Image: Square Enix
As a fight with credit card companies over adult games leads to renewed concerns about censorship on Steam and even on indie platforms like itch.io, a recent warning by Nier: Automata director Yoko Taro calling censorship a “security hole that endangers democracy itself” has become relevant again.
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The comments came last November when the Manga Library Z online repository for digital downloads of out-of-print manga was forced to shut down. The group blamed international credit card companies, presumably Visa and Mastercard, who wanted the site to censor certain words from its copies of adult manga.
“Publishing and similar fields have always faced regulations that go beyond the law, but the fact that a payment processor, which is involved in the entire infrastructure of content distribution, can do such things at its own discretion seems to me to be dangerous on a whole new level,” Taro wrote in a thread at the time, according to a translation by Automaton.
He contionued:
It implies that by controlling payment processing companies, you can even censor another country’s free speech. I feel like it’s not just a matter of censoring adult content or jeopardizing freedom of expression, but rather a security hole that endangers democracy itself.
Manga Library Z was eventually able to come back online thanks to a crowdfunding campaign earlier this year, but now video game developers behind adult games with controversial themes are facing similar issues on Steam and itch.io due to recent boycott campaigns. Some artists and fans have been organizing reverse boycotts calling for Visa, Mastercard, and others to end their “moral panic.” One such petition has nearly 100,000 signatures so far.
“Some of the games that have been caught up in the last day’s changes on Itch are games that up-and-coming creators have made about their own experiences in abusive relationships, or dealing with trauma, or coming out of the closet and finding their first romance as an LGBTQ person,” NYU Game Center chair Naomi Clark told 404 Media this week. She mentioned Jenny Jiao Hsia’s autobiographical Consume Me as one example of the type of work that could be censored under the platform’s shifting definitions of what’s acceptable.
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