I’m sorry you’ve been hit by this. You’re far from alone in having these feelings.
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I wouldn’t describe the act as ‘reasonable’ or ‘proportionate’. You already admitted that it’s badly worded. You’re asking people to act on the basis that words in the guidance you quoted mean things other than what they ordinarily mean in English. That’s clearly a risky strategy if the matter is ever adjudicated.
I entirely sympathize with the organizers not wanting to take that risk. That being said, if some of the games have to be blocked, I would recommend, as an act of solidarity, simply excluding the UK entirely.
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IF and Twine in particular has come to the attention of Internet hate groups before. There are people out there with a grudge against IFTF. (Like, maybe two people, but that’s enough to start something.)
I am not involved with the IFComp blocking process, but from the IF Archive side, I can say that we’ve looked at the UK guidelines; we’ve also had our lawyer look at the UK guidelines. The point of having a lawyer is that you don’t believe you are a domain expert on reading legal rules.
The lawyer said (back when IFTF was set up) that we had to obey GDPR rules, and explained to us what we needed to do. So we did that.
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This is a crappy situation but I hope nobody is taking it out on the organizers, who do a lot for IFComp and clearly are unhappy with this as well.
It’s worth noting (since some people seem a little unclear?) that the intent of the law is not to block content completely but to implement “highly effective age assurance” for relevant content. There doesn’t appear to be any way of implementing that which isn’t also highly expensive, though. Itch can afford that, since they are an online marketplace. I’m not sure IFTF has the funds it would require. Geoblocking costs nothing and sidesteps the issue.
For the record, my game is geoblocked for a scene which might be interpreted as encouraging violence. I don’t believe it actually is, and don’t think the IFComp team believes that either, but I also don’t think any of this is their fault.
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Thanks for the afternoon yawning (preparing a good espresso for offsetting the boring debate…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I hate this law, hate this situation, and hate the people who created this law, but the above is incorrect. OSA distinguishes between priority primary content, which children of any age must be prohibited from accessing, and priority content, which some children may have access to if they’re an appropriate age. In other words, it’s a distinction that’s very important if you’ve got a functional age-verification regime allowing you to modify what content is displayed based on how old a particular user is, and more or less meaningless in the absence of such a system.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this kind of thing is why you hire a lawyer and listen to what they tell you.
Regardless I hope it’s a good Comp and everyone can play all the games that are appealing and appropriate for them, regardless of where they happen to live.
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One, it really doesn’t matter if the intent of the law is not blocking content when it is demonstrably leading to content being blocked, and, two, it is generally a good idea to be somewhat skeptical of the stated motives of the people trying to censor the internet.
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Are you saying sites that provide age-appropriate material need to do ID checks to verify that their child users are, say, over 12?
So much opinion presented in this thread, and very few facts.
I hope the legal advice the IFTF is getting is at least inexpensive.
Okay, if we’redoing to get all semantics: “the law does not require content to be geoblocked.”
It’s a shitty law and I’m neither interested in defending it nor in winning points in an internet debate or whatever, so I’ll be muting this thread now.
I would encourage people to show the IFComp organizers understanding, but hey– it’s a free internet.
The IF Comp 2025 entries have been published.
By my hasty count, 24 out of 85 (~28%) are currently geoblocked in the UK. (I may have made errors.)
[edit:] And there’s a statement by the organisers as part of the announcement blog post (which confirms my number).
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Right, my understanding is that sites doing age-checking need to restrict all the primary priority content to people over 18, but they can make some kinds of priority content available to older kids under 18, though I don’t believe there’s much specific guidance on what’s ok for different age ranges - unfortunately of a piece with the vagueness of the roll-out.
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I have done a quick scan of the blurbs, and tested the online version of two obviously geoblocked games, no interference from “perfidous albion”.
Which raises an interesting question if one know how the 'Net works: there’s a major contradiction in His Majesty’s law, geoblocked data are allowed to transit thru His Majesty’s realm. Now, Britannia, what to do with this contradiction ? 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Well, the law is about providing this information to minors within the UK, not routing it through the UK, so I don’t think that’ll be an issue. That’s why geoblocks work—the easiest way to keep minors from accessing this information is to keep anyone in the UK from accessing it.
That said, I do have long-term concerns about the use of content warnings for this. If including content warnings can get your game geoblocked, but nothing bad happens if you leave off content warnings entirely, then I imagine people will just stop using them—which is a net loss to everyone.
This happened on Tumblr when the NSFW ban was imposed by deleting content based on its tags. Now people still post NSFW content, but they don’t tag it any more, which means you can’t filter it out based on the tags like you could before. The result is that there’s just as much NSFW on the platform, but the tools to avoid it (or find it, if you want!) no longer work.
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Hello, folks.
We did post an update on the OSA issue in our launch post at https://blog.ifcomp.org/
We did not solely use content warnings, some games were initially flagged that did not have content warnings. As I say in the post, we do not love restricting content and we understand that lots of people are frustrated, but we are obligated to comply with the law for UK users and following advice from our attorney. Our alternative option was to geoblock the entire competition, and that seemed worse. We spent considerable time investigating whether a third-party provider could offer age verification for our UK users without us needing to retain sensitive information, but we were not able to implement a workable solution before launch. We are still pursuing that possibility, but it may not be in place until next year’s competition, and we recognize that there are people who would avoid providing their information if we were to implement that.
My gratitude to those of you who are acknowledging that we are doing our best in a difficult situation that we do not like.
Jacqueline
PS - Yes, I mostly do not frequent the forums, but I’m here today because of setting up the private forum for 2025 authors. We look forwward to hearing everyone’s feedback in our post-competition survey, which will be available beginning October 18th. In the meantime, authors who wish to contest their geoblock should email us at ifcomp@ifcomp.org from the address they used to register their game.
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I’ve made an IFDB list of the subset of entries that UK judges can play without technical block circumvention measures.
(Unofficial, I’m not an organiser; may contain mistakes or get out of date; moan at me if so, not anyone else.)
[edit:] The obvious complementary list is over in the other thread.
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