the "We're against incest/rape simulators" petition while most people are not going to be quite so fortright on the "Valve should reinstate the incest/rape simulators" petition.
See cryptocurrency payments. So the good news in this direction is that bitcoin et al are very much making progress at these businesses. As far as I can see, many - perhaps even most - such businesses now accept 2-5 forms of cryptocurrencies as payment. That took long enough but we are finally getting there.
The bad news is that essentially ALL such businesses still believe that it is essential for them to accept credit card payments - and that means they must still implement whatever agenda these are pushing. On their entire customer base, even if paying by crypto. For now.
Or I suspect in this case there are Puritans with a lot of money who will sue the payment providers if the providers don't block things they think are bad.
Yes the payment provider is making a simple money based business decision, or possibly there is a threat of sanctions against the directors so a personal decision as well.
> You could just ask, "why do payment processors pressure content vendors not to offer this kind of content". You're starting from the premise that there's some weird puritan thing happening, but there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. There are other explanations!
Someone, somewhere is making a choice to pressure content vendors to not offer this kind of content, and not to pressure them to not offer other kinds of content. It may be upstream of the payment processors but there is absolutely a weird puritan American thing going on somewhere, and it's much more interesting to get to the bottom of that since that's the point where change could happen. If everyone involved was amoral, these profitable games would continue being sold.
Utterly amoral people would need even more reason to not serve basically anyone. Since I know I don’t give a shit, the only thing I can assume is that it’s people that generally oppose what I think is perfectly acceptable.
Since the processors don’t actually care, they must simply believe that dealing with these annoying people is not worth the effort, compared to just not serving stupidly marginal markets.
But the thing is, the people upset about the sex aren’t upset about the killing, which I think is ridiculous.
What Thomas is hinting at is that these products are unprofitable for the payment processors.
So it’s not even that the controversy is not worth the effort. It’s that it literally costs them money to deal with.
The sex taboo may not make sense, but it exists. And it makes people behave in ways that creates problems for lending to them, specifically fraud and chargeback rates are demonstrably higher.
Disputed charges by the user. I know of one payment processor that specifically seeks out these high-risk businesses. Consider one of many possible scenarios would be that of a spouse who is alarmed at a charge to a clearly risque service and says "What the heck is that??" and the offender says "What the heck I don't know. Cancel the charge!"
If by “people involved” you mean folks who consume this kind of content then id totally agree. As soon as you offer crypto or even mildly sexual content your cc abuse rate goes through the roof. Which i suspect is the sole reason for processors getting upset in this case
OK well this is interesting information, what are the connections between crypto or even mildly sexual content exactly that create this phenomenon? I mean they do not seem to be related - if you said crypto or drawings of currency I would say huh, well they are sort of related, but the graph connection between crypto and even mildly sexual content would seem to me to be about as tenuous as that between crypto and meat eating.
So why do these two things cause credit card abuse to go through the roof?
Furthermore if it caused the credit card abuse to go through the roof wouldn't Valve just remove it of their own accord - at some point the abuse would mean money was taken away from Valve right?
Finally the article doesn't give this as a reason why it was removed - it said "violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors" - which sure, that may mean "high rates of credit card abuse were reported", but I doubt it.
Anyway, a link to studies of this phenomenon?
ps: I would probably believe credit card abuse increase under crypto, due no doubt to my innate prejudices.
I bet it has higher chargeback percentage too and they probably pay higher fees. iirc if merchant is getting close to 2% fraud to sales ratio, they can get banned for life. It's probably different rules when you're the size of Valve though...
> there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. [...] utterly amoral.
What? Puritanism is not about some kind of blanket purity to be recognized or expressed from any angle, perspective or religion. And in American business is both extreme and extremely selective.
It's also very much about appearances and image projected. You have to accept a difference between anybody's personal values (in so far as these can show through the mess of corporate decisions), and the image that businesses believe they much display.
You're talking about a culture that freely and enthusiastically sold opiates for decades. If they're cracking down on porn, it's because porn is costing them money, probably because people are disputing charges.
That's super interesting but a trivial Google search shows that chargebacks are a huge problem for this space so I'm not sure why I would care about that history.
The difference I see is that the player is getting sexual pleasure from what is being simulated in porn type games. I.e. they are trying to simulate the feeling of doing that in real life.
Where as in violent games like soldier of fortune I doubt most players are trying to achieve the feeling of brutally killing another human being.
Yes and often with pornography it involves the abuse of women and girls, and depicting this as a positive action. It's probably not the main reason why payment processors are banning and restricting purchases, but it should be.
Adult content is considered a high risk merchant category - meaning it is susceptible to high chargeback and fraud rates. This is because after someone pays for and consumes adult content, a certain level of "clarity" overcomes them resulting in the execution of chargebacks against the merchant.
It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.
I don't think that can explain why they're only targeting certain sub-categories of porn, and it's also contradictory to the public statements by Valve:
> We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks
Individual games violating "rules and standards" doesn't really fit with prohibiting a category because of high rates of fraud.
That sounds like a reasonable argument. We should force them to make it publicly with data. Maybe even force them to release aggregate statistics every quarter going forward.
That seems disingenuous. (1) in this case, this is a not a tiny fly-by-night wannabe game company. (2) which is good for paying back (or never seeing) the money of chargebacks.
For a new company, the risk of chargebacks might rest on a credit card company (for a little while anyway). But not for a long established one.
> Adult content is considered a high risk merchant category
> It has nothing to do with any sort of puritanical premise.
But I have no problem with the parent poster. I'm here hoping for conversation. The argument though is one we hear now and then and like I point out, how can it make sense? Like many things, it looks more like a vaguely possible, plausible explanation or chain of arguments... which on closer look doesn't fly. How can Valve, a long established, apparently solid merchant, be a serious risk for the credit card infrastructure? Should there be chargebacks, they can handle chargebacks. This is not limited to Valve. Many of us have run into the issue. The credit card infrastructure goes out of its way to refuse solid business.
> But I have no problem with the parent poster. I'm here hoping for conversation.
If you don’t have a problem with them and you were hoping for conversation, then starting out by accusing them of being disingenuous is a strange way of showing it.
> how can it make sense?
Why didn’t you ask this to begin with instead of assuming they were being deceitful? You know “disingenuous” doesn’t just mean “I disagree”, right?
Mastercard and Visa needs some serious competition. How come a payment company decides who to partner with and dictates what people use their system for. Ridiculous bullshite.
At the same time those "games" that were affected, well, who on earth pays for that seriously fucked up crap? People need to get a grip. I'd rather send a psycho team to evaluate people who pay for these games...
note: PCGAMER the epitome of games journalism. They didn't even checked which were the affected banned games.
Consider that not even a hard-line Christian puritan would agree with you in-principle. If publishers were forbidden from selling literature depicting incest, rape or genocide then the Old Testament would be removed from shelves. Clearly society has a tolerance for some of it.
Unconvincing argument considering what was widely known about certain prominent politicians and their adjuncts long before they became as prominent as they are today.
There's no evidence these people were corrupted by games on Steam. Somehow they managed to become who they are by other means.
>Implying that you like the idea of fucking your own children. You have just exposed yourself.
You imply that people that play shooter games like the dea of killing people, and people that play GTA like the ideas of being criminals and killing cops and innocents,
do this people also exposed themselves?
Do you also imply same things for movie watchers and book readers ? And metal listeners are Satanists right ?
If we let the Christian extremists ban something without any proof then they will move to the next thing and soon enough they will ban your favorite video game because it gives you the option to be bisexual. (I read about such extremists moving from Texas to Ruzzia since Texas is not Christian enough, it did not end well)
You could have opined that allowing certain extreme content was not a politically savvy business decision for US-based Valve.
Or that healthy societies have incest taboos for very good reasons, and Valve "having standards" would have had more social (plus lobbying/marketing) value.
Angrily insulting HN's user base, on HN, is not an effective method of persuasion.
I agree with the fact there is hypocricy. I disagree that either should be banned. (Maybe you didn't mean it that way but somebody with us the argument that way)
If group A wants to control group or person B, they should prove with very high certainty that group B's behavior is harmful to someone who is not B.
It's like we've collectively decided that digital gore is fine for teens, but a boob requires a Senate hearing. The irony is, one actually mirrors real-world trauma a lot more closely than the other
This isn’t about “trying to show a sensual human body”, it seems to be about incest porn specifically. There are still plenty of pornographic games available on Steam, even absurdly offensive ones such as the multi-part “Sex with Hitler” series.
To be fair, Postal and SOF haven’t been relevant in almost 20 years, though your point stands.
I wonder how a modern implementation of these two games would look given the vast visual improvements since then. I assume UE5 or 6 already comes with a Ghoul-esque framework ready to go. Though I hope they would feature a curmudgeon caricature of Jack Thompson.
I think this is a bit of a strawman. The market for people who get addicted to gruesome gore and are willing to pay money to see it is several orders of magnitude smaller than people willing to pay to see porn or OnlyFans. There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.
The GP highlights a classic observation: America's nearly unique cultural contradiction, where nudity and sex are considered highly offensive, while gore and violence are widely accepted.
This holds true in most other countries as well. Gore/ chopping of appendages is happily accepted and enjoyed (in movies, games etc) by all of India, whilst a simple kiss can be a taboo/ issue.
Japan has some of the weirdest/inconsistent rules around this stuff. Black lines or mozaic partial censorship of genitals, incest/stuff with minors widely available, and then you have some pretty violent uncensored movies, manga/anime, and games (though while it's mostly a China thing, sometimes the blood gets censored to be white instead of red which doesn't actually make it better (also sometimes done for urine)), GTA5 is as popular there as anywhere, but game franchises like Mortal Kombat are banned.
And of course, even in America, we tend to like our violence and gore more over-the-top and simulated. Most people didn't care for liveleak type content, even fewer for not so hard to find footage from ongoing wars.
Japan runs custom scratch-built implementation of ethics reverse engineered from Western cultures. That's all. Consistence is key, but it's consistent only with itself, and nothing else, and explicitly not aligned to Christian religious scripts. Nothing Japanese is compatible with anything unless and until it is the sole dominant standard, like Sony storage media or Apple hardware. Always has been.
> There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.
Do you have any evidence to back this wild claim? I've never heard this argument about chargebacks made before.
I don't think it's about this at all. I think it's about policing content, but then the observation of GP's comment applies: why is violence ok, but sex is not?
So grotesque violence appeals to fewer people, but banning gets focused on material more people find acceptable, even desirable?
This really is a culture/posture driven issue.
It is not as if many people think (emphasis on "think", as in being honest, reasoning carefully and being scientific about evidence) that banning sexy curves in a video game is going to impact the prevalence of sexy curve imagery, or "save" anyone from anything.
Imagine if financial companies required their employees to sign a legal statement committing to not "use porn, escorts, blow ... or spicy video games!" So strange that they don't do that!!
Financial companies like to make a show of having "high standards" when it comes to "controversial" segments of the market, or unfortunate individuals who don't fit the mold, when that gets them a lot of showy theatre for being hard asses to their audience of regulators.
While keeping very quiet, and not looking into things too hard, when it comes to tens of billions of sketchy dollars going through their systems associated with very high net worth criminal actors, organizations and corrupt governments.
There was a callout of multiple types of bank hypocrisy. Contrasting bank's "concerns" about small time erotic material vs. their lack of concern about employees use of erotic material, and the blind eyes they turn for major criminals, include prolific trafficking/pedophilic billionaires.
Are you saying porn buyers regret and that gore buyers do not? (As a broad generalization). Are you also asserting that's built in to risk-profole that payment gateways have?
I don’t have time for o look at the stats and provide quotes / cite sources but it does seem from what I’ve read on the topic that the more people play gore games the less violence there is in society.
If that’s true, maybe it’s also true that the more people have access to adult content the less babies we create as a society.
The US had more TVs per capita than Congo, and a higher life expectancy. Sending more TVs to Congo probably won't do much for their life expectancy though.
Similarly, I suspect the increase in violent video games and reduction of actual violence is just a side effect of an increasingly technology driven society.
But try to show a sensual human body, instead of one that’s ripped into small pieces, and oh my god, this is going too far!