I know we haven’t had much news recently about the UK Online Safety Act business. The tagging process is slow and somewhat discouraging. Also the way we handle the redirection and geoblock check is a bit of a nightmare and not fully debugged yet.
However, I have now implemented the first tiny step towards improving matters. To wit:
Most of the games/competition2025 directory is now unblocked in the UK. Only a few games are still geoblocked:
The_Kidnapping_of_a_Tokyo_Game_Developer.zip (blocked at developer request)
In addition the big IFComp2025.zip file is blocked because it contains all the above.
Note that this is fewer games than were blocked on the IFComp site. This basically comes down to a policy decision: “textual descriptions of violence” are so common in the IF canon that the Archive can’t meaningfully block them all.
If there’s a bright line between “The troll is battered into unconsciousness” and violent scenes that need to be blocked in the UK, we have not yet pinned it down. Have at it. :)
Now the footnotes:
This is only a change in the games/competition2025 directory. All other games directories remain broadly blocked, including previous IFComp years. If the Comp25 experiment seems to work correctly, I will start extending the same change to other directories that our volunteers have plowed through. (Which is not a lot yet!) This will require some additional implementation work, though.
I have not played the IFComp games in their entirety. The above list is compiled from (a) the IFComp metadata; (b) IFDB descriptions and reviews; (c) playing the opening of the IFComp-blocked games; (d) looking through all the games’ media resources to check for sexually explicit or graphically violent images.
(I didn’t find any sexually explicit or graphically violent images in IFComp 2025 at all.)
If I have missed some games that should be tagged, please tell me! Feel free to reply here and explain.
I know content blocking is a touchy subject. I’m not asking what games need to be blocked, and I’m definitely not running this thread as a referendum on blocking decisions. I’m asking for IFComp '25 games which seem like they might be a problem so I should take another look at them.
I can’t think of any Comp games that should get a second look to get added to the list, but I think there are at least two that should be removed.
You are an ancient chinese poet…'s mention of self-harm* does not at all track what the KOSA requires to be age-gated on my reading (link is to the official guidance doc, relevant section here is pp. 29-30). I’m glad to lay out a more detailed explanation for why that is, but I understand that public debate from internet randos about legal questions is generally not a good practice. Is there a helpful next step other than flagging the issue for the Archive review team to potentially take a second look?
As I understand the rationale for Kidnapping… being geo-blocked, it was based on the context of the Comp, and the author not wanting to competing with geo-blocked peers and/or standing in solidarity with them and/or drawing attention to and protesting KOSA and its application to the Comp. That all makes sense to me, but of course the Comp is over, and it seems odd to me to extend the geoblocking rationale to permanent archival; of course authors can upload their work to the Archive under whatever license they want, but ordinarily “anyone can play my game except residents of country X” wouldn’t be a request the Archive should be open to, in my view.
I actually suspect the other three titles shouldn’t be geoblocked either, though don’t have time at the moment to go through alternate paths to zero in on potentially-implicated content and compare it to the guidance. Having been part of the team doing initial review of Comp submissions to ensure their compliance with the rules, I know the process for identifying potential KOSA issues was done on a much more abbreviated time-frame, and with more of an onus placed on authors to determine whether their work was or was not content that would be restricted by the law, which means I’m not sure all of the nuances of what the law actually applies to came through. If the games all already went through an independent review by the Archive team currently doing the work and the judgment was they still should be geoblocked, ignore the above, but otherwise I think it might be worth taking another look.
* spoiler-blocked for not-very-intense-IMO mention of self-harm: “The general is denounced and charged with treason. Stripped of command, he is sentenced to death by being forced to run behind a horse from dawn until dusk, travelling from county to county to serve as a warning. However, his torture does not last very long, as you hear rumours that in the first city the general stopped by, he only had to speak a single command — a string of numbers, and the people of that town came to tear him apart, killing him and leaving not a single part of him behind.”
I just wanted to thank you and the volunteers who are ploughing through this for the work you are doing. It’s a huge job that you certainly didn’t ask for, and I, for one, am very grateful, not to mention excited, to have access to the IF Comp 2025 entries.
The IF Comp geoblock was primarily due to “Kidnapping” not really being “all ages,” with the solidarity stuff being secondary.
Just like during IF Comp, I’m okay with whatever the IF Archive / @zarf / volunteers choose to do. I’d suggest maintaining the geoblock in order to be overcautious of OSA law, even though I’m opposed to the law.
I also asked IF Archive to delist my games months ago but gave them the option to override that request. Basically, I’m not happy with the way things are going and will probably not primarily host games on any sites with ID / age checks, but IF Archive is important enough that they can have a pass for what they need to do.
Finally, I lifted the geoblock for the version of “Kidnapping” that’s on my personal site because it’s probably not at risk of any enforcement. (Unless the web host sees a need to start complying with the OSA law.)
When trying to use the unbox service for playing online through IFDB, I’m still getting the “Access restricted / Due to the UK Online Safety Act, all games on the IF Archive are currently unavailable to users in the United Kingdom.” message. I’ve tried both Detritus and The Wise Woman’s Dog:
We don’t have a scheme for doing a conditional geolocation check on Unbox URLs. Until we figure that out, unbox.ifarchive.org is unconditionally blocked in the UK, meaning you can’t do “view contents” in the UK at all.