It does get tiresome going to steam threads and seeing the same copy pasted “don’t ruin the game with woke shit” post up voted to the top.
There’s a pencil thin line between farming clown emoji and overt bigotry getting pumped to the top of the reviews section by bad faith actors.
Steam has a serious problem with a lack of moderation, which has made it a very attractive platform for fascists. Gamergate never ended, and remember that began with Steve Bannon realizing he could exploit gamer outrage to push propaganda. They keep inventing new scandals to repeat their past success.
One of my favorite games had a very minor patch to revise some cringier elements from early in the game’s lifespan. Years later, the forum is still unusuable because it’s been colonized by right-wing weirdos with 0.3 hours on record who have dedicated their lives to crying about a game they never cared about pre-patch, because they saw it as an opportunity to push their propaganda.
While I do question a lot of the changes they made to Skullgirls 2nd Encore, there was one context where censoring panty shots was entirely understandable.
Filia was one of the characters censored. She’s a sixteen year old schoolgirl, and while this may be a stretch, her name sounds like a reference to “paedophilia”, which makes the fact that some of her animation frames and concept art were originally drawn upskirted with clearly exposed panties even more problematic.
Skullgirls?
Yup.
For anybody saying “it’s not a problem, just moderate it yourself”, look at Relooted’s steam forum. There are more than 700 threads there and most of them are really not kind. Tell me how you’re going to moderate that.
Just put yourself in the shoes of game publishers or studios that make a game which goes against the grind and gets attacked like Relooted is being attacked. Would you want to employ somebody just to moderate the forums? Should the onus be on the forum owners or should it be on the forum providers (Valve)? Do you think this has no effect on the types of games being released?
I mean, look at this game Tyrone vs Cops 2. Is this OK? What do you think the forum discussions look like. Are they OK? If it’s only devs that should moderate their forums, that means the KKK could make game about water lillies and then have their forums be the meeting ground for white power discussions. They won’t be offended after-all. That’s OK?
For anyone else not familiar, here’s the first line of Relooted’s description:
Reclaim real African artifacts from Western museums in this Africanfuturist heist game.
The forum is full of exactly what you’d expect.
For anybody saying “it’s not a problem, just moderate it yourself”
I’m of the opposite opinion. It’s a much bigger problem than just Steam community moderation and it needs to be addressed more broadly. (Monkey’s paw curls)
The reason it got this bad was because they didn’t nip it in the bud sooner. If they had been more proactive from the start, there wouldn’t be 700+ threads.
At this point, just nuke them all and ban everyone who made a bigoted troll thread. It’s gonna be a game of whack-a-mole for a little while, but once you start handing out bans, the trolling will start die down.
Or it becomes a popular trolling target with a cry of “they can’t take us all down” and it gets worse.
If it continues to get bad enough, you can lock the forum down from new accounts so they can’t make alts.
I mean, look at this game Tyrone vs Cops 2. Is this OK?
It’s probably filled with vile stuff, so I simply won’t go there. There’s awful stuff to be found everywhere on the internet if you seek it out, you can just not go there.
Sure, I won’t travel to Gaza and say “wow, so many dead people here” and act surprised, but if I stumble upon a dead body on a playground, you betcha it’s at least a little surprising.
nobody is forcing you to play it, and nobody is forcing you to go to a forum and talk about it. If it bothers you so much just don’t go there?
You guys realise that censoring racist content doesn’t modify or remove the underlying belief right? just like closing your eyes doesn’t make you invisible…
Stems need a better tools to moderate. It’s a pain to manually go thru.
Steam provides the forums; not mods. The developers are supposed to moderate their forums. The only forums I actually see moderated are the Steam specific ones (like the support board). Game specific ones are hit or miss. Most devs just seem to ignore that they even exist.
The article is referring to reviews, not forums, which devs have no control over.
Multiple game creators describe ineffective moderation on the platform, resulting in unchecked hatred in forums and…
Reminder that The Guardian is a dogshit paper that pretty much systematically misgender trans people and keeps tripling down on backing up TERFs. You don’t get to talk shit about the bigots when you’re among them.
Do you have evidence of this? I thought the Guardian was pretty left-wing?
There’s so much Guardian posted on lemmy that I feel they’re spamming us.
I would very much like to read something about it !
Thanks. I boycott all Guardian articles that talk shit about bigots.
The main reason Valve doesn’t step in on these is they have a firm philosophy of giving the community the tools to form their own outcomes, rather than directing them in every issue. So they might be dissatisfied with people writing “Woke TRASH!” braindead reviews, but also not want to take action on them.
The least they’ve done is remove the clown award so people have less incentive to troll. But I’d also like them to implement community blocklists; If you nag a game for “Having/not having LGBT representation”, you go on a blocklist 90% of the community is using.
Does the clown award still exist on profiles? I used to get added by randoms everytime and they always had the clown award because that’s the easiest way for people to mark someone as a scammer
The main reason Valve doesn’t step in is because it would cost them money. Moderating content is expensive as hell and these corporations will bend themselves backwards finding any and every way to avoid it.
They also famously allow you to work on whatever you want, I doubt many Valve employees want to spend their days cleaning shit like that
They also have guidelines for “user generated content” which includes reviews, and you can report people for violating those guidelines.
Sure Valve does not pay for moderators to check things proactively. I quite like that they don’t have AI or some other half-assed attempt at “moderation” like other platforms have. I hate the way that the whole Internet has moved to censor “fuck” and made up the word “unalive” because the automated systems of platforms I don’t even use have decided they are the arbitora of what language is allowed.
I think the responsibility to monitor reviews should lie with whoever controls the Steam page: I would assume the publisher most of the time? The publisher and developer should be looking at reviews anyways. Add in the ability for users to vote reviews as helpful or unhelpful and I think it’s one of the better systems left on the internet.
You know you can “block all communication” from users and it blocks them EVERYWHERE on Steam, right? Not just in games, but in Friends and on the forums, too. IDK why you’d need community specific blocks over the normal blocking method already available.
I think what they mean by “community blocklist” is a blocklist maintained by the community which users can have applied to them. This means, rather than everyone having to deal with blocking the trolls individually, only one user has to and the rest get the benefit of that.
bigoted reviews posted on games’ Steam pages, which can hugely affect sales for their developers; and Steam curators (self-appointed taste-makers on the platform) directing campaigns against games they perceive to lean left or pursue inclusion.
This fucking shit again. Reviews affect sales? Well, good. You don’t get to carefully select a few most-read outlets who’ll give you the thumb up. Also, chud curators are “directing” only those who follow them. This argument is about a failing industry that’d like to control what can be said about their products. Make no mistake, Steam’s openness in this regard is, for me as a customer at least, added value.
To be perfectly honest, the odds of me buying a game are significantly higher if I see reviews about “toxic femininity” or “woke politics”
I agree with that, but negative reviews also affect the algorithm. If enough of those reviews drown out positive ones it will reduce the chance you see the game at all.
That is literally how I discovered Signalis. It was included in one of those anti-woke curators’ “not recommended” list, then I saw that it was an indie title, and overwhelmingly positive… I was sold immediately.
You have to be way down the rabbit hole to think Signalis is too woke. Nothing it does would have been out of place in '02 or so.
Depends on where the curator draws the line, and you can’t apply sane criteria to what they consider “too woke”. Sometimes a game is put on a woke list because it has a female lead, or a physically strong female character, or non-heteronormative character dynamics, or people of color are present in it… I’ve seen one that was marked as woke because it referenced climate change and climate action. I think it was some popular shooter or something.
Some are more consistent than others.
Once you start making lists of games to avoid based on thematics, though, you’ve already taken a step to cuckoo land.I disagree. Avoiding media because of certain themes is perfectly fine. I for example will not play games like Hatred or Nazi Games, no matter how good they could be. It’s the kind of themes they try to avoid which show how scared they are of everybody around them.
Yet by not playing it, you’re relying on somebody else’s description of what’s in it, which can be very misleading.
For example, the discourse around Horses.
Its fine not to like certain themes but obsessing over not seeing them to the point that you’re making lists is not really healthy.
I use those “wokism tiers” that you usually see from bigoted idiots to check out new games that I’ll probably like
I occasionally go through the lists posted by chud curators for small indie titles that would have escaped my notice. I don’t have time to scrutinize every title on Steam, but these guys seemingly have infinite time to ensure every unheard of title with a case of LGBTQ+ representation gets criticism from them. Ironically, they’re fantastic for finding small, progressive passion projects I would have otherwise missed.
If you know that you explicitly disagree with somebody on certain aspects, their opinion will be just as useful to you as if you liked exactly what they like.
There’s a big list of “woke games” that would be a great source for finding new games to play, if it didn’t include almost every game ever made making it meaningless.
They’re not just trying to remove negative reviews for being negative though, this is about bad actors weaponizing the review system to push bigotry. That should not be platformed.
I dislike people normalizing hate speech through this kind of space, but I largely agree. If people want to follow a curator that will make sure they aren’t emotionally blindsided by a female protagonist showing affection towards another woman, for example, that’s a choice they can make. We wouldn’t want the chuds to get their feelings hurt, afterall.
But in all seriousness, that’s kind of their choice. Obviously, any comments that suggest violence against people who make/play/are represented in that kind of game needs to get shut down immediately, but you’re allowed to not like LGBTQ+ representation. It’s not illegal to clutch your pearls at the sight of non-heteronormative sexuality. It’s just reprehensible.
for a more recent example, the negative reviews under Relooted are fucking sickening. one of the top ones is a joke making fun of George Floyd’s death.
what does steam do? nothing. valve is one of the most profitable companies per employee out there, and they have no pressure from investors to botch their work, they could absolutely moderate.
they actively choose not to, because despite what bootlickers on lemmy would have you believe, gabe newell is a libertarian dipshit who values “free speech” over the safety of marginalized people.
Fucking hell. You were not kidding. This was posted five days ago! The comments on that review are even more vile, to the point where I don’t even think I can show them here.
There are guidelines on Steam that ban such content, and you can report people for violating them.
So no, Steam does not do “nothing” as you claim. A very basic Internet search can confirm that.
Even better, users can rate reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Which is great for a wider variety of reasons, but is also good for reviews that get into a grey area or use dog whistles to hide their true intentions.
as the article mentions, if you’d bothered to read it, steam rarely enforces their guidelines, which is the problem here
The article is behind a paywall. Do they have any statistics or evidence backing that sentiment or is it just vibes?
You can find articles and reddit posts claiming this same exact thing going back years, and yet personally when I go through the store and look through reviews it’s really hard for me to come across hate speech, especially if you don’t specifically look at reviews that have been downvoted to hell. It’s never going to be perfect, but I encounter less hate speech on Steam than most other platforms.
i didn’t have any paywall, maybe it’s a regional thing? here’s a version that shouldn’t have it.
anyways, here’s a screenshot of the Relooted review i talked about. if you check the game’s negative reviews and sort by most pertinent, it’s the 3rd one. it was here yesterday, and despite me reporting it, it’s still here today, and in fact has been here since february 11th. as time of writing, it has 373 people who found it useful, and 115 who found it funny. some of the comments under that review are critical, but most just say “based” and the like.
CW: screenshot of a racist review, makes fun of George Floyd's death
it’s an anecdotal evidence, but as you said, “you can find articles and reddit posts claiming this same exact thing going back years”, doesn’t that mean it’s a recurring problem?
That’s it? I kind of expected something worse with the whole stink your making about it.
It just your typical kiddie hater comment, not worth paying attention to and certainly not worthy of a moderator’s time.
What do you want Steam to do? Be the judge and executioner of what lives and what dies? There is no agreed upon guidelines for what is chud behavior and not so how does Valve make that call?
VALUE PER EMPLOYEE MEANS NOTHING IN THIS CONTEXT. You are saying that fact to imply “rich people need to be the adults if they are going to have that money” and that is absolutely Monarch/Authoritarian enabler thinking. Fuck that.
Valve is not responsible for the shit other people say. Report them if you don’t like it. As with democracy, with enough votes things will change. But one person mad at what another person says so they plead to a central authority to shut it down? The Internet has seen this decision turn into legal battles over speech after one trolling shithead decides to use the system against innocent people.
Stop listening to racists and this all goes away.
What do you want Steam to do?
Moderate, like every other half-decent platform does.
Every platform of Steam’s size or bigger has mostly replaced human moderation with AI at this point because it’s the only way to moderate at that scale.
And I’d rather a few anti-woke weirdos get to post their by default hidden curator reviews than have to start saying “unalive” in Steam forums.
pressure from investors
This unfortunately trades one group of scumbags for another.
If you pump enough money into Linux gaming and do regular sales, a lot can be forgiven apparently. Steam Discussions are one of the most miserable places on the internet I go to semi-regularly and I don’t understand how Steam just gets a pass for the stuff that’s normal there.
Steam discussions can be moderated in any way a developer/publisher wants though? Their choice to not do so is weird to blame Valve for.
So devs not only have to give Steam 30% percent of every sale, but they also have to provide the additional labour of keeping hate speech off the platform in perpetuity.
If Valve doesn’t want to do moderation, they shouldn’t have got into the social media business. It’s their platform and they’re ultimately responsible for it.
they also have to provide the additional labour of keeping hate speech off the platform in perpetuity.
The developers can choose to lock down and effectively disable discussions entirely if they want.
Steam simply provides devs a service, easy access to host a forum for their game w/o having to manage that separately. Using it is completely optional.
Social media is an apt comparison, as Steam is at the size where human moderation isn’t really viable so they’d have to use AI like everyone else in that space.
And I’d rather a few anti-woke weirdos shout into the void than have to type “unalive” in the Steam forums.
Not to mention if Valve moderated every game developers would complain about Valve stepping on their toes and moderating their forum in a way they dislike.
Some dev theoretically might not like a mod decision Valve theoretically makes, so the only logical solution is to expect every single dev that publishes on the platform to commit to moderating Valve’s game-specific forums forever.
Yes, good moderation is expensive. Externalising that cost onto devs is, frankly, exploitative. Also, “a few anti-woke weirdos” is a massive understatement. The modern reactionary movement is heavily tied to gaming and Steam plays a major role in that.
Moderate your own forum, honestly its kinda based of Valve to be as hands off as they are. You set your own guidelines rather than having Valve force their own on you. It makes sense too given the variety of games on Steam.
It’s about reviews, not forums, which devs have no control over
They list both, and the developers have direct control over the forum. Less over reviews but you can report them if they are inappropriate.
you can report them if they are inappropriate.
Which is what the entire article is about, reports being ineffective…
Its not, its about Valve not proactively moderating for the devs.
Breaking News: Bigots increasingly comfortable, some mods bigots too.
It’s a shame there isn’t real moderation when people feel harassed, but I no longer care about those reviews as a consumer anyway. A negative review by some loser probably means I’ll like it more.
And I continue to support challengers to monopolies. Hope Steam gets a real competitor someday so I can take my money elsewhere.
