Right, so right there you're trying to decide who's a "real gamer".

Believe it or not, plenty of "real gamers" care about things outside of games. Many of them care about the medium and the culture surrounding it. Many of them are members of various minorities that don't particularly enjoy having racial, homophobic,…

Ah, yes, "real gamers", who apparently don't have anything else in their lives at all aside from games. They are perfectly isolated entities, utterly divorced from society and the demands of the physical world, living only for the next League of Legends match.

Thank you so much for including Wolfenstein. I feel like that game is criminally overlooked.

You can definitely feel that it was made by veterans of Starbreeze, because it has a lot of their little signature touches in the world-building and pacing of the game. The whole experience is so much more clever, ambitious,…

Yeah. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to see both of those elements in Victory. Just change "Nostradamus" to "Sir Isaac Newton" or "John Dee", and change "Eugene Vidocq" to "Arthur Conan Doyle", or something.

It's interesting. I agree with a number of the points brought up in this discussion, but some of them just...don't particularly resonate with me.

Sure you can. Steam isn't a monopoly. They also have language in their guidelines that specifically allows them to exclude games based on "offensive content".

It seems what people are actually asking for is for them to create an exhaustive list of everything that they might possibly consider "offensive content", and…

Yes, but it doesn't matter, because those traits aren't relevant to the actual controversy.

I mean...do people genuinely not understand why Hatred is being singled out? Is this actually a mystery to some people?

Would it be a mystery if this were Custer's Revenge? Or Ethnic Cleansing?

But to people who don't ascribe to the seriousness of the subject matter and just sees it as something interesting, then they don't ascribe to your particular viewpoint.

But they already exercise that control. This is nothing new. They already pulled "Seduce Me" a couple of years ago. I think it's a pretty good bet that "Ethnic Cleansing" and "Rapeplay" wouldn't make it through the program either, no matter how many votes they received.

Do you actually think, if someone submitted…

I'm talking about the subject matter because that is literally the core of the controversy.

The simple fact is, I don't really care about the intent of the players. This is also true of something like Rapeplay. I mean, you (the hypothetical player) may have your reasons, but...I'm not really interested in hearing…

Not to butt in, but Steam doesn't have a "near monopoly". They're certainly the dominant service, but I'm sure Notch would be interested to hear about how you can't succeed without Steam. So would League of Legends. So would EA and Ubisoft. So would GOG and Amazon.

Right, but it's not the violence itself that's at issue. No one is complaining that Hatred is "too violent".

Like I've said, it's the context of the violence that's the problem, and that's where the Manhunt comparison falls apart.

I have a hard time taking any argument using the term "political correctness" seriously. I know you didn't mean it, but it (like "cultural marxism") is a term that, these days, is mostly used by people you really don't want to be associated with.

And yes, people will have different tolerance levels. There are some…

Everyone has biases. If someone made a game about being a neo-Nazi and how AWESOME it is to curb stomp minorities, should I be restrained from calling it disgusting on the basis that I have an "extreme bias against it"?

Again, it's not about the violence. No one is criticizing this game because it's "violent". They're criticizing it because of the context of the violence.

I'm mostly talking about that "Ooh, look how EDGY and CONTROVERSIAL" I am attitude. Yeah, we get it.

Of course they have the right to make whatever they want. I, in turn, have the right to think it's awful and mock it without mercy. That's the system working as intended.

I agree on both counts. I can just understand why people might make the Postal comparison, at least superficially, since they're both about spree shooters. Even the original game, though, was pretty over-the-top and ridiculous.

I'm not a huge fan of the series, but I think it's still clearly pretty different from what…

But if we use the term that broadly, then censorship is ubiquitous. Wal-mart can't carry every game in the world; are they committing thousands of acts of censorship every day? Is Barnes and Noble committing censorship by choosing not to stock my hypothetical self-published steampunk erotica novella? Are TV networks fo…

Oh, sure. I mean, you're far more likely to die in a car accident than you are to die to a spree shooter.

Yeah, it's funny how the first thing to get lost in these discussions tend to be context. Everything quickly devolves to weird absolutes and lack of nuance.