I haven't yet written about the whole Collective Shout/Visa/Mastercard adult art censorship thing currently roiling Games World but: it's fucking stupid you can't buy whatever legal porn you wish to buy.
It's particularly stupid that itch.io, of all places, ended up at the heart of all this. It's home to raw human creation, which means that a lot of the most "objectionable" material on that site is laughably-amateur, absolutely not-worth-discussing porn games exactly like No Mercy, the one which kicked off this whole chaotic mess.
You can see a censored, no-visible-nudity example of its first 20 minutes here. If you're curious, I do recommend checking it out, if only to see for yourself how profoundly amateur and pointless it was. You can see the whole thing sampled in a playthrough here... I also recommend checking out that playthrough, so that you can see how, precisely, the coercive plot points play out in the story.
The game frequently encourages the player to be cruel to women, but it scarcely matters how transgressive it gets - the whole thing is so badly-made that it wasn't likely to attract much attention at all, from anyone. This may be why the dev team put so much exaggerating, misleading text on the game's storefront - text designed to rile people up, frankly.
But at a certain point, you have got to stop accepting the argument that an amateur Daz 3D porn game is worth an international uproar, no matter how transgressive and offensive it's trying to be.
I was talking with some friends recently about why games, in particular, seem to attract this kind of terrified focus from "advocacy" groups like Collective Shout, even when the games in question are amateur, badly-made products which clearly don't merit much attention. CS is clearly going after this stuff in pursuit of a larger plan of right-wing cultural suppression... but it's shocking that anyone else in power took their complaints about No Mercy seriously. It's frankly shocking that more games sites haven't pointed out how low-effort No Mercy actually was. It's like complaining that someone's Goofy Movie fanfiction is too objectionable. It's like starting an international incident over something you saw written on a bathroom wall. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself whether your complaints are bestowing it with more power than it ever really had, right?
Text doesn't get this kind of overwrought, legitimizing attention. There are probably tens of thousands of people out there on the internet publishing rape or extreme violence fantasy fanfiction every year - stuff way more transgressive than anything in No Mercy. That kind of material is much more widely consumed than any Daz 3D videogame (see: Grummz's weird audience for his combat porn).
And, frankly, the amount of money and effort that goes into your average badly-made amateur porn game is nothing compared to the money and effort that extreme right-wing influencers put into their YouTube channels. You may find the misogynistic fantasy in No Mercy objectionable, but its reach is miniscule compared to the reach and harm of misogynistic media routinely produced by people like Andrew Tate.
Why is it, then, that games seem to have this strange halo of danger and importance around them? This game is the equivalent of a public bathroom scrawl. Why does anyone think it's worth paying attention to or talking about Collective Shout's complaint? Would they have taken Collective Shout seriously if they'd gone after rape fantasy fanfiction? I think not. Why do people talk about games as if their cultural impact is so uncontrollable, threatening, and mysterious, when games are already so mainstreamed and unremarkable?
I really do think that it's primarily because games take too fucking long to play. Consequently, the material inside games is very hard for any curious outsider - or even a curious gamer - to see for themselves. Sure, consoles are expensive, and you must invest more skill and effort into a game to complete it than you would need to passively watch a movie. But the main thing that makes games inaccessible to even the adults who want to experience them is time.
- You can screen a movie to see if it's appropriate for your 7 year old in a single evening. You cannot easily screen a 20-hour game, even if you have the console to play it and the skill to complete it.
- Most people who have free evenings, free train commutes, free time before bed, or a lunchtime in their workday can figure out how to check out a scandalous, much-discussed movie or book to see how objectionable it really is. But even if you have the hardware to play a 15-hour controversial game, you might not want to put in the time to see it for yourself.
- It takes so much effort to slowly tease out the story content in long story games, particularly in big-budget RPGs with sex scenes and relationship mechanics. You can't fast-forward through the game to see that material for yourself. You must continually devote your undivided attention to the game, continually recommit your enthusiasm to reviewing it, make sure you make all the correct choices to unlock the material, and successfully "earn" the sex scene. What if you screw up? That takes even longer.
I don't mean to say that this material should be easier for adults or parents specifically to review or access. I just mean that even once they've passed the hurdle of hardware and money - even once they've bought the PS5 and learned to use it - people are unlikely to ever play a controversial game long enough to check whether it is really worth getting angry at.
Sure, we could be sending YouTube longplays of some of these games to the angry people who claim that transgressive games are ruining society. But even then, watching a longplay of something like BG3 takes forever. Who has time for this? It seems that very few people realized that they could even watch a video of No Mercy to check it out for themselves, and I don't blame them. I work in games and I don't have time to watch longplays, either! I didn't even go looking for the No Mercy video myself - a friend who is writing about this stuff for their students actually did. I should have looked it up myself, but I didn't, partially because I figured it would be a thankless pain to slog through.
I think that so long as your average game remains longer than, like, something shockingly short, like literally 4 hours, game content will remain mysterious, threatening, uncontrollable, unreviewable, and not-worth-experiencing-for-yourself for many people, most especially people in power.
Every year, you'll see people writing essays that ask questions like, "When will games finally be treated as mainstream as they actually are??" I don't think they ever will, because they're not, actually, that mainstream. Nothing that takes 80 hours to play will ever really be mainstream in our culture in the way a movie is. Nothing that demands a hundred hours of dedicated effort will really be able to penetrate popular discourse in the same way that set of 40-minute television episodes can. Lies about games will always stick around longer. Fear about games will always seem more real to parents and teachers and people in power.
Even in a future where every adult used to once play videogames, where everyone has the hardware immediately at hand to play any game they want, this stuff will seem more mysterious and dangerous and threatening than it really is. It really is very hard to know what happens in your average videogame. And, crucially, even the short games inherit that shadow of mystery and fear from the long ones.
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