This is correct—when people are saying thousands of games on Itch were affected, that refers to the deindexing. If you search for one of the affected games, even by its exact title, it won’t show up in the search results. However, these games are still on the platform and can be viewed via direct links, Itch collections, the author’s page, etc.
Yes, an unknown number of games have been actually removed/suspended. Collective Shout’s July 11 open letter to payment processors calls out “games featuring rape, incest and child sexual abuse,” and it seems that the Itch removals have targeted games that focused on these topics. I haven’t heard of any cases of games being removed that were not about incest or sexual assault.
Bez’s game Bi Lines seems to have been targeted because it had the tag “rape” (you can view tags for removed games by adding “/data.json” to the end of the url, e.g. https://norbez.itch.io/bi-lines/data.json). I could definitely see Itch panic-removing any games with metadata indicating rape- or incest-related content, regardless of how each game portrays such content.
If Itch is set on bowing to pressure from payment processors (and if payment processors remain set on bowing to pressure from Collective Shout), I hope that they will at least reconsider banning games that focus on the trauma of sexual assault, like Bi Lines does, rather than letting them get caught in the crossfire.
I think that Itch will wind up introducing a game content questionnaire as part of publication. This is what Steam, Google and Apple do.
It’s important to be aware of the questions on these for game design, because they are insufficiently fine grain. For example, Does your game contain violence? Well, that’s a wide term. Does Tom & Jerry cartoon violence get the same classification as realistic blood and gore. Apparently yes.
Same for blood. Do you have any blood in your game? I’m currently making a Sherlock Holmes story and I’ve already eliminated the idea that Holmes might find a drop of blood as a clue. Because saying a game has blood at all, means it’s treated the same as if it had the most gory scenes possible. I can see vampire stories being hit by this also.
pleeeaaasseeeee… don’t put in the bonfire the EU side of the censorship issue ! (violence, blood and gore in EU get the same dim view that sex and love get in the anglosphere).
(wearing the power armor +5 against fire with cryogenic cooling…)
The way the ESRB does ratings allows for this nuance. For instance, E10+ video games (everyone 10 and up) can have Mild Violence, Fantasy Violence and Cartoon Violence. They can also usually have mild blood without gaining the Blood and Gore tag that necessitates a T rating (teen). Blood without violence can even stay as E games (everyone).
I imagine Itch would implement something similar, with a scale in terms of how intense the violence, nudity, language, etc. is.
I think this is actually a good idea. I haven’t published in a long while, but the main checkbox for “Does your game include Adult content” that ensures it doesn’t show up in general searches unless the user is opted-into adult content isn’t on the edit page, it’s on the Metadata tab which I imagine is one of those tabs a lot of casual uploaders may not explore nor realize is there.
And I’ve sampled a couple of Twine games that have NSFW images of nudity and activity that is probably just lifted from adult sites and inserted into the project. That certainly needs to be removed per their “no photographic nudity of real people” rule and is the type of thing that you don’t want minors to stumble across.
None of my games have been removed but I try to well-tag and CW them. If I was able to upload images I could show how the traffic from on-site referral has decreased since the adult-marked games don’t show up in search.
My impression is itch is a business that’s open to kids, so they are just realistically needing to keep any adult content in the back room and not have tags that clue it’s there.
I know Bi-Lines got removed, most likely due to a tag or CW for “rape”. That’s the catch 22 is that one person’s content warning is another person’s search-term/fetish. It’s a difficult situation and they cannot review every single of the millions of games on there for context so they have to make some arbitrary decisions.
All of my adult games contain some LGBTQ+ content and I even have one titled Breeding Princesses of the Planet Lesbonicon and it’s still up - likely because it’s always been correctly NSFW tagged, or their trawl for adult content searched for “lesbian” and my title fudges the spelling?
And even some E-rated games include violently stomping cartoon animals to death… Says the guy surprised to find that Mario Odyssey got an E-10 rating but can confirm at least one game with koopa stomping that got an E… Of course, most people claiming Mario encourages animal abuse are rightfully viewed as crazy.
But yeah, you need more than just a bunch of check boxes to properly label a game… and sadly, most content labeling systems err on the side of prioritizing censorship and ageism rather than properly informing the consumer… and plenty of people can’t seem to comprehend the concept of “Don’t like, don’t read/look/watch/listen/other appropriate verb” no matter how much more reasonable folk bash them over the head with it.
Worryingly, the way British law is currently written, anything that could be interpreted as an incitement to protest would be illegal under the itch.io’s new terms. This is particularly awkward given that the explainer for the Online Safety Act indicates it is intended to hit a lot of content.
Directly, categories hit are:
any content encouraging self-harm
non-consensual digital nudity (including of fictional characters)
false information intended to harm anyone
threats
epilepsy-inducing patterns without preceding content warnings
sexual abuse (several different categories)
controlling behaviour
fraud
religious hatred
inciting violence of any kind
immigration without going through whichever channels happen to be legal at the time someone is checking for compliance
illegal drugs or weapons
terrorism
any other content that breaks a British law (the ones listed above are priorities, but anything against a UK law now cannot be depicted if the law is followed precisely)
In all cases, content about those subjects is specifically banned, right alongside content that includes examples. (So technically, a game that said trolling people with epilepsy is bad, would now be illegal on the internet, but legal and outright encouraged otherwise).
I trust I do not need to give examples of other things UK law bans (and therefore cannot even be discussed, let alone depicted, in a strictly Online Safety Act-compliant game put online), to indicate the amount of trouble this law has just landed on everyone’s plates. Mark my words, this is just the start.
I haven’t read the whole text of the OSA, but I haven’t seen this particular claim made anywhere else, and it’s not mentioned in the explainer you linked. Do you have a source for it?
(Note that “illegal content” isn’t the same as “content depicting illegal activities.)
Incidentally, there was an article for VICE Waypoint that was about adult games being removed on Steam and how Collective Shoutout was behind that, but that had been removed by the editorial board.
There’s lots to read on the matter. I think Lefo’s update sums it best. But Abusing women is wrong. Simple as that! No Mercy is a sickening idea that no business should help sell! You have a legal right of expression, but it cannot go without scrutiny. The VICE article suggests it isn’t the reason why those groups protested in the first place. They say COLLECTIVE SHOUT are being deliberately misleading. However, standing up for the abuse and mistreatment of women shouldn’t spark cries of fascism. I’m very intolerant in that case. Your rights shouldn’t cut women off. And being a woman doesn’t mean you’re a feminist. or make feminism. That’s a grotesque mistreatment of women. And it effects all people in all forms and facets of their lives.
There are now videos on No Mercy that show how overblown the negative image of the game is and while the content may still be intolerable to some folks, this is not exactly the game Collective Shout and other organizations are alleging. It is simply a terribly written and deeply un-serious fetish game that wouldn’t interest most people if not for the constant media attention.
The game is no different from someone writing some bad porn and uploading it onto the internet. I don’t think it is a crime or infringing on women’s rights to write awful sex scenes with incestuous relationships.
If anything, I find it frustrating that these organizations are dragging works that only a few people would care about into the public. Of course, anything niche is going to be hyper-analyzed on social media and elsewhere. The discussions on this game have been toxic and unproductive since very few people seem aware what the game is about (and how terrible it plays).
I think we all agree that misogyny is a deeply complicated topic, but focusing on this honestly forgettable and boring game as the prime example of what went wrong in society just seems wrong-headed. I feel that it’s more important to focus on reproductive rights than the ethical standing of one virtually unknown fetish game. Even if the campaign was led by a more morally responsible group and the game was indeed reprehensible, I still don’t understand the point of rallying around small games when there are bigger issues at hand.
And whether these groups intended it or not, they have basically destabilized many queer and adult media creators by campaigning toward payment processors. To use your point, “your rights shouldn’t cut women off”. I agree: you definitely have a right to protest against what you see as injustice, but it becomes questionable when they are cutting off many vulnerable people, including women, in the scene. They surely must have realized there is going to be a lot of collateral damage. Again, if No Mercy was indeed the big horrible game people are claiming, I don’t see why – after Valve ignores you – it needed to be escalated to payment processors. It’s only one game or a few games, not an entire platform.
For better or for worse, this uncertainty has indeed “effected all people in all forms and facets of their lives”. If you remain intolerant, I’m not here to convince you. But that intolerance is indeed creating this instability for many independent spaces, including interactive fiction. I doubt any of us will be posting a No Mercy-styled game any time soon, but the same dynamics that almost brought Itch to fall can go after IFArchive and other beloved spaces. This is a concern I have: No Mercy is not a game I care much about, but if the game happened to be on the archive and that takes down the archive for a while and even put adult games’ standing into question, I think we’d all be pretty pissed.
And notably, No Mercy was already taken off Steam by its creators after the initial public backlash, wasn’t it? Collective Shout escalated the issue because that was their real goal from the beginning, not because No Mercy was actually a continuing problem.
Honestly, I’m disgusted by how often incest gets lumped in with rape by overzealous moral guardians and don’t buy for a second that fictional rape is going to make anyone with an in-tact moral compass or a functional understanding of the distinction between fantasy and reality commit actual rape… and similar for any other crime players commit casually in many a game… Granted, I sometimes question the censors’ grip on reality.
This type of question, when asked without context, definition, or follow-up, has always driven me nuts, and working for a bureaucracy for many years I was perhaps exposed to it more than some. To give some extreme examples, anyone approaching this question literally might say to themselves:
Well, most of the characters in my IF contain blood, so does it count if it remains within them at all times?
But, then what if I specifically mention blood “racing” or “coursing” through their veins?
What if I say there’s “bad blood” between characters?
Does it matter if the blood is human or not, or if it’s not actually real (“blood of Christ”, etc).
Does it still count if it’s less than 10ml?
Can I have my game set in a blood bank if the PC is only donating plasma?
My point being that questions such as this are so open to interpretation as to be meaningless, and someone erring on the side of caution in their answer could face unintended consequences.
It reminds me of when my daughter was engaged to an American and was completing her US entry visa. There was a question on there asking if she’d ever sold drugs. Given that she was a pharmacist, the correct answer was “Yes”. But there was no follow up question to clarify whether or not the drugs had been sold legally. I suggested that “No” might be a more prudent answer given the circumstances. In the end she didn’t go ahead with it - either the visa, or the marriage.
Anyway, in short, this hamfisted approach to categorising content just makes my “blood” boil.
People who accuse others of mistaking fantasy for reality are projecting. They are the ones who don’t know much at all about real life. Edit: My bad, I wasn’t clear. We’re on the same side here.
Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations
Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.
I’m increasingly convinced that Itch io and Steam were informed of the hypothetical possibility of a service cutoff — the notifier being a third-party/their lawyers/their compliance teams. This was likely based on a combination of historical service cutoffs elsewhere and the public aspects of the Collective Shout campaign.
Of course, it’s possible that any of the relevant parties are lying. Or one of the intermediate companies (not Visa or Mastercard) privately imposed pressure. Or what other people are reading between the lines is the more accurate explanation.
The public really needs an inquiry into this from any government or news body that can do it.
But I’m repeating myself. And still delisting my games from Itch.
