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Because you have allowed the social discourse to be dominated by authoritarians, and have not supported the voices of your fellows that fight against fascism, you are now being overrun by fascists.
Enjoy. You have no one to blame but yourselves.
Collective Shout is a self-described feminist non-partisan organization, but has alleged ties with anti-trans and conservative organizations. The group has developed a reputation as a sort of puritan crusade that targets everything from Detroit: Become Human to Tyler, the Creator.
This one quote tells me what kind of people Collective Shout are. First, Collective Shout will go after the low hanging fruit and then will move to LGBT themed games.
There’s ample evidence that a lot of recent self-identifying “feminist” grassroots organisations worldwide are fronts for (or sponsored by) christo-fascist organisations.
After gay marriage passed to widespread popular support in multiple countries, there was a whole considered and deliberate regrouping, where they identified trans rights and porn as wedge issues that they could present their bigoted view as a progressive one. That’s why we’re suddenly inundated with orgs like this one; they’re posing as feminists and progressives but they’re actually bigots trying to occupy progressive or mainstream spaces, and give shelter to bigotry in others.
And yet when you call them out for co-opting the feminist label, instead of being outed by actual feminists, their detractors are publicly lambasted as being anti-feminist.
Mission accomplished
It’s a hate group and Valve is caving to them.
That would mean that they actually are responsible. I don’t think that’s correct, at best they complained to payment processors to make them enforce their pre-existing bullshit rules. That’s where the problem lies IMO, those corporations should not be allowed to ban paying for legal goods and services, especially since they have formed a cartel.
This group is shooting for very easy targets and they celebrate like they’ve won hard battles. It’s self indulgent but ultimately unimportant, nothing of value was lost here. If they keep it up long enough and choose a target people are actually willing to fight for, things might turn out differently.
https://www.collectiveshout.org/ is the group.
https://www.collectiveshout.org/our_team and https://www.collectiveshout.org/collective_shout_board_members - Ensure their names and faces haunt them for every job they go for next.
https://www.collectiveshout.org/partners - Let them know your unhappy with this group that they are supporting.
“Our (winning!) campaign calling on payment processors including Visa and Mastercard to stop processing payments for rape and incest games available on Steam and other platforms has received global media attention.”
Well that is not what I was expecting to find on their site…
Did no one play “Detroit Become Incestual Rapist”?
Nah I was too busy with “epstein island adventure: the trump files”
It seems like politics is more likely to turn someone into a rapist than video games will.
Well when you write policy anything is possible.
Something about the ability to control leads the possibility of abuse.
“Campaign Against Sex Robots”
They have sex robots down there?
Every accusation is a confession for these sex-negative types. The guy who shrieks the loudest about gender non-conforming people being abominable and vile is usually found 6 months later in Thailand smoking hash and hiring kathoey escorts.
Absolutely, and the scary part to me is how that projection includes LGBT folks also being child predators all the damn time.
It’s like they are a bunch of bisexual pedophiles who are repressed and angry, and they get jealous when they see other people giving in to the same desires. Or, as we see all the time, they assume somebody “giving in” to their homosexuality or gender dysphoria is also “giving in” to their pedophilia.
“All these porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists so desperate to get their hands on rape-my-little-sister incest games they’re now exchanging clues on how to find them so that they don’t all die overnight,” Collective Shout co-founder Melinda Tankard Reist tweeted
Ah, so this was a rational, scientific study-based campaign centered around ensuring the health and well-being of society, and not at all an emotionally-charged crusade to take material away from people you find repulsive based on content you personally object to. Got it.
Melinda speaks like she’s on 4chan
There’s a lot of overlap between the most terminally online “rad”"“fem”"s and kiwifarmers, so there’s also a nonzero chance you’re right.
People are blaming Collective Shout but crazy lobbying groups have always existed. Visa and Mastercard are solely responsible for acquiescing. Maybe it’s time we stop caring so much what people on the political extremes have to say?
Alright, time to research and rat these idiots out. The fact that they tried to ban Detroit: Become Human is enough for me to know that they’re not gamers at all and are just cookers.
I’m trying to follow the money and can’t find much but there are very strong ties to the Christian/Baptist community, which means that there is an above 0% chance that Advance Australia has or is providing funding.
Their partners and partner’s partners are anti-sex (such as CATWA who believe that all prostitution is not a job but is a form of sex trafficking and appears to be against the sex industry), anti-abortion, and all board members and their associated partners are very painfully white.
There’s also an association with the NCJWA, whose president appears to be pro Zionist and has lauded Jillian Segal as a voice of moral clarity (anti-semetic envoy for government pushing to reduce protest rights, husband made a $50k donation to Advance Australia).
Hilariously, one of their partners is called ‘Campaign Against Sex Robots’.
Anyway, in summary, this appears to be a very well funded right wing puritan religious group whose only games experiences are in the political realm rather than PC.
“All these porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists so desperate to get their hands on rape-my-little-sister incest games they’re now exchanging clues on how to find them so that they don’t all die overnight,” Collective Shout co-founder Melinda Tankard Reist tweeted on July 18th.
She sounds deranged.
i wonder what her own perversion is. It’s likely quite disturbing - nobody has that much anger and scorn over other people’s sex lives and a healthy sex life of their own.
I think she just told us what her thing is, “rape my little sister incest games”
I did think her use of a first person pronoun there was a bit odd, but I didn’t put that together. You might be onto something.
Simple fix is to call in suspicion of child porn on their computers. Their statement look a lot like projection to me.
yeah it’s hard to come to any other conclusion on people who constantly think and talk about pedophilia unprompted.
“Pro life feminist”
I give my left leg if this is not another TERF group
Surprising absolutely nobody, you’re spot on.
If you can substantiate that, might be good to pass to someone in journalism… “Visa allies with TERFs” makes an epic headline ;)
Feminists are TERFs & homophobes PERIOD, the ones that aren’t are in hiding.
I study at a quite left university. Several of my lectures are about or at least cover some feminist theories. There are a lot of outspoken feminist people here, as well as quite a few queer folk. I have yet to meet a single homophobic or terf feminist.
Oh boy, you’ll learn
Australia is also the same place where they had to switch the word “drugs” out with “chems” in Fallout, and video games have to have green blood. That whole place is ass backwards and upside down, as one would expect given its geographical location.
Morphine was switched to Med-X (worldwide) due to refusal for classification in Australia for Fallout 3 in 2008. Fallout has used the word “chems” in every country since the start I thought.
Are you claiming that all video games have to have green blood to be sold in Australia?
video games have to have green blood.
This is completely untrue.
They might be referring to the 90s, post Mortal Kombat.
A lot of games got blood censorship in a lot of countries.
Even before that I know some games like Contra they replaced the infected “humans” with robots.
I am really fucking old, to be fair, but every time I hear about violent video games being censored it’s Australia.
There was a time before the R18+ classification for video games existed that some violent games were refused classification (Left 4 Dead 2 being one of the most prominent examples; the gore and dismemberment were cut out, but the blood was still red and it was trivial to restore the gore), but that stopped being an issue about 15 years ago.
That’s way after the SNES and NES era
True, but I was a child and was not old enough to remember how strict the Australian classification rules for video games were back then.
The country started life as a prison with prison rules, seems they forgot to get rid of those rules when they became a real country
No, they went too far in the opposite direction. “Okay we all got sent here for murder, whoring, and illicit trafficking, so let’s switch to punishing those with person and fines.”
If prisoner colonists put you in prison is it double prison?
it’s dumb that that’s the reason for the change…but i honestly associate that kind of fantasy language with fallout in general.
makes it feel more like a parallel world, close but not quite like our own, and helps suspension of disbelief!
overall a good change, imho, for a very dumb reason…silver linings, i guess…
As an Australian this is accurate, remember it is illegal here to share nude photos or porn if the woman has small breasts! Because protect the children
What in the world is the litmus test for that
If they don’t think “BAZONGAS!” when they see them, then they’re too small.
Has anyone been convicted of this?
I think this was a ratings issue. I think you can make video games with real life drugs in them but if you don’t want an +18 rating you’ll have to compromise. I think Bethesda got told they could only sell the game to adults and so they changed the names to make more money. I mean I was playing GTA selling real drugs and playing fallout 4 and doping on fake drugs on the same PS4 at 15, I just couldn’t walk into eb’s and buy a copy of GTA without my dad there lol.
I’m all for creative freedoms but when it comes to selling games to kids that show real life drugs as giving sweet buffs, maybe a little subtlety is warranted.
Anyway obligatory ragebait dum American can’t comprehend nuance comment
Kinda correct, it was a ratings issue. The problem was that we didn’t have an 18+ rating for video games - if your game was deemed 18+ then you couldn’t sell it here. Sex, depictions of drug use, and a couple of other things I can’t remember right now are reasons for an instant 18+ rating.
Bethesda got told they couldn’t sell it to anyone in Australia, so they compromised to drugs that didn’t actually exist.
Left 4 Dead had something similar with the gore; if I remember correctly, L4D rating submission referred to the zombies as “monsters” (or something) and passed while L4D2 referred to the zombies as “infected people”… because they were now people, our ratings board
shit the bedprotected the children and gave it 18+ until they removed the bodies and gore. It was patched back in by Valve when we got an 18+ rating.South Park: The Stick of Truth has/had some good censored scenes about this, graphically describing Randy being probed by an alien while the graphic of a koala sits in the background. These were patched out too I think (or I downloaded a mod).
We still have people like these lobbying against porn on Steam, but the overall situation got a lot better when we got an 18+ rating.
The first Australian +18 video game was released in January 2013, GTA 5 came out in December 2013 and fallout 4 was released in November… 2015
From what I can tell from the timeline of events it absolutely was a move by Bethesda to market the game to kids.
The name changes go back to Fallout 3 (at least, I can’t recall if FO1 & FO2 had the same drama).
By the time of Fallout 4, names like Med-X (morphine), Rad-Away (iodine), Brawno (amphetamine? I can’t remember) were well and truly bedded in, and suited the aesthetic. Why change it at that point? They’ve created names that suit the aesthetic better than the actual drug names.
I was in my mid/late 20s when this was all going down. I grey imported the MK reboot so I could play, had a copy of Manhunt, and others. The Fallout drug names were a result of the lack of 18+ rating and trying to comply with MA15.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/07/fallout-3-cant-get-a-rating-in-australia/
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/fallout-continues-from-ban-on-game-20080715-gdsma8.html
https://www.gameshub.com/news/features/australian-classification-law-video-games-2646457/
Ah yeah true dat
The US is filled with gun crazy bigoted nut bags who love to go around bathrooms for genital inspections while crying at the sight of any rainbow flag.
See how unhelpful it is to make shitty generalisations?
Isn’t that the case though?
Not really - seems like a pretty accurate description
All I wanna know is how fucked up and perverted the porn that they watch is. Anyone taking this hard of a stand against something surely must be projecting.
It’d be kind of funny if some rep from steam just came out and said, ‘Wait, the Aussies wanted this? Put it all back! Add on a few more new ones even. This won’t stand.’
I had a look at their website.
They have campaigned against games that normalize incest and sexual abuse. The first campaign, that led to this one, was against a game called No mercy.
The description, according to their website, is:
In this game, you’ll either become every woman’s worst nightmare… or rather: the best dick they’ll ever have. Your goal is simple: leave no pussy non-fucked, since that’s the only thing they all want. Never take ‘no’ for an answer.
Fuck your mom, fuck your auntie, and even fuck your friend’s mom. Why not?
Take what’s yours and show No Mercy.
Following that they campaigned against other games promoting sexual violence and incest.
Following our successful campaign and 70k petition to get rape simulation game No Mercy pulled from gaming platform Steam, we discovered almost 500 other games depicting rape, incest, sexual torture and child abuse.
How is this a bad thing? Do you lot just hear anti-porn and start foaming around your mouth?
Targeting payment processors to force change within a business often leads to overreaction. That’s how we got Onlyfans announcing that it was banning porn entirely. Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal become quite unreasonable when these groups start gaining traction.
This same group pushed to get Detroit: Become Human pulled because it has the player controlling a victim of abuse protecting another victim. There is zero nuance to their target choices. If they get pull with payment processors, they can go “this is a child abuse simulator!” and get something like that pulled with less public support behind them.
There is zero nuance to their target choices.
Zero nuance is what this thread is filled with.
One does not need to agree with everything they do or did. In fact, i don’t. But getting games that are clearly catering to rapist fantasies pulled off steam, is something i see as very positive.
not sure anyone thinks the problem here is that these particular games are getting taken down, the larger context and efforts of this group are concerning and the precedent this establishes for them to take the next step in their anti-trans and anti-gay agenda …
Downthread there are some people arguing pro rape and incest games.
I am not defending the group. When (likely not even if) they go against LGBTQI+ games i will happily speak up against that. But in this case they are not wrong, and i am okay with pointing that out. Look at the level of hate in this thread. For banning incest and rape games…
When they move to anti trans stuff and we give them flak, they will rightfully say “Oh, it’s those gamers again. Last time they defended rape games. No need to listen to them.”
huh, scrolling through the comments I mostly see comments calling them out for being TERFs, I’m not really seeing any defense of the games themselves.
Excuse me if I’m a bit sensitive, though - I’m both gay and trans, so this group in particular is dangerous to me and I don’t really care if the broken clock is right twice a day, I think it’s best to call the clock broken.
We don’t have any argument here, though - we agree that vile games are vile and it’s good they’re gone.
Do you have trouble differentiating between fiction and reality?
Can I demand racing games be banned because they promote CO2 emissions?
No. Do you think fiction about rapeing women is’nt a problem? Have you considered the idea that exposing oneself to said fiction could reinforce a violent and objectifying view of womem? Or normalize rape and sexual violence?
Can I demand racing games be banned because they promote CO2 emissions?
No, and thankfully this is a complete strawman. If one wanted to make that analogy, it might point out how racing games might normalize speeding.
No. I don’t think that. In fact, research says access to porn reduces sex violence.
And again, a stawman.
We are talking about rape porn (games) normalizing sexual violence.
This article is not talking about rape porn. By the way, it is an article from 2016 who uses studies from 2011 and younger. Here is a Meta analysis of the timeframe, suggesting that many stdies suffert from a metholodical weekness.
The question, if violent porn causes sexual violence is debated, but as of now simply not enoth good studys exist to confirm or denie such a link.
This study, for example, hints towards it. It is also a good example for methodological muddiness though:
Data was collected from 247 college men who completed self-report surveys at baseline, 4-month, and 7-month intervals. Higher gender inequitable attitudes, greater problems with alcohol use, and lower levels of responsibility assigned to men for rape mediated the relation between exposure to violent pornography at baseline and endorsement of sexually coercive behavior at the 7-month. Findings highlight the need to address pornography literacy in sexual assault prevention programs for college men.
I can only repeat: there is evidence towards violent porn causing violent behauvior, but it is weak and more studys are needed. Untilh then both of our standpoints are just opinions. Either of us might be right. Personaly, i wouldn’t risk it.
i agree with that research, and i agree with where you’re coming from but i’m not sure you can apply the same research to violence. there’s an argument that it gives people an outlet, but afaik also people that commit these crimes often escalate. making it easier for them to try out their fantasy could easily mean they escalate faster
Citation?
this suggests that skill level plays a part in escalation. i’d argue that refining the “fantasy” is absolutely part of that (the same is true of the psychology of all fetishes: you start with something you’re not sure you’re into, and as you refine what it is about it you like you can dive deeper)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0093854813485575
this paper suggests that both thrill seeking and self control have different impacts on people’s desire to commit crime
Because letting extremely biased ideological groups dictate worldwide policy is always a bad thing that comes with negative consequences.
I’m not personally familiar with any of the games in this ban wave, but Steam’s stance prior is that these games are free expression of art, made by adults and it’s not Steam’s job to police art. If a group does want to impose limitations on art on a worldwide storefront - that should be a national limitation performed by an appropriate body - Australia already has a stringent games rating system, and if these games do not meet any approved standards they would be hit with ‘Refused Classification’ and thereby restricted to be sold (banned from sale or import) to Australia and Steam would region block them for sale to Aus. As is the case for many games already.
However, this group deemed following the appropriate channels too much work, so instead went for a Karen smear campaign of the payment processors on social media - stating that they supported the sale of rape and incest games (simply by working with Steam), thereby pressuring the payment processors to put lobby Steam to remove the games entirely as the easiest path for Steam to avoid financial processing impacts.
I see where you are coming from. I still think that it is a net positive that they got rid of those games. I quoted the description of one game above. That aint no art. That is just the glorification of rape. And i’m glad it’s gone. Glad it’s gone everywhere in fact, not just in Australia.
Are these good people? Rather not. I still have to see them campaign against queer or trans folk, but seeing their connections that is a valid fear to have.
I will fight for diversity, in any form, beeing part of gaming culture. But i won’t cry a single tear about games that have a glorification of rape and incest as their main topic.
