This is terrible: Visa, Mastercard and an Australian radical group are successfully censoring Steam

Over the last couple of years, payment processors such as Visa, Mastercard and PayPal have been steadily ramping up efforts to control what people can purchase. Several Japanese stores have been targeted in this way. For example, Melonbooks, a website that specialises in independently published manga, was forced to stop accepting payments by Visa and Mastercard. This has been a big and growing issue in Japan, though it has flown under the radar across much of the rest of the world. People are certainly becoming aware of it now, however, because they’re going after Steam now.

As per a report on PC Gamer: “We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks,” said Valve. “As a result, we are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store.”

What they mean here is that there has been an absolute tsunami of games being de-listed from the Steam store over the last week. Some of which have been there for a very long time. Furthermore, Valve has added a new restriction to what it will allow onto the store, telling developers that it will not publish “content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or Internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult-only content.”

“Certain kinds” does seem to imply that not every adult game is facing a de-listing. For now, it seems to be games with incest themes that are the main target, while everything from Nekopara to Sex With Hitler are left unaffected. Valve also seems firm on respecting games that cover transgressive themes but do so in an overtly artful manner – Saya no Uta and Sweetest Monster are both still available.

However, “certain kinds” is also a wildly subjective statement and that really is the problem with all of this: It ultimately comes down to the payment processors wielding their influence to determine what people are allowed to play.

With regard to Valve, those payment processors seem to be acting after coordinated lobbying from Collective Shout – an Australian puritanical organisation that actively campaigns to censor media that its members find offensive, and it has been gloating about what it has achieved with Valve.

(Incidentally, this was reported by Ana Valens for Vice. It seems that there is pressure being placed on media organisations, too, because Vice took two of Ana’s articles about the topic down, leading to her and several of her colleagues resigning in protest).

Collective Shout, too, is not going after all adult games (for now, though I would bet significant money that this will change and they’ll become more ambitious with every victory). Collective Shout is, for now, targeting what it and its members decide is “rape, incest, sexual torture and child abuse.”

As to why Visa and Mastercard are so susceptible to this campaigning from the puritanical crusaders, that comes down to a concern for “brand damage.” When Visa in Japan was queried over Melonbooks and similar sites, the response from the Japanese Managing Director went as so (as reported by Automaton):

In response, Kitney commented that while Visa’s policy is to make legal and legitimate purchases available as much as possible, it is “sometimes necessary to deny use to protect the brand.” He goes on to say that these are “complex decisions involving both global and local policies” and that “it is important to maintain sincerity and integrity, and we will continue to do so,” which suggests that the company does not intent to change its stance. There is no specific explanation provided as to what kind of global and local policies Visa’s decisions are being determined by.

So with all that as background, here’s the thing: I don’t think too many people will miss the stuff that Collective Shout had on its target list. I certainly haven’t played any of them, nor have any interest in doing so. While I enjoy many adult games, there needs to be something artful and purposeful about them to catch my interest. That goes the same for film. I love the work of someone like Gaspar Noé, the erotic thriller genre, and so on, but I have next to no interest in pornography.  I love the poetic, lyrical wordsmithing of Anaïs Nin, though I’m less interested in plain smut, and so on.

The games that were removed seem to be very limited in both artistry and effort. Most of them either use cheap Blender models or AI generation (for the newer ones), and look like they have the same effort in narrative and storytelling that the worst pornography does. It seems obvious that we’re not losing great works of art here. And the descriptions and titles of these games do make it clear that they’re offensive, and not for legitimate reasons.

However, the censorship does set a dangerous precedent, and it’s only a matter of time before stuff that does have artistic value gets removed because it offends some radical group or another. It might not be Collective Shout. There are plenty of others, and these groups are successful because there isn’t much resistance to them. The CEO of a payments processor is certainly not going to be a patron to the arts and take a moral stand on creative censorship. Meanwhile, Valve doesn’t have much of a choice if their entire business is threatened if they don’t remove the “offending” games.

But it’s important that someone take a stand on this, and for several reasons. Transgressive art that challenges, shocks and offends is often critical for examining and understanding taboo. Foucault wrote about that a lot with his analysis of Georges Bataille and “limit-experiences”. Not all art needs to be pleasant, but that doesn’t invalidate it as a work of art.

Furthermore, it’s not just about the consumer. It is critical for artists to be able to explore taboo subjects, and whenever censorship rears its ugly head, they lose the ability to do that. As this article looking at theatre notes: “By tackling taboo subjects, playwrights and directors expose the underlying issues that society often prefers to keep hidden. This boldness allows audiences to confront uncomfortable truths, ultimately leading to social progress and change. Taboo topics like sexuality, mental health, and race are given a voice on stage, giving marginalised communities an opportunity to be heard and understood.”

The arts have long been a place where artists explore difficult topics. Kirino Natsuo’s brilliant, if incredibly distressing book, Grotesque, explores the way two women are sexually exploited from their teenage years. It’s filled with descriptions of abuse. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is infamous, of course, but it’s not smut. It uses the material to build a comprehensive critique of America. These are artworks that, were they in game form, would have been under threat on Steam now.

And while you may well say, “Well, sure, but these are works of art, and the stuff that got delisted off Steam is not,” what is and isn’t art is subjective and subject to revision over time. Case-in-point: The Marquis de Sade, whose particularly horrifying writing has swung back and forth between being a vile kind of transgressive art or just plain vile like a pendulum. And even if this lot of games that were delisted were all artless garbage, history is filled with examples of people deciding for themselves that a work of art is artless and taking steps to censor it, only for other people to find them to be stunning, provocative, or at least interesting works of art.

Yes, art that transgresses or grapples with the taboo needs to be appropriately age-gated and needs adequate content warnings so people can avoid the subject if they find it too uncomfortable. But the decision over whether to create an artwork, and then be the audience to it, needs to come down to the individuals involved. What art we can and cannot engage with should not be determined for us by interest groups or corporations.

You don’t need to care about a couple hundred terrible smut games being removed from Steam to care about the implications of that, and what comes next. Censorship of the arts – even the most crass end of the arts – is concerning.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, even if censorship of the arts is necessary, it should not be down to the CEOs of payment companies to be the moral arbiters over what does get censored. What we are able to access, watch and engage with should not be decided by corporations. That’s just dystopic.