Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday June 09 2018, @05:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-it dept.

You might say we're all living inside a ruinous waking nightmare that spawned from the dream of Web 2.0.

Don't get me wrong: It was a beautiful dream.

Web 2.0. We are all of us producers. With our blogs and our comments and our tweets and our YouTube channels we will democratise content and the algorithms -- those glorious algorithms -- will aid in the process. We will upvote and favourite and like and the wheat will be separated from the chaff.

Magic.

I think we can all agree that Web 2.0 didn't quite work as advertised.

It gave us Minecraft. It gave us Wikipedia, collaborative spaces, online tools. But it also gave us Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Gamergate, incels, toxic communities, Logan Paul wandering into a suicide forest. It gave us Twitter bullying, Kelly Marie Tran harassment campaigns on Instagram.

It gave us terrible, opportunistic video games about school shootings.

Wednesday, after yanking Active Shooter, a video game where you play as a high school shooter, from its Steam store, Valve made an announcement. In a blog titled "Who gets to be on the Steam Store" Valve discussed the steps it's taking to prevent a video game like Active Shooter from making it to the Steam store in the future.

Its solution is about as Web 2.0 as it gets.

"[W]e've decided," wrote Valve, "that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling."

"Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see."

In 2018, at this current moment, it seems like a decision out of time. An old-fashioned solution to a problem that literally every single platform on the internet is currently trying to solve. We live in a world where Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are in the process of trying to actively take responsibility for the content produced and posted on their platforms.

Meanwhile, Valve is busy trying to abdicate that responsibility.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:29PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:29PM (#690876)

    I played politically incorrect games like Dopewars, and this crazy game whose name I forgot, where you were an arsonist tht had to burn down government buildings floor by floor without getting your escape route cut off.
    Yeah, stuff that the professionally umbraged can take umbrage to, but they are in my memories 30 years later.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:42PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:42PM (#690888)

    If you like indie and not exactly politically correct games, you might get a kick out of Liberal Crime Squad. Probably not on steam[ing pile] tho...

    Its elevator pitch: WARNING: The scope of this game is narrower than that of real life. We have attempted to include foul language, graphic violence, politics, religion, sexual references, adult situations, narcotics, prostitution, bodily functions and bad pickup lines, but Bay 12 Games recognizes that there might be omissions which will make some players uncomfortable. In light of these facts, use your discretion when making decisions about downloading LCS.

    http://www.bay12games.com/lcs/ [bay12games.com]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @02:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @02:24AM (#691007)

      That game is ... odd. I've fixed it up and am playing it now.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:52PM (#690895)

    I remember playing "Schoolyard Slaughter" on an Atari 1040ST. I had to get it from an FTP site because mosaic wasn't a thing yet. Clearly still web2.0's fault tho'! Man that game was HARD! Them little kids were QUICK! And you had to get 'em with single headshots too...