Tag: Media

Chaturday: The One in Which I Get Myself Blacklisted, And That’s a Good Thing


I had some extra time to work on today’s Chaturday article, so I thought I’d make this one extra long. Sit back and enjoy.

This week I’d like to take a look at Valve’s recent decision to no longer curate games on Steam, barring games that are illegal or blatantly trolling. This has prompted an immediate and unsurprising backlash from a population of the internet whose income and livelihoods are directly proportional to the amount of drama that they can stir up. The doomsayers came out of their holes to proclaim that the service is now damned to be a hellscape of disgusting pornographic games where Nazis and white supremacists murder babies! The National Center on Sexual Exploitation claimed that there were one thousand games on Steam with sexual content, and every single one without exception was objectifying in nature.

It’s important to note here that none of the games journalists you may have seen talking about this are trying to take your games away, and I know this because they’ve been telling us repeatedly for the past five years. If I am repeatedly slapping food out of the hand of a small child, it doesn’t mean I’m against that child eating or trying to control him, I’m just saying that his hands can’t hold the food that I don’t personally like.

And for what it’s worth, I think that a lot of these recent decisions at Valve come down to the flat corporate structure. The decision to remove Hatred all those years back was done and then reversed because there is no real managerial structure in the company. Nobody to come out and squarely lead with a vision for how the Steam store should exist. As a result, factions form with differing opinions which arguably led to the warning letters being sent to certain developers a few weeks ago, and you have a company that massively disagrees on how to police the store with nobody around to pull rank and say “my word is final.” Nobody can agree on who gets to push the big shiny “approved” button, so nobody gets to push it at all.

I could spend a year going over quotes from our friends in the games media losing their collective sanity over this announcement, but I don’t have that kind of time. Inverse posted a piece saying that Valve’s response to trolling was to monetize it, despite that being a complete lie, saying that Valve’s answer to bigotry is to monetize it, despite not having any evidence of games genuinely advocating bigotry appearing or attempting to appear on the platform. Polygon’s Ben Kuchera wrote a piece with the subheading “anything goes as long as you give Valve a cut,” a blatantly false statement followed by paragraphs of trying to connect how Valve is wrong for deciding what constitutes an “illegal game” as it makes them the arbitrary decision maker, but also wrong for not acting as arbitrary decision maker on which games pass muster for the store. Freelance writer Nick Capozzoli compared the statement to Valve essentially saying “We believe we should bring Nazis together,” a flagrant misrepresentation.

Even the founder of Itch.io got in on the salt-throwing, posting “A platform that allows “everything, unless it’s illegal or straight up trolling” is ridiculous. Please keep your malicious, derogatory, discriminatory, bullying, harassing, demeaning content off . Our ban buttons are ready.” Incidentally, within five minutes of searching, MMO Fallout had managed to pick up a lengthy list of titles hosted on, and thus presumably endorsed, by itch.io, including hentai games with less-than-consensual sex, games where the objective is to beat up aggressive, beautiful girls, and a game that simply describes itself as “Learn Japanese You Faggot!” Itch.io is a veritable dumping ground for virtually everything that would never make its way on to Steam, be it meme games, troll games, outright piracy, and unfettered copyright infringement. If there are any stores that have no standing to criticize Valve’s curation, it’s itch.io.

It’s not entirely surprising to see outlets deliberately misinterpreting Valve’s statements, bringing up titles like Active Shooting Simulator and conveniently passing over either the fact that the game was removed, or why it was removed, and presenting hyperbolic questions on whether or not Valve will accept certain games, pointing to titles that a reasonable person could conclude to fall under the trolling rule. I say unsurprising because many of these writers are the same people whose bread and butter lies in outrage bait, throwing out accusations and feigning offense to drive hate-views by the thousands, otherwise known as trolling for profit. If these articles had been video games, they’d be banned from Steam.

One subject in which I will agree with my fellow press on is this: If Valve is claiming that they are going to only block illegal games and troll games, they damn sure better start actually doing that. As I said previously, Valve has pretty explicitly stated that they had no intention of selling Active Shooter Simulator on Steam, a statement that would hold more water if Valve weren’t clearly getting ready to sell Active Shooter on Steam. The same goes for titles like Aids Simulator, Gay World, and that shooting game where the only goal is to kill gay people. Titles that are so obvious from the slightest glance to be troll titles and yet they managed to get their way on to Steam before being removed.

In reality, the media should be happy about these changes, as should Youtubers. After all, the idea of Steam being flooded with dozens of games on a daily basis just means that people will be going back to modern and traditional games media in order to find the titles worth playing. It also grants a fantastic opportunity to the portion of games media that really likes writing troll bait but hates actually playing games. If Steam actually becomes the cesspool that you predict, you will have a lifetime of articles to express faux outrage.

The only people who have a genuine right to be angry about these changes are the developers, for whom many this open door policy means drowning in an even larger ocean of competing voices.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

[Column] Mobile Legends Threatens The Press, Good Luck With That


Riot Games is currently suing Moonton over alleged copyright infringement in regards to their game Mobile Legends. I’m going to reiterate that last statement because Moonton apparently doesn’t want me to tell you this: Moonton is currently being sued in court over alleged copyright infringement regarding Mobile Legends allegedly ripping off League of Legends. Those of you who are interested in reading up on the lawsuit, filed in California, can do so here. If you don’t feel like sifting through 44 pages of legal documents, I’ll be running an In Plain English article summarizing the charges. There are plenty of photos comparing the two games to gawk at, so I recommend taking a look.

The part of this lawsuit that caught my eye is that Moonton needs to read up on the free press and the definition of slander, because the company has posted a threat to the media reporting on this lawsuit: Stop, or potentially face intimidation through legal threats. Moonton posted the below statement on their Facebook page calling the stories “unreal,” and “rumors,” albeit refusing to go into detail on either aspect. For their part, Moonton has explicitly denied all claims of infringement, which can also be read in the statement below. The lawsuit is real, for a case that will occur in a real court in the real state of California.

The lawsuit notes that Riot Games had initially gone through Google and Apple to remove the app from both stores, alleging that Moonton simply changed its name, made minor changes, and put the game back on the store.

Most notably, after Riot discovered Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA and notified Google that the game was infringing, Moonton purported to remove the game from the Google Play store. But that was simply a subterfuge. Immediately after removing Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA, Moonton (without notifying Riot or Google) released a “new” game, Mobile Legends: Bang bang. However, Mobile Legends: Bang bang was not a new game at all, but in fact was the exact same game as Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA, with some modest changes. This ploy of “hide the ball” was part of Moonton’s deliberate business strategy, designed to hamper Riot’s ability to protect its intellectual property.

Winning a defamation lawsuit in the United States would be incredibly difficult. It requires that the plaintiff prove that the allegations are false (a nonstarter in this case, as the lawsuit is very real) and that the author knew that the statements were false and can prove material damage related to said statements. In cases of lawsuits, the press can’t be sued for writing about a lawsuit, provided the author isn’t making their own conclusions, and represents the allegations as just that (charges, not convictions). Moonton can’t sue the press for reporting on the allegations made by Riot Games and win, not in the states anyway.

More on this lawsuit to come.

[Less Massive] The Attack On Redditors Has Already Begun


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You can’t turn anywhere in the tech industry these days without running into Ellen Pao, now former CEO of Reddit. Pao came into the public scene in 2012 when she filed a landmark discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a hedge fund, for sexual discrimination in the course of her employment and dismissal from the company. In 2013 we learned that Pao was appointed to the role of interim CEO at Reddit, a position she would use to eliminate salary negotiations out of a belief that women can’t negotiate as well as men, while her discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins was still ongoing.

Pao lost her case against Kleiner Perkins earlier this year, marking the end of a long discrimination case and the beginning of Reddit and Pao really butting heads. Reddit, a website that once prided itself on free speech to the extent that it defended a subreddit for “creepshots,” now seemed to be deleting threads critical of Pao and her husband, Buddy Fletcher. Fletcher, it turned out, has a history of filing frivolous discrimination lawsuits of his own, and losing them, and is currently being sued under allegations of operating a ponzi scheme. Fletcher owes at least $140 million in court judgements, a number that seems to grow with each passing year.

But for Redditors, posting about Pao’s lawsuit or Fletcher’s troubled legal history meant bans, both outright and shadowban (a shadowban on Reddit is a way to ban people without them knowing. Their post is invisible to everyone else). The fighting has escalated over the past few months as Reddit changed focus from a website that vigorously defended all free speech to one focused on creating a safe space. Numerous subreddits were banned, leading to protests overflowing onto the Reddit main page, leading to more bans, leading to more protests.

Tensions boiled over when AMA curator Victoria Taylor was let go from the company, prompting multiple subreddits to go dark in protest. The protesting against Pao’s leadership has not ceased and, in a rather surprising move, Pao announced that she would be stepping down from her position, remaining on board in an advisory role.

Similar to the sustained attack on gamers following the Gamergate controversy, certain members of the press have immediately gone on the offensive, accusing Pao’s critics of being motivated by racism and misogyny. Gawker’s headline on the story is “Misogynist Tantrum Officially Drives Ellen Pao from Reddit” with

“Ms. Pao’s abrupt downfall in the face of a torrent of sexist and racist comments, many of them on Reddit itself, is quite likely to renew charges that bullying, harassment and cruel behavior are out of control on the web…”
-Mike Isaac, David Streitfeld, NYTimes.com

Nilay Patel, editor in chief at The Verge, took time to call out the “dirtbags” on Reddit for ousting Pao.

“Every dirtbag on Reddit is going to take Pao leaving as validating their dirtbaggery, and it will paralyze a company that needs to change.”

The Guardian is attempting to spin the story as Pao departing due as a victim with the headline “Reddit chief Ellen Pao resigns after receiving ‘sickening’ abuse from users,” while making time to acknowledge the petition for Pao to step down that had gained more than two hundred thousand signatures. Mother Jones, meanwhile, focused on the racist minority of users with the headline “Reddit’s Faction of Racist Trolls Celebrates CEO Ellen Pao’s Resignation.”

Given the history of both Pao and Fletcher making false allegations of discrimination based on sex and ethnicity, the media blitz of articles blaming misogyny and racism for Pao’s resignation, rather than a string of very unpopular actions, isn’t entirely surprising. Ultimately Pao and Fletcher’s histories are readily available for the whole internet to see, regardless of what headline the media decides to go with.