What makes a "troll game"? Valve tries for a Steam-wide definition
Some of Valve's definitions of trolling seem relatively clear-cut. Most everyone would agree that Steam should remove developers that are "trying to scam folks out of their Steam inventory items" or those "looking for a way to generate a small amount of money off Steam through a series of schemes that revolve around how we let developers use Steam keys," for instance.
There's a little more subjectivity in determining if a Steam title is what Valve calls "a game shaped object." The company defines this category as "a crudely made piece of software that technically and just barely passes our bar as a functioning video game but isn't what 99.9% of folks would say is 'good.'" There may be some edge cases where a game some people consider "broken" is one that others consider brilliantly deconstructed "art." For the most part, though, a game that only 1 in 1,000 people would consider playable sets a good rule-of-thumb threshold for what deserves removal from Steam.
Where the "troll game" determination begins to get squishy is in games and developers that Valve says are "just trying to incite and sow discord." This is similar to the justification Valve used in June to remove Active Shooter, an unreleased game that planned to let players take on the role of a school shooter or the SWAT team trying to stop him. [...] The Active Shooter case gets into the one thing that Valve says unites all of these different troll developers: their malign motives. A troll developer is one that isn't "actually interested in good faith efforts to make and sell games to you or anyone," the company writes. While good-faith developer efforts can obviously lead to "crude or lower quality games" on Steam, Valve says that "it really does seem like bad games are made by bad people." And it's those bad games from bad people that Valve doesn't want on Steam.
Pool's closed, no AIDS Simulator for you.
Also at Motherboard.
Previously: "Active Shooter" Game on Steam Sparks Uproar
Valve Still Lives in the Waking Nightmare of Web 2.0
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Friday September 07 2018, @06:30PM (2 children)
I can't define pornography but I'll know it when I see it.
Sometimes even professionaly developed games are crap, maybe not to you, but certainly to me. One example, I believe, is Myst which required (if memory serves me right) to match some musical notes and I'm tone deaf, so the game was a total waste to me.
YMMV
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Friday September 07 2018, @07:23PM
Most of its puzzles aren't based on tones, so if you're (tone)deaf you can always lookup a walkthrough to bypass a particular puzzle. It resorts to such gimmicks like musical puzzles to counteract its blatantly light and simple gameplay. Gamplay-wise Myst can most definitely be considered a game of adventure/puzzle genre.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday September 10 2018, @10:06AM
So you're saying if Myst had some porn-related puzzles, you'd have had no issues? Interesting.