That's why I'm terminating my Steam account.įor as much as Valve's actions have revitalized the PC gaming scene in the last dozen years, its inaction has been steadily deteriorating gaming culture. "Valve's dogmatic commitment to removing human judgment from every aspect of the operation is in effect a judgment call of its own" That approach might be fine for some functions, but the company cannot abdicate responsibility for the community and culture that has come from its own neglect. Just like translation of its store pages or curation of its catalog, Valve seems to like nothing more to offload the work on others. But it wasn't Valve who handled the clean up, because Valve offloads moderation of game-specific forums to the developers. Most of those threads in the Firewatch forum have since been consolidated, with the most exceptionally racist ones being deleted. (See also: People actually concerned with ethics in games journalism who provided willing cover for virulent misogynists and harassers during GamerGate.) Because we're so upset about a developer using a questionable invocation of the DMCA that we would crusade arm-in-arm with overt racists and human garbage rather than let our rage go unvented for even a moment. Because we are gamers and every avenue of feedback available to us must be weaponized so that we can have things our way. Angry gamers then began review bombing the title on Steam, and poured into the game-specific forums to flood them with abuse. This week's events left me wanting to do something to make things better, and that's when I saw a NSFW tweet with some screen caps of the Firewatch Steam forum.Īfter PewDiePie dropped his racist interjection, Firewatch developer Campo Santo had the popular streamer's video of the game pulled from YouTube using the service's copyright claims process. Like riding a bike instead of driving a car or using LEDs instead of incandescent lights, our actions don't move the needle on their own, but can add up to something significant when combined with the actions of enough others.
This is a cultural problem, which means all of us play a small role in making it better or worse. But when the concentration is high enough, they can be fatal. ( Seriously.) When they are present in very small amounts, the damage they do is manageable. They're like arsenic in your drinking water, or rat feces in your popcorn we should aspire to have none at all, but that's a difficult enough task that we "accept" both in small quantities. They surround us at all times, but in varying concentrations. That is not racist." But maybe we should think of these things less like contagions and more like environmental pollutants. People talk about racism, sexism, transphobia and the like as if they are diseases, like it's something binary you either have or you don't. "People talk about racism, sexism, transphobia and the like as if they are diseases, but maybe we should think of these things less like contagions and more like environmental pollutants" It's much, much rarer to see anyone indirectly responsible for this pattern take an honest look at their role in it, and we absolutely need them to if this is ever going to get better.
If we're very lucky, the people who screwed up in the first place publicly apologize, reflect on their mistakes and try to do better the next time. I hadn't intended to write a follow-up piece, but I hit a bit of a breaking point this week with the one-two punch of PewDiePie dropping the n-word on stream and Bungie removing a white supremacist symbol from its Destiny 2.īoth events are part of a wretched pattern that has been recurring in games for several years now, a pattern where we see some deep-seated prejudices in gaming culture come to the fore in alarming clarity for a moment, everyone points and decries the awfulness, then everyone else gets angry at the people who didn't like the awful thing. Today I'm going to talk about something I'm doing to fix it as a customer and gamer. Earlier this week I wrote about a recurring problem in games, and what I was going to do as a member of the media to try and fix it.