Adult games: quick links
Last month, after protests by Australian activist group Collective Shout – a grassroots activist group against the objectification of women and girls – called for the removal of certain adult games featuring explicit and non-consensual sexual content from online games stores, some unlikely heroes stepped in to heed their plea.
But somewhat surprisingly, it was not the gaming sales platforms themselves who chose to act.
Instead, the likes of Mastercard, Visa and PayPal responded and changed their policies to enforce new standards around what kind of games can be processed through their payment systems used by its online game store customers.
Subsequently, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of such games have been removed from game sales sites like Steam and itch.io over the past few weeks.
While the extent to which these credit companies are directly instructing the online games stores to remove certain products remains a hotly contested subject, the credit companies deny their moves are a form of censorship.
Adult games: Mastercard’s statement
As per Mastercard’s recently released statement on the issue, it says that ‘[while the company] allow[s] all lawful purchases on [its] network … [it] require[s] merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content’.
The changes have led activist groups like Collective Shout to loudly rejoice – in what they see as ‘a major win for women and girls’. But for others, the situation raises big concerns around who gets to decide what kind of content is made available to consumers (in general), and who has the power to define what constitutes appropriate morally acceptable and morally harmful behaviour.
In this case, the picture is especially loaded because the ones calling the shots around what constitutes ethical behaviour are a group of faceless corporate entities whose primary purpose is to generate profits based on people’s rampant appetites for materialistic spending.
Unsurprisingly, this perverse irony has tipped some people’s rage around the changes to volcanic, if not riotous levels.
Adult games: reputational risk
Last week, a more measured (yet no less concerned) view was expressed by the President of the (US) Freedom of the Press Foundation, Rainey Reitman who told the ABC that, ‘what we’ve seen in several circumstances [recently] is that payment companies have started to concern themselves with what they call “reputation risk”.’
She added that ‘[while] this isn’t a legal requirement … these companies … might decide to end a relationship with any customer that they think might be disreputable or might negatively impact their reputation’.
For Reitman, and others monitoring these corporate trends, the major worry here is that these corporations’ choices, which they do not make in the public interest but are rather made to protect their own reputations, infringe on people’s individual rights and freedoms to access content that is not illegal, but might be marginal in nature and not in-step with mainstream thinking.
‘It’s about who gets to decide which voices are allowed to exist online, and which are not,’ Rainey commented.
‘Payment companies are really inappropriate [entities] to be weighing in on these issues because they don’t have a direct connection to the people who are posting the content that is being flagged, and they [as companies] aren’t required to have any transparency, or care about [free] speech,’ she said.
Adult games: moral guardians
Either way, what is impossible to ignore in this case is the profound irony of seeing multinational corporations, who care only for their bottom lines, taking the lead in addressing moral issues that are of collective social concern – in issues which have almost nothing to do with money, profits or markets.
Rather, these issues relate to codes, standards and laws that inform who we are as a collective group, and how we treat each other as part of that greater whole.
So the most obvious question to ask next is: how many more of these decisions do we want being made by the likes of our credit card companies? And if not them, who else needs to step up?
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