Censorship is not correct. and here's why.

[censorship = death :(]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5PJL8VMxDo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL18fryeqUg&t=56s



in fact. there's an under age sex scene in life is strange.
However, games from larger game studios featuring white characters seem to get a pass, such as this one with underage nudity and sex—though it's not gratuitous, and nothing more than you might see in any Hollywood teen movie. https://sankakucomplex.com/2019/05/18/life-is-strange-2s-underage-sex-scene-goes-uncriticized/

But the united nations and the HYPER RIGHT WING conservtive group NCOSE (fromerly morality in media that tried to get gay marrage banned) pressures steam to stop having games. even those raited t for teen.

so ... yeah.

double think before you support censorship.


Edit 2:


When the future club employee gives me the full artbook for me to archive over discord, ... would that make them guilty of "distribution" in the eyes of the pro censorship people?

This is why censorship of this kind makes no dang sense. ever.

and people saying "distasteful". well. i get that but that's a value judgment. I may not like it but i have to defend against censorship of stuff I don't like.

Adding an option to toggle the changes. would make everyone happy. Thing is. "their choice'. it's hard to believe that with SIE and CERO being like it is. and social and internal pressures.

it's all sorts of crazy.

https://www.thefire.org/news/why-sensitivity-readers-are-bad-free-speech-art-and-culture

this has been a problem. FOR SOME TIME.

https://www.thefire.org/news/lisa-controversy-highlights-non-transparency-and-arbitrariness-platforms-policing-video-game

if it's "do this or you don't get on our system or market place" then that's kinda ... nuts.

even Steam is the most open but has strange double standards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdaZMan_Vk8


with apple being a juggernaut and 50% of the market. of COURSE people are going to have to bend to that.

it's like the roads are public and anyone can use them but if you're barred from getting a car or anypublic transportation...

I can understand a store having things to protect but to censor even tales about war and suffering in the middle east... yeah that's kinda crappy

https://youtu.be/9U7a15MgIhk?si=2sufpKc00r-DDZH3


Edit: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KjBuHlujvFo

there's litterally a word for that kind of censorship. because it happens so often. The talks of what was censored and why and for what modern sensibilities are all beside the point.

it's an argument for the abuse of power and control. the non existant magical concept of "modern audiences" is a con.

A choice is not a choice if it is made with not enough infomration, or a nebulous presence of social value judgments.

What of the consumer what of art? to say that the artists have a choice may be somthing but at what point does that weigh with the value of art itself?

there's better ways. and to say it's minor. then all the more reason to NOT change. even though the changes span across two youtube videos.

to the point where people on twitter screached that it was to remove abuse... when it doesn't do that.

https://archive.ph/nRTgx

it's spelled out. what is so hard to understand? This is an argument that has been long made. through out history.

maybe there could be an option to toggle it on or off to make everyone happy.

____



I've gotten some threats. the harassment. it's only emboldened the most toxic players to accuse others of the worst as they do the worst themselves. the first round of censorship was because sony and not wanting to jepordize the JPN release.

It's pixels on a screen. there was no porn. there was no obscene materials. But it seems some people who demanded changes and social proof made this change happen. A choice coerced is not a choice at all even if the person making the choice is not aware of the social forces at play.


“Censoring video games is always wrong! It's strange that this is such a controversial statement nowadays, but it's come to a point in time where many people defend censorship vehemently. Now, if you haven't heard, the most recent victim of video game censorship is a game called Skullgirls. And honestly, considering the trend of censoring anything that is in any way offensive is so widespread, I'm actually kind of surprised it took the pro-censorship crowd this long to throw a fit over this game.
Now, I don't have hundreds of hours of this game, but I did play it back in the day and really enjoyed it. It's a cute little fighting game with phenomenal art, riveting characters, and complex gameplay. Well, just a couple of weeks ago, a patch dropped for this game that censored large parts of the game and straight up removed other parts of it. Bear in mind, this game has been out for 10 years. I thought that surely nobody would defend censoring a 10-year-old game, but to my surprise, there are many who did just that.

As I searched the internet, I feel that not only were many people defending censorship, but they were unfairly characterizing anyone who criticized the censorship of a 10-year-old game. As I thought more about it as the days went by, it bothered me more and more until the point where I felt compelled to make this video.

Now, when people censor video games, it's almost always under the guise of removing what they feel is dangerous information. In the case of Skullgirls, two of the biggest aspects that were censored were allusions to real-world hate groups and racial sensitivity.

The way the first change was actually implemented was by removing the red armband from the Black Egrets, the group of soldiers who serve under one of the main characters named Parasol. This red armband was seen as too close to Nazi armbands. Though the second change was implemented, they removed one of the more graphic scenes of the character Big Band being beaten and left for dead by his fellow cops. Since Big Band is African-American, this was seen as too close to real-world instances of racial violence.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions of the pro-censorship crowd. They believe that not talking about or not depicting real-world issues is a noble idea. However, this accomplishes the complete opposite of what they think it does. Censoring these issues brings less awareness to these topics instead of more.

In the case of the Black Egrets, they were censored because they were supposedly the good guys, and having them identify with the imagery was seen as promoting that view. The Black Egrets, though, are the military of a totalitarian dictatorship. The inclusion of the red armbands was a way of warning the player against trusting totalitarian governments. It was a way of showing that even the so-called good guys could turn into something evil if the situation is right. The Canopy Kingdom, which the Black Egrets served under, also has a very dark past. This includes the rule of King Renoir, who restricted political freedoms and enforced authority with jackbooted officers. The red armbands served as a reminder that even the so-called good guys can have committed atrocities in the past and made the Black Egrets more complex and their backstory into more of a moral gray area.

In the case of Big Band, by removing his art in the story mode, it trivializes the police brutality that happened instead of highlighting it. When players are exposed to the full brutality of a scene, it makes a bigger impact on them. These changes have only served to downplay the issues that should be talked about instead of highlighting them. Not portraying real-world issues is not a noble pursuit; it's a foolish one.

Since the pro-censorship crowd seems to think that even depicting these issues in fiction is dangerous, it's not a stretch to infer that they think fiction inspires real-world events. In these cases, it seems that they think that by identifying the Black Egrets with the Nazis or showing police brutality inflicted on Big Band, they're inspiring real-world racism. This is a completely preposterous notion that fiction, especially video games, inspires any meaningful amount of real-world action. It's reminiscent of the constant scares of video games causing violence. Whenever violent video games come out, this exact same rhetoric is thrown around.

A perfect example is the video game Hatred, an extremely violent video game and basically a mass shooting simulator. Many critics at the time said it was going to inspire real-life mass shootings. The game was removed from Steam for a small period of time but was later brought back with a personal apology from Gabe Newell. Only eight years ago, such censorship was abhorred enough to force an apology from one of the biggest names in gaming. But now, it's celebrated. Unsurprisingly, a mass shooting inspired by Hatred never actually took place. It's hard to believe that video games have inspired real-life violence in any meaningful way.

One of the most recent studies on if there is a link between violent video games and violent behavior was done in 2020 by Royal Society Open Science, which concluded: "current research is unable to support the hypothesis that violent video games have a meaningful long-term predictive impact on youth aggression." Therefore, why do people believe that video games have a meaningful long-term predictive impact on beliefs such as racism? It seems hard to believe that including the red armbands of the Egrets or the depiction of Big Band's betrayal would have inspired any real-life racism or police brutality.

Furthermore, this extends to one of the other biggest points of contention of the recent Skullgirls censorship, and that would be the removal of sexual themes, specifically of the character Fillia. Now, Fillia,in the canon, is 16 years old.

Some changes were made to remove what was believed to be sexualized content towards this character. Based on the previous points, it's hard to believe Fillia will inspire any meaningful amount of real-world sexualization either. It's understandable that people are concerned about children; obviously, real-life children should be protected. But a fictional character like Philea, while her depiction can be off-putting to some at times, generally seems harmless in the grand scope of things. Her depiction is really no worse than girls in current anime, such as Nagatoro.

[What is "sexualization" anyway? It's like a thought terminating cliche that people use as some very bigoted value judgment to shut down anything. because you can't get in the way of the self rightousness of people who think they're stopping sex traficking by policing art. ]

The censorship around Fillia is also the most perplexing part of this whole debacle. Although some scenes were altered, like the scene from our story mode that shows her underwear, other scenes in this game still show her underwear largely unaltered. So it's very strange that people are defending the censorship because if the people who are defending it believe that the way Filia has been portrayed is wrong, don't they think this hasn't gone nearly far enough?

If the pro-censorship crowd had it their way, they would likely remove Fillia completely. And show you the demographic that is upset about the censorship. The censorship has largely been categorized as removing “sexualization” of minors. That's not true at all either. Much of the artwork that was censored was of characters who are 18 plus, like Cerebella in this scene or the way they adjusted a scene of Double Violet.

One of the biggest ways that this game has set itself apart from others has always been its character designs and its use of sexual themes. Now, whether or not you think this is a good way to market a game, it's very disingenuous that people are downplaying the censorship. This is one of the main ways that this game was marketed, and it was definitely one of the multitude of reasons that people became interested in this game in the first place. So, of course, people are upset about the removal of sexual themes.

It's also very dubious that the censorship will, in any meaningful way, stop the sexualization of any of these characters. It's one of the biggest problems with censorship, and that it almost always misses the point of what it's actually trying to accomplish. The censorship of any of these characters will never, in any meaningful way, reduce their sexualization. They've been characters on the internet for 10 years. All the art that was censored will remain on the internet. The censorship to the Black Egrets does not change the fact that the rest of their uniform or their weapons are both inspired by Nazi Germany. The censorship to Big Band does not change the fact that an African-American police officer was assaulted by white police officers.

The censoring of Hatred did not prevent it from being purchased on alternative markets. The digital age is here, and those censors will continue to try to stifle information. There's very little that can actually be done to prevent the dissemination of information online. A mod that removes all the censorship to Skullgirls is already out. Although there are benefits to the digital age, such as the dissemination of information, there are also massive drawbacks as well. The biggest is a concerning trend of digital products consumers own never actually belonging to them.

The Skullgirls team has taken a digital product that many people purchased and altered it in very significant ways. They've cut out entire pages from the art book, removed and re-announced voice lines, and drawn over concept art to make it less offensive. The current Skullgirls team, while many of them have ties to the very beginning of the game, is not the same team it was at the beginning. They're missing some of the most important contributors to the Skullgirls brand. They're also literally a completely different company than the original Lab Zero, who is now censoring Lab Zero's products.

The digital age just made the censorship okay in some people's eyes, but imagine if these were physical products. Imagine if you bought a physical art book that you really loved. Ten years later, when the company you bought that art book from is overtaken by another company, that new company comes into your house and demands that you give them the pages of the art book that they deemed offensive.

[Not entirely so one can revert the game and the like. Ask someone in the discord about how to access or how to get the original uncensored art book and they should be able to help you how to get it... just pm the community manager first, the fans and other people in the discord can and do harass anyone that dares bring the issue up because... I don't know why.]


Now, even if you had no problem with it, although many popular gaming websites try to unfairly characterize everyone who's raised their voice about this censorship as nazi pedophiles.

[that's slanderous but since they didn't name anyone specific, then there's no legal grounds]

Censorship is truly what the backlash against Skullgirls has been about. It's about censorship and the nature of owning digital art. If consumers allow such censorship without raising any concern about it, that's a very dangerous precedent. At any time, a developer can drop a digital patch removing swaths of content that consumers enjoyed under the guise of reflecting on past decisions.

Although the changes with Skullgirls might not seem like a big issue to some, if these kinds of actions are allowed, another time will come where a developer censors something that the so-called pro-censorship crowd loved, that they were attached to, and then they will have zero recourse to get that content back because they're the very ones who cheered that censorship on from the start.”


-luckystrike1917

[RGS]

Originally posted by Missingno.:

The purpose to show that speaking in absolutes, with no regard for context or nuance, doesn't work.

Not all 'censorship' is the same.

When speaking about censorship no normal person thinks about CP or any act that directly harms another human being physically speaking, at least your argument about TV censorship made sense even if it wasn't comparable, but this is simply nonsense.

[1.2M | Missingno.]

This is an extreme example, but that's because using an example so extreme you can't possibly disagree with it is kind of the point.

[RGS]

Originally posted by Missingno.:

This is an extreme example, but that's because using an example so extreme you can't possibly disagree with it is kind of the point.

"I don't like fruit." I see so you musn't like anything with atoms.

[1.2M | Missingno.]

You're trying to use absolutes, which means you've got it completely backwards from what I'm doing.

[Tanoomba]

Originally posted by RGS:

You keep saying that like we're not talking about a paid product that was never advertised to have content removed for arbitrary reasons.

The reasons weren't arbitrary, and it's a stretch to even say things were "removed" as opposed to "altered".

[RGS]

Originally posted by Missingno.:

You're trying to use absolutes, which means you've got it completely backwards from what I'm doing.

I'm showing how useless it's to use nonsense.

Absulutes would be censoring people speech with death penalty or allowing anyone to say whatever they like wherever they like, like going into a church and yelling blasphemy while the church is unable to kick you out due to you being protected.

[RGS]

Originally posted by Tanoomba:

Originally posted by RGS:

You keep saying that like we're not talking about a paid product that was never advertised to have content removed for arbitrary reasons.

The reasons weren't arbitrary, and it's a stretch to even say things were "removed" as opposed to "altered".

No, the reasons were arbitrary and things were removed.

[1.2M | Missingno.]

Originally posted by RGS:

I'm showing how useless it's to use nonsense.

I'm making a point about the use of absolutes, you're just doing non sequitur.

"All censorship is always bad no matter what, so all I have to do to show that Skullgirls is bad is to call it censorship" is not valid if I can provide a counterexample to the premise "all censorship is always bad no matter what".

[Tanoomba]

Originally posted by RGS:

No, the reasons were arbitrary

Perhaps, subjectively, according to your principles, preferences and personal values.

[RGS]

Originally posted by Missingno.:

Originally posted by RGS:

I'm showing how useless it's to use nonsense.

I'm making a point about the use of absolutes, you're just doing non sequitur.

"All censorship is always bad no matter what, so all I have to do to show that Skullgirls is bad is to call it censorship" is not valid if I can provide a counterexample to the premise "all censorship is always bad no matter what".

You don't know how that works.

I can say all fruit is bad because I don't like fruit and you're here talking about atoms.

[RGS]

Originally posted by Tanoomba:

Originally posted by RGS:

No, the reasons were arbitrary

Perhaps, subjectively, according to your principles, preferences and personal values.

Nah, objectively.

[Debiru]

Originally posted by Tanoomba:

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

the first round of censorship was because sony and not wanting to jepordize the JPN release.

Source?

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

But it seems some people who demanded changes and social proof made this change happen.

There were no such demands. The devs made the changes because they wanted to.

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

A choice coerced is not a choice at all even if the person making the choice is not aware of the social forces at play.

The only ones trying to "coerce" the devs are the anti-woke mob.

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

I'm actually kind of surprised it took the pro-censorship crowd this long to throw a fit over this game.

There was no such fit.

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

They believe that not talking about or not depicting real-world issues is a noble idea.

No, this is a straw man.

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

However, this accomplishes the complete opposite of what they think it does. Censoring these issues brings less awareness to these topics instead of more.

The red armbands were never meant to "bring awareness" about Nazis. It was a lazy visual parallel that didn't even fit the regimen depicted. Similarly, Big Band's beating wasn't meant to "bring awareness" to racially-motivated police brutality. It was an unfortunate coincidence that wasn't worth the potential trauma it could cause.

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

Since the pro-censorship crowd seems to think that even depicting these issues in fiction is dangerous

They don't.

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

Many critics at the time said it was going to inspire real-life mass shootings.

Did they, though?

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

What is "sexualization" anyway?

If you don't know, then perhaps you are unequipped to discuss this in good faith.

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

Although some scenes were altered, like the scene from our story mode that shows her underwear, other scenes in this game still show her underwear largely unaltered.

That's right. It was never "seeing underwear" that was the problem.

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

If the pro-censorship crowd had it their way, they would likely remove Fillia completely.

There is no "pro-censorship" crowd.

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

Much of the artwork that was censored was of characters who are 18 plus, like Cerebella in this scene or the way they adjusted a scene of Double Violet.

There were reasons for those changes that had nothing to do with the characters' ages.

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

it's very disingenuous that people are downplaying the censorship.

It's more disingenuous how people are overstating it.

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

The Skullgirls team has taken a digital product that many people purchased and altered it in very significant ways.

That's hyperbole. They were very minor visual tweaks.

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

although many popular gaming websites try to unfairly characterize everyone who's raised their voice about this censorship as nazi pedophiles.

This isn't remotely true.

I find it incredibly ironic that, in the entirety of this lengthy diatribe, at no point was the ACTUAL problem with censorship addressed. Do you know why censorship can be bad? Because it can limit creative freedom. Censorship forces artists to compromise on their creative vision in order to accommodate outside demands. The Skullgirls update, on the other hand, was a creative decision motivated by the devs themselves. If you believe they shouldn't have been able to modify their own game the way they did, then you are the one advocating for censorship.

dude, i remember you, you are the guy defending the censorship update since day 1, you appear in every single discussion of this game whenever someone tries to go and expose the bad censorship, why the f are you still defending it?

At first i thought you were just a troll, rage baiting with wrong information but holy damn, i was wrong, you really think there's nothing wrong with it.

At this point im accusing you of being obsessed with being some kind of white knight for the update, its almost as if its your entire life, as if you have nothing better to do, you have been loosing arguments about the censorship update over, and over, AND OVER AGAIN, and yet you still find a way to still keep fighting over it, and its not just you, its other two o three people in this entire debacle or whataver that i keep seeing in this site, a minority, so i have to ask since you had been doing for almost a year now.

WHY?

[Sstavix]

Originally posted by RGS:

Originally posted by Sstavix:

So, a question for you. (And don't try to link to another site as a response - I am often on a device that can't follow them).

Should child pr0n be illegal? Or would you consider that to be a Constitutionally-protected form of free speech?

CP involves direct physical and psychological damage of a human without the mental capacity to consent.

What if it were drawn? Or CGI? Or even AI, since that seems to be trendy now. Would you say it should be permitted in those cases?

[RGS]

Originally posted by Sstavix:

Originally posted by RGS:

CP involves direct physical and psychological damage of a human without the mental capacity to consent.

What if it were drawn? Or CGI? Or even AI, since that seems to be trendy now. Would you say it should be permitted in those cases?

I'm pretty sure you can find that on steam.

[Ness_and_Sonic]

Originally posted by censorship = death :(:

i'm not so sure if that analogy works. what consent was violated? if an artist grafiti tags their own art is it censorship?

There is such a thing as "self censorship", but I'm trying not to look at it from that perspective. Again, if you think of video games as art and someone already bought the art, they vandalized what people paid for. So even for those that don't want to claim it's censorship, they can't as easily dodge this one.