Valve recently changed Steam’s rules and regulations to give banks, payment processors, and internet service providers some control over the definition of acceptable “adult content” on Steam, in line with their own respective policies. As Valve suggested to RPS in a statement, it was either that or risk a credit card firm or bank blocking Steam purchases at large. Alongside all this, Valve also delisted a bunch of sexually explicit games, including a number of games that depict incest.
Valve have yet to specify which games they’ve delisted as a direct result of the policy change, or which particular institutions prompted them to make this rather momentous shift. But it looks increasingly like the result of an anti-violent pornography game campaign directed at Valve, Mastercard, Paypal, Visa, Paysafe Limited, Discover and the Japan Credit Bureau in early July, carried out by Australian pressure group Collective Shout. This is the conclusion offered by Collective Shout themselves, anyway – they’ve described the Steam delistings as a “victory for child safety campaigners”, while commenting that they are now being sent misogynistic abuse and threats by players in retaliation.
Founded in 2009, Collective Shout have long called for the banning or delisting of games they regard as violently sexist, exploitative and abusive, as part of a wider campaign against the sexualisation and objectification of women in media. Much of their campaign is based on the argument that there is a causal relationship between such representations and real-life abuse. On their About page, they quote a 2016 meta-analysis of 135 studies of media sexualisation carried out by L. Monique Ward. I don’t have the permissions to access it, but according to the abstract, exposure to “sexually objectifying portrayals” of women is “directly associated with a range of consequences, including higher levels of body dissatisfaction, greater self-objectification, greater support of sexist beliefs and of adversarial sexual beliefs, and greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women.”
The latest action against Steam appears to have begun on July 11th, when Collective Shout published an “open letter to payment processors profiting from rape, incest + child abuse games on Steam”. The open letter cites Collective Shout’s previous call for the removal of an outright rape simulation game, No Mercy, and states that they have “discovered hundreds of other games featuring rape, incest and child sexual abuse on both Steam and Itch.io”. It does not share any details of the games in question.
As a result of this letter, Collective Shout claim to have brought about the delisting of 500 games from Steam, a statement that Valve have yet to corroborate (and which as PCGamer observe, appears to include a number of duplicate entries). They’re also calling for the removal of a further 82 games “tagged with rape and incest”, without sharing names.
I think it would be constructive for Collective Shout to specify the games they’re referring to publicly, and to articulate the context of the sexual content they’re objecting to, given that some of their previous campaigns against “sickening” video games make assumptions that border on misinformation. In 2018, for example, Collective Shout endorsed a petition for a ban on the sale of Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human in Australia, declaring that it features “child abuse and violence against women.”
I am no great fan of Quantic Dream, who have been accused of cultivating sexism in their workplace and who have a track record for using sexual violence to define their female characters, but it seems important to insist – as the petition itself acknowledges – that the scenes referred to are, in fact, designed to create empathy for the victim as part of a story about social injustice. They are not wish fulfilment for abusers. Collective Shout’s endorsing of the petition suggests minimal familiarity with the game they’re trying to ban.
In 2014, similarly, Collective Shout called for a ban on GTA 5‘s sale in Australia, summarising it as a “video game that encourages players to brutally murder women for entertainment”. I think it’s fair to say that Grand Theft Auto‘s portrayal of women has long been abysmal – this is the series that turns sex workers into health packs and yes, lets you kill them afterwards to recover your fee. I’m interested to see whether GTA 6 changes the record here – it has a female protagonist (and an often-underdressed male co-star), but is also partial to booty shots in trailers.
At the same time, GTA has never been a series designed to indulge fantasies about murdering women and sex workers. The Changelog.org petition in question does not place its allegation in the context of a farcical open world simulation in which it is possible to brutally murder everybody, from pimps to the police. Again, it does not give much indication that Collective Shout and the organisers played the game they’re trying to have removed from sale.
Valve’s change of policy has prompted an outcry from developers of erotic games and journalists who see this as continuing a pattern of financial institutions using their control of transactions to silence ‘taboo’ expressions of sex and sexuality – a push for conformity that may accompany a sincere desire to protect children and women from exploitation, or may simply use that professed desire as camouflage for, say, a conviction that trans and queer people are deviants, and that sex work of any kind should be illegal.
The discovery that Collective Shout may have goaded Mastercard and co into demanding changes has fuelled this argument, given Collective Shout’s connections to certain fundamentally religious and conservative-leaning organisations such as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) and Exodus Cry – both of whom signed Collective Shout’s open letter from July 11th.
In an investigation for Vice, Ana Valens dug into the history of these groups, which I’ll summarise with a few pieces of information from my own research. Exodus Cry are an American Christian non-profit advocacy organization who seek the abolition of the legal commercial sex industry, from porn to strip clubs and sex work, as well as illegal sex trafficking. In 2013, their founder and CEO, Benjamin Nolot, compared abortion to the Holocaust and described gay marriage as an “unspeakable offence to God”, though he says his views on these subjects have changed since.
NCOSE, meanwhile, were founded by American clergymen in the 1960s, and have asserted that pornography at large is a “public health crisis”. Katherine Cross wrote a piece for Game Developer in 2018 about NCOSE’s previous attempts to have games featuring “sexual exploitation” removed from Steam, concluding that “what these groups actually want has nothing to do with the dignity of anyone, and everything to do with restoring a traditional gender order that criminalizes both sexual expression and sexual labor.”
I’d tell you to read the rest of Valens’s piece on Vice, but Vice have since pulled the article and a previous article on Collective Shout, without explaining why. Valens has claimed that Vice’s parent company, Savage Ventures, called for the removal of her articles “due to concerns about the controversial subject matter – not journalistic complaints”. She and several other staffers have now resigned from the site in protest. I’ll ask Savage Ventures for comment. In the meantime, you can find a copy of Valens’ article on the Internet Archive.
As for my own take on the situation, I don’t think it can be disputed that violent sexualised media contributes to a culture of violent sexualisation, but the extent of that contribution is difficult to identify and as such, needs to be addressed case-by-case. Collective Shout, so far, have avoided going into details – they haven’t disclosed which games they consider abhorrent, or explained why these games in particular are in contravention of Steam’s existing prohibition against games that promote hatred, violence, or discrimination based on gender, or which “exploit children in any way”.
Collective Voice may be sincere in their anger and desire to protect women and children, but it’s not enough to say that certain topics are self-evidently unfit for representation in a work of fiction and enlist vast financial corporations as enforcers – particularly when your choice of affiliations suggests you may have ulterior motives, and particularly when you have a track record for getting important details wrong.
