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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @11:15PM (3 children)
As a frequent consumer of visual novels, it was somewhat annoying that many of them got delistings or at least warnings after they butchered the games to make it on to steam in the first place. Thankfully I always purchase physical editions and the steam keys are just a courtesy.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Sunday June 10 2018, @12:14AM (1 child)
I guess as a follow-up to this story, I want to know:
1. Are all of the games that got scary letters from Steam now safe?
2. Will they be swept up by Steam's also-vague "straight up trolling" or "things that we decide are illegal" policies?
3. Will they re-enable adult content that had been disabled for Steam?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @08:12PM
I would need to go back and read through the updates, but as I recall, most got notices and then no response or followup. Usually, the VN's will have a separate "adult" patch that can be downloaded from their site. These can either be a real patch that contains the removed material, or a small script that unlocks the content already included in the steam download. The speculation was that the ones that just "hid" the content, rather than actually removed it where what triggered the warning, but again, they claimed to not have recieved any explination or clarification from Valve. Some have since released updates that completely remove any sexual or highly suggestive content, whether it is accessible or not in the defualt install. A lot of the panic came from games that were still in the appproval process, and I have not heard much since the initial scare.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @12:31AM
https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2018/05/gog-com-adds-visual-novels-following-steam-censorship-fiasco/59445/ [oneangrygamer.net]