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posted by chromas on Friday September 07 2018, @05:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the [Deleted] dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday September 09 2018, @10:02AM

    by Bot (3902) on Sunday September 09 2018, @10:02AM (#732431) Journal

    or get one. One of the clauses in steam should be: if we don't like it, it's out, no matter what the law says.
    Censorship is bad, but the theory of entitlement is worse.

    The case of FB and others that censor some and only some opinions is different, because "game not found" is a clear message, while there isn't a "user wrote stuff we took down", so there is a propaganda bubble involved. Also, if a movement who proclaims superiority and the need to prevail is banned, islam and "chosen by god" people should be out too.

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