- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
Senator Mark Warner’s letter follows an ADL report about extremist content on the platform.
US Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has sent a letter to Valve CEO Gabe Newell asking if the company intends to take measures to curtail extremist content on Steam. The letter references a report by the Anti-Defamation League that identified a large number of user accounts and user-created groups “that glorified antisemitic, Nazi, white supremacist, gender- and sexuality-based hate, and other extremist ideologies” on the PC gaming platform.
The letter features a high-level view of the kind of hateful content the ADL found on Steam. That includes “40,000 groups with names that included hateful words, with the most prominent being ‘1488,’ ‘shekel,’ and ‘white power’.”
The Steam forums are fucking awful. Filled with bigotry and nazis complaining about gaming be woke. There’s literally a list of “Woke games” for people to avoid, it has thousands of games on there.
When people talk about the new Dragon Age, it’s filled with people calling it woke propaganda and pushing the transgender ideology all because it has a trans character that you can’t not accept.
If you ever wonder “should I go on the steam forums to check this one thing I’m curious about?” The answer is always no.
I’m kind of curious about that list so that I can use it as a source for recommendations.
I find that I almost always enjoy movies, TV shows, games, etc. that get conservatives all riled up and in the mood for brigading.
I saw it. I thought it would be good for recommendations, but it’s enormous and contains almost every game, so not helpful.
They put Bloons TD6 on that list. They’re schizo for sure
I’m just surprised anyone uses steam forums for anything beside troubleshooting.
Troubleshooting yes. But you’re missing the other 90% of the forums which is just constantly bitching about the games.
It’s so annoying while trying to troubleshoot issues I may have with a game. I used to get upset when a dev goes nuclear and deletes a bunch of comments or moderates the forums like a hawk, but the forums are basically overrun to the point that I hope they do since I can’t find solutions to my problems without reddit, which usually isn’t helpful either. It’s not like steam is particularly the majority fault, it’s the people using it for what’s it’s not meant for. Seriously dumb brick idiot just need to go to 4chan and complain there, they are far more likely to get positive reinforcement there.
I agree with most of what you said, but your example could probably serve as a textbook definition for “pushing an agenda”. A still very controversial real life topic that you must engage with and can only respond to in one way.
I think it would have been more elegant if the player can choose to treat the trans person negatively, with negative story impact down the line as a penalty for being a dick. Much better way to get the point across without feeling like a lecture.
Can you treat the women negatively because they are women? Can you treat the Grey Warden Davrin badly because he’s a black elf? Can you treat the Dwarf Harding badly because she’s a Dwarf?
The answer to all of these is no. Why should someone being trans be any different?
Edit: is it purely pushing an agenda because it’s a “controversial” topic for some people? Would the same be said if accepting Black rights in our society was more recent and the game had allowed you to simply accept a black person for who they are? Making your character accept your companions for who they are is a core theme of the game, Taash is no different.
Fuck that’d actually be really cool of them to let you play a shitty racist for real, more games need to let you actually be a truly vile piece of…
😞of course
You can be a truly vile piece of shit without having to resort to prejudice. If anything, resorting to racism to be a piece of shit is cheap, as if the writer didn’t want to think of an actually shitty thing the character could do. For instance, if you could turn one of your companions over to a bounty hunter who wants them because of some gambling debts. But you’ve gotten to know them and understand those debts were only a result of them being blackmailed into gambling by some mobster. Then when the bounty hunter comes a knocking, you say “Don’t care, you shouldn’t have gambled” and turn them over. Mind I’m not a writer so this isn’t the best example. But that’s still being a piece of shit without having to be racist. There are more ways to be a piece of shit and have it be interesting than resorting to prejudice.
Doesn’t mean I can’t want the option to be a racist asshole to every race in a video game
Bonus points if I can pick a race to consistently (or not) not hate rather than just always being a general racist or not
It’s like people forget that Valve has been enabling this for a long time. When people suck off Valve, remember half of them may be Nazis who appreciate that Valve gives them a place to be a pile of shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatred_(video_game)
The fact that this got released, immediately was a top seller on Steam, is indicative of how popular the anti-woke narrative is and how long it has been going on, since Hatred was released in 2015 which means it was at least developed through 2014, if not 2013.
Why is it Valve’s job to police game content? That’s a shitty precedent for any platform.
If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Whether it’s ultraviolent stuff like Postal or Hatred, ww2 games where you can play as literal Nazis, or the opposite side of the spectrum where you have LGBT centric content.
Bear with me, that previous sentence isn’t intended to equate those two things, but the reality is a lot of people find LGBT content objectionable. By putting the publish/not publish decision up to platform owners, you’re setting up a system that getting your game published is according to the political whims of whoever is in charge of that process. Any system you make here can easily be abused.
If you think banned books are dumb the same should apply to games. I for one appreciate knowing that freedom of expression is alive and well on Steam, and if I don’t want to engage with content I find objectionable, I simply don’t. Why is that such a foreign concept?
Should Valve be required to publish each and every game submitted? Even if they are absolute bare minimum shovelware garbage?
If it’s not malicious software like a bitcoin miner or whatever, yes. If people want to buy shovelware, that’s between them and whoever made it.
Valve decided a while ago that it was easier to just take the $100 and have some basic verification that a game runs rather than do any curation themselves.