Adult Content

The past few years have made the future of video games feel a little bleak. Endless layoffs. The ongoing disruption of creative roles by immediately embracing AI at all costs. Exploding budgets and unpredictable sales.

What probably wasn't on your—or our—bingo card, though, was the role credit card companies might play in the process. And yet, the pressure applied to Steam and itch.io has it's put the commercial viability of all kinds of important games, now and in the future, in serious doubt.

We talked extensively about this topic on the latest Remap Radio, but that was recorded before all the itch.io stuff went down. Naturally, we haven't been able to shake the topic from our heads in a variety of ways.

In this case, it's Rob and Patrick looking at the topic from a much broader lens, about the role media plays in the development of identity, of the conversations parents are afraid to have with their children, and what a "dangerous" internet even is in a world of artificial boogeymen.

Rob: Ages ago I was in this creative writing class. Intro-level so the talent levels were all over the map and some of the stories people contributed were clearly more exercises in journaling or therapy than writing. It led to some awkward moments, but the one that I think about a lot is this story a particularly untalented student contributed.

It was a gothic, hallucinatory story of child abuse described ineptly in lurid detail. It was deeply unpleasant to read and also incredibly stupid (the angel Michael showed up at the end and read a PSA about child abuse). But the point of a creative writing class to is to give and receive feedback so we all went around the room discussing this story. Nobody was being a dick, everyone was kind of uncomfortable, but was trying gently to talk about why it wasn’t good and things that could have made it better. Finally the professor, who was a delightful and sensitive man, said, “This story is just incredibly heightened but does not embrace any of the fantastical elements it feels like it’s reaching for. It’s unrealistic and confusing in what it portrays. It could be toned down or turned up, but it’s just not really convincing or compelling as it is.”

Our poor author had been getting quieter and angrier throughout the session but now she snapped. “Unrealistic? No convincing? It’s funny you say that, because I lived through stuff like this.”

Patrick, you could have heard a pin drop. Nobody really knew what to say. If she was being accurate then we’d wrung something out of her that it didn’t feel like we had any business knowing… but I can’t overstate how bad and weird the story was. The story wasn’t sexual but the attempts at portraying the violence were undeniably clumsily erotic, so now everyone mostly just wanted to move on and pretend the last twenty minutes had not happened.

I remembered it, though, both because it was an incredibly embarrassing conversation for all concerned, but it was also really instructive about the degree to which fantasies are not wishes. To this day I have no idea what exactly that girl had gone through, but telling that story in that way did something for her. I try and bear this in mind when it comes to all manner of adult or erotic content that’s out there. Sometimes the act of creating and consuming that material serves some kind of therapeutic purpose, sometimes it’s just a way of touching some kind of forbidden darkness, and sometimes it’s just the titillation of the forbidden. But as with all creative work, the notion that depiction or exploration equates to endorsement or enthusiasm is incredibly wrong-headed. Fundamentally, the inner experiences of feelings of the people on either side of that transaction, creation or consumption, are unknowable to me but I don’t like making assumptions and tend to adopt a “not my business if no one is being harmed” approach to all kinds of stuff I find unpleasant or just alien.

I think most people tend to draw a similar line. Few people want to think of themselves as busybodies. But we run into problems when we try and define “harm”. Right now games platforms are being besieged by payment processors who are cracking down on content they have decided they find objectionable, either out of their own inclination or because they are being pressured by activist groups. Notionally, the interest being served here is keeping inappropriate material out of the hands of children who can be harmed by being exposed to it, or out of the hands of people who can be made more likely to harm others if they consume and enjoy such material.

I don’t think those concerns are entirely without merit. Consumption of a lot of porn seems like it could and does stoke some fairly warped views around sexuality and relationships. But is porn doing that to someone or is the kind of person who compulsively watches hours and hours of porn servicing views that have already become warped and unhealthy in some way? Is this a problem that is solved by censorship and, more importantly, is the fucking credit card company the organization that should be making those rulings?

I think that’s pretty patently not the case but I also have to admit that it’s very easy for me to retreat to a kind of lazy libertarian perspective on this stuff because I don’t have kids and mostly think the interests and rights of parents are a smokescreen used to lend a high-mindedness to attempts at patriarchal control. I do wonder, though, would I be more concerned about the propagation of creepy, misogynistic or perverted content if I had kids who were in danger of stumbling across it or coming of age among peers who have completely unfettered access to all kinds of disturbing stuff?

These moral crusades are often launched on behalf of children and parents, and it’s very easy for me to roll my eyes and dismiss all their points but I am curious where you are with some of this stuff? Do you have dreads around this type of content as well?

Patrick: Light topic this week, huh? We’re going to London and Paris next week, and in telling a neighbor about this, they handed me a bunch of spare tourist material from an old trip they went on. You know, maps, an English-to-French hand dictionary, etc. It’s the kind of stuff you handle on a phone these days, but it was kind of them, so I took it home, figuring my oldest would get a kick out of it. She started to page through the dictionary, and the first thing she shouted out loud to the room was “Can I make love to you?”

I gave her a quizzical look, unsure what to do. She gave me an equally quizzical look, likely informed by my unexpected pause. Without skipping a beat, she shrugged her shoulders and flipped to the next page.

The topic of “Can I make love to you?” has, thankfully, not come up since.

This is a longer way of saying: I don’t know. It’s not a problem I have to deal with and I’m happy to not have an answer about it because it doesn’t have easy answers and I’ll deal with it when I have no choice.

The answer I tell myself is that I will raise young people with the tools to guide them through. I cannot be there to help them cross the street every time. At some point, you have to trust they’ll look both ways. The same responsibility for looking left and right falls to parents teaching their children to navigate the internet. I do not intend to install network sniffers to monitor the browsing activity of my kids, once they are of the age where you should begin handing responsibility of their life and decisions over to them, not you.