Sex, Pistols

About a month ago, a new PC game showed up on Steam, as part of their Greenlight program that allows customers to vote on the next games to be offered on the site. The same day, Steam took it down, later citing inappropriate content. On the game’s page, Steam left a message saying that: “the item has been banned for either violating the Steam Terms of Service or the Terms of Service for Greenlight.” It must have had some pretty questionable contact to be removed from a server that also sells Grand Theft Auto.

Before I get into the details of this particular game, I want to point out some of the most popular games that have been sold through Steam or comparable services: Left 4 Dead, Doom 3, multiple iterations of the Call of Duty series, and most infamously, Grand Theft Auto IV. Most of these are well-known, even outside the gaming world, but it doesn’t take a lot of scrutiny to figure out that they are structured around violence: most of them include references to war, death, and violence in their titles. Now, to be fair, some of the “greatest hits” in the gaming world are games like Portal and Minecraft, which involve no violence and focus instead on puzzles, creativity, world building, and other engaging and positive activities. The gaming industry, like the film industry, has a rating system intended to keep young children from games with inappropriate content, so violent games are rated M, for 17 and older, but that doesn’t stop many “underage” teens from playing these bloody and brutal games.

So what was the incredibly offensive content that caused a terms of service violation and got this game removed from Steam’s Greenlight page? It must be worse than the mechanism in Grand Theft Auto – or GTA – in which you can have sex with prostitutes and then kill them. This behavior is not only possible, but is encouraged by the gameplay mechanics, because having sex with a prostitute raises your health. The drawback, according to the wikia page for GTA, is that it costs money – a problem easily remedied by killing the hooker and taking her money. The sex acts, while not shown in great detail, are also not skipped over (NSFW). This is not objectionable to Steam.
And it definitely must be worse than the scoring system in Manhunt, which encourages you to carry out grisly and sadistic murders. In that game, your score is dependent on how gruesome the executions are (Disturbing images abound), and you are rated from a low “unimpressive” to a high “extremely competent.”

In fact, it is an erotic game called Seduce Me, which focuses on building relationships – yes, sexual ones – with characters in the game. The sex appears to be all consensual, and from what little I have seen of it (the game has yet to come out, but the developer has gameplay clips up as a preview), your actions in the game have consequences. So while I can’t make pronouncements about the detail of its content, I can say that from what the developer released, it seems rather, well, harmless.

Read more.

Photography: "Universal Laws"

Available for purchase at FineArt America.

On the Goodness of Humanity

Sometimes this world is like a sucker punch to the stomach.  You can’t help but stand there, immobile and gasping for breath at the sheer senselessness of it.

It has been hard lately to be optimistic. An old friend of mine was just involved in a horrible car accident. Five years ago, another close friend was in a coma when she was hit by a drag racer on the freeway. At least twelve people died last night in a mindless shooting in Colorado.  And in the weeks prior to that, the internet was awash with stories of rape, child molestation, and violence against and harassment of women.  The world is bleeding deep, personal pain, and history tells us this is nothing new. It seems that every time I check my email, go online, or read a paper, something horrific has occurred. When I walk outside, the number of suffering, hungry, and homeless in just my own neighborhood is impossible to deny. Even for those of us fortunate to be healthy and have a roof over our heads and food to eat at night, so many carry around deep pain.  The developed world has an entire set of its own problems: eating disorders, cancer, obesity-related illness, office anxiety. So many suffer in silence.  The pain out there is fathomless.  It’s palpable. It’s tangible.

A girl can only do so much, only be pulled so many directions before it feels hopeless.  There are days that I don’t want to get out of bed. I want to pull the covers up over my head and never speak to another human being again.  Yes, this world can knock the wind out of you.

But it can also take your breath away for other, more beautiful reasons.

Casey's Law of Hipsterism

Much research and testing went into creating a definition of hipsterism for future scientific debate.

Definitions:

Let j = "tightness of jeans"

Let c = "time since last haircut"

Let u = number of times the subject has dismissively uttered "I liked it before it was cool"

Let i = "irony of eyewear or t-shirts"

Let R'(t) be the frequency of obscure cultural references over time t

Hipsterism (H) as a function of age (t) is defined as the following:

As you can see, the significance of the utterance “I liked it before it was cool” becomes diminished as the subject ages, and irrelevant after 35, as it is more likely to be a factually accurate statement at that time. The choice of clothing has no relationship to age and is consistent regardless of the subject’s age, but the obscure cultural references compound over time.

I present these findings for peer review, and for the edification of my peers and future students of the science of human behavior.

Read more responses to the question "what is a hipster?" at The Inclusive.

Enough

What do Daniel Tosh, Anita Sarkeesian, and Jesse Lee Peterson have in common? Practically nothing, except that they have all appeared in news stories this year about women’s issues that have been quite frankly horrifying.

I wrote an article about Reverend Peterson earlier this year when he gave a sermon on why he believes women are destroying America. His sermon was filled with hateful vitriol about women, running the gambit from they can’t handle pressure to they’re all sluts to they aren’t even capable of love. In the article, I explained why we should pay attention to this blatantly bigoted small-time preacher:

We should bother ourselves with people like him because this ugly sentiment is buried deeply in American culture. We see it come out in media figures like Rush Limbaugh, in legislative efforts like the more than nine hundred bills introduced this year alone in state and federal legislature to limit women’s rights, in the thirty-one Republicans who voted against the Violence Against Women Act, and we see it glamorized in media portrayals of women as objects. When almost a third of female homicide victims are killed by their partner and one in five American women have been the victim of rape or attempted rape, we can’t afford to remain silent about this issue.

The events in recent weeks involving Daniel Tosh and Anita Sarkeesian are exactly the sort of thing I was talking about.

Read more at The Inclusive.