In the last few years questions have been raised about Valve's handling of explicit and inappropriate content on its Steam platform, which has led to more steps being taken like banning games about child exploitation back in December. Now reports from the likes of Polygon have brought another game to our attention called Rape Day, again asking questions of how Valve is handling or regulating content on Steam.
The website for the game describes it as "a visual novel where you control the choices of a sociopath during a zombie apocalypse. You can verbally harass, kill people, and rape women as you choose to progress the story." The creator, Desk Plant, also seems to be aware of the controversy and almost willing to test Valve, adding that they "will let you know when the game is available & where to get it, just in case Steam doesn't approve it for some reason."
Desk Plant even offers some justification for the controversy:
"If we ever come to the scientific conclusion that committing crimes in video games, significantly increases the chances of committing crimes in real life, then at that point we as a society will have to decide if we want to ban committing some or all crimes in fiction. But you can't reasonable consider banning rape in fiction without banning murder and torture. Murder has been normalized in fiction, while rape has yet to be normalized."
"At some point in the future, game historians will look back on visual novels such as "rape day" as game historians look back on games such as "grand theft auto" now or even the first time nudity was shown on television. Moral outrage does not stop the entertainment industry, it slows it down but in time society progresses and realizes that the purely fictional things they thought would cause moral decay and widespread lawlessness in fact do not."
The game being described as a "dark comedy" just adds fuel to the fire of controversy surrounding this title, although as pointed out by Desk Plant the creator has marked the game as adult and described the content as required for the Steam listing. Indeed, if you look on the Steam guidelines the following is listed as inappropriate for Steam:
Adult content that isn't appropriately labeled and age-gated
Libelous or defamatory statements
Content you don't own or have adequate rights to
Content that violates the laws of any jurisdiction in which it will be available
Content that exploits children in any way
Applications that modify customer's computers in unexpected or harmful ways, such as malware or viruses
Applications that fraudulently attempts to gather sensitive information, such as Steam credentials or financial data (e.g. credit card information)
As you can see, Rape Day doesn't quite fit into any of these categories, since its content has already been labelled and age-gated. This has caused many to call once more for Valve to update its Steam policy to address games like these, and of course for the specific removal of this game as well.
What do you think Valve needs to do?