Yeah, that’s definitely new. The emails authors received today said 11AM EST tomorrow.
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I’m curious… Do we know an estimation of how many games will be geo-blocked in this comp?
I have no skin in the game. But I think, in the name of fairness, either all games should be geoblocked, or none. UK users have to use VPN.
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When I first read section 62 of the Online Safety Act 2023 a narrow meaning of “depict” (covering visual rather than text-based material) seemed more natural in the context of the rest of the section and the other bits of the Act I’d read – but the consensus here seems to favour a wider meaning. The OFCOM guidance linked to on this forum seems to use the verb in various ways, which isn’t helpful. It’s not defined in the Act, but has there been any authorative interpretation yet? If not then it might take years for the question to be resolved by the courts.
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I’m reading through this, finding examples and counter-examples, turning my understanding on its head with each new discovery, and it really just underscores to me how this Act essentially cedes the internet in the UK over to large companies.
Facebook has a full-time legal team that ensured they complied with the Act long before it was being enforced. The same will be true of any of the other corporations that have Balkanized the Internet. But what can individuals, small groups, hobbyists, non-commercial projects like IFComp do except block the UK or censor themselves?
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Seems to me like the ofcom guidance very explicitly excludes text-only content when defining pornography, but pretty clearly includes text content for the other categories.
The website now says it opens on Sept 1. (Like, just now.)
The judging period will begin during the day on September 1.
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I was just thinking about the matters in section 62(6) and (7). There are more types of content than just pornography and everything else. I had another squint at the guidance on the phone and get the impression you could “graphically” (in text) describe violence or death in a game all right.
That’s sort of thing’s not my cup of tea anyway, but it’s always a shame when guidance goes beyond the law or people go beyond the guidance or law to their detriment.
The link to Ofcom’s guidance has already been posted in this thread, and I wish more people would actually read it.
No, you don’t need to block games that have violence in them.
Section 8 on page 53 describes what they mean by violent content as it relates to the act.
Violent content means content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for an act of serious violence against a person, or content which depicts real or realistic serious violence against, or detailed, graphic injury of, a person, animal or fictional creature.
Can a text game depict real or realistic violence? No. Unless you’ve got photos and videos in there of that kind of thing.
What about a text game that encourages violence against people? Up to the organisers it that’s the kind of thing they want to accept in the comp, I guess.
Either way violent content is not “primary priority content”, which is the type that children would need to be blocked from accessing.
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This is what I was getting at. It depends on how widely you define “depict”, and my instinct is to agree with you.
Yeah, annoyingly I can’t find anything totally definitive on “depict”. There does not appear to be any basis for interpreting it as relating to text content though. The context is always around visual content. The guidance uses phrases like “description or depiction” when they want to include text.
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This is so sad to see, but inevitable.
Content warnings start out as direct, author-to-reader communication. Authors are showing care for their audience with them.
But, inevitably, when a censorship mandate turns up, those threatened by crushing penalties panic, and an obvious thing to do is to hijack pre-existing content warnings as a convenient way to divide the sheep from the █████. The more conscientious authors were, the more they are punished. We saw it with itch.io and now we’re seeing it with IFComp.
And that puts pressure on authors to be obfuscatory with their content warnings, pushing the reader aside to turn them into legalese/jargon ultimately written for the censors as audience. (Or to just give up and omit them.)
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Appeal to whom, exactly, the UK government or someone else?
The IFComp organisers (a tiny team of volunteers trying to cope with this nonsense).
(You think HMG or Ofcom have the slightest idea we exist?)
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Er… Can’t they simply shrug that off? We’re small fry, after all.
This has been discussed a lot in the other thread; IFTF have sought legal advice, and decided they can’t take the risk.
You’re right, almost certainly this would never come to anything, but (to my mind) the risk is some scenario like:
- One day, someone in this community is unfortunate enough to become the Main Character on social media for whatever reason (maybe nothing to do with IFComp or IF at all).
- Everything they’ve done and everyone nearby suddenly comes under massive scrutiny from the worst people.
- The Daily Mail gets hold of it and runs some unhinged story about this community of sick woke freaks, finding something in the IF world to quote out of context and distort.
- The UK government is embarrassed and wants to appease the Mail, as is its habit, and leans on Ofcom.
- Ofcom finds something IFTF has done actionable under the UK OSA and threatens (as it is permitted/mandated to do) £18m fines etc, which is “approximately a thousand times as much money as [IFTF has] in [its] bank account”. (As I understand it, by the time Ofcom are talking to you, you’re already in breach [citation needed]). IFTF is forced to fold in some direction. Its officers fear travel to the UK forever.
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The whole Online Safety Act is precisely about managing risk, and taking reasonable and proportionate steps to manage the risk of content on platforms that you run.
The fines are at a similar level to GDPR infractions.
The current approach from the IFTF is a disproportionate over-reaction. The risk scenario described is extremely far-fetched.
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Once you know some entries are geoblocked it’s absolutely trivial to get around it. You can just use a VPN, or the Tor Browser, or even a free web proxy (though that would probably be my least recommended option). My main concern at this point is how the block is communicated. I noticed that the “play online” links for my games on IFDB were throwing a generic error before I set up a VPN, presumably because of the IF Archive’s geoblock. If we have the same setup for IFComp, I’m concerned that some less-informed judges in the UK might assume that blocked games are non-functional and give low ratings (despite the requirement to actually play them).
A clear notice saying “You’re seeing this screen instead of the game because it’s blocked” would probably be the best way to deal with this: people would know to find their way around it (and though I think the OSA prohibits IFComp itself recommending VPNs as a solution, there’s nothing preventing us pointing people towards them). Blocking ratings from the UK would probably be a good idea too (since anyone who can circumvent the block to play games can rate them as normal anyway).
It’s worth noting that even if other people in the UK don’t take advantage of the huge, glaring, widely reported-on ways around this kind of block, fewer ratings don’t actually harm a submission’s chances in the competition. It would only be a disadvantage if blocking led to low ratings, which is why I’d really like to avoid a situation where a blocked game might look like a broken game.
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You can see what it looks like from the preview page, it redirects to IFComp - Access Restricted. Not very detailed but it is clear.
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Ah - thanks! I wanted to be sure I’d be able to see all the games myself, so sidestepped the block before checking what happened if I tried to test my own.
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