MD/Censorship Interview
Questions asked by Psychbomb for an article on censorship, including Itch, IGDB, and Backloggd. You can read that article here
1. What do you think about Moonlight Duelists works best as a story between women?
It's hard to have a story about a man inflicting violence on a woman and have it not be about gendered power imbalance. That's a very important topic, but it's a societal one more than a personal one and most readings would lose the personal nuance. A male Bao would be a story about rape culture, and a male Jan could work but even that kinda gets overshadowed either by the perceived role inversion, or falling into different kinds of "crazy girl" stereotypes. For this to be purely about the emotions of the characters, it needs to be gay. You could do the BL version of Moonlight Duelists I'm sure, but the type of pining, the social pressures, Jan trying to ease Bao in as a friend and show her friendly social intimacy... those are very feminine things.
I had a few men play the game who still managed to identify with Bao and learn through her own mistakes. Part of me feels like this wouldn't be effective if this was hetero, or if Bao was a man. I think it'd hit too close to home for them. It'd feel too broadly judgemental. "You are just like Bao!" Rather than letting them identify with her on their own.
Also I can't help but to be biased due to my influences. There is nothing intrinsically gendered about dueling and magical realism schools, and swords being pulled out of people that's intrinsically feminine, but I've watched enough stuff like Utena or Revue Starlight that it kinda is for me.
2. You mention in the design book that you're against the "pressure put on strange and queer art" by payment processors, companies, and governments. What about this pressure do you find to be particularly dangerous?
Right now the most dangerous part is it keeps happening. The goalpost keeps moving. For a good 10-15 years, we'd have the occasional paypal crackdown. Maybe a site would cut out some content... but it didn't feel like the treadmill was moving toward stricter and stricter censorship. It felt more like platforms would just become too "legit" and that was okay, because new platforms would show up.
Now it feels like things just keep getting worse. Everything is tightening down at once. Replacement platforms are rare and short lived. There hasn't been a focused push like this on the internet before. We're at the point where Doki Doki Literature club can't be in the google play store for something as vague as "sensitive themes". Even the new platforms are caving before they're even pressed to do so. We comply in advance.
3. Do you believe that video games are uniquely censored relative to other forms of media (film, music, books, etc.)?
Absolutely. If Moonlight Duelists was an indie film, would it not be on IMDB because of its content? Would Blood Meridian even be for sale anywhere? Games will be taken down for mentioning incest in their description, but Game of Thrones can show incestuous rape over the corpse of a child?
The only comparable medium here is comics. Music gets half credit -- they tried and were just as petty about music, but music won. Music turned its Parental Adversary stickers into a badge of honor. Meanwhile games and comics are cursed to be at the same time legitimate art and a medium for children.
4. When IGDB staff reviewed Moonlight Duelists, the proposed themes and tags of "Drama" and "Romance" were replaced only with "Erotic" before the game was purged. How do you feel about this flattening of games such as yours as simply "being erotic"?
It's infuriating, obviously. Maybe I'd argue 'romance' should be 'psychological horror' or something, but either way, 'erotic'? Even though I've done so myself, using 'erotic' for Moonlight Duelists feels like a stretch. Using it as the only description is simply insane. IGDB is an extremely unserious resource, especially when compared to far more respectable websites that care about history like Mobygames. What IGDB bothers to take down seems random. The infamous Illusion game Rapelay is listed as violating the rules, but a similar game from the same dev, Premium Play Darkness is... listed as an erotic sudoku game? I understand maybe wanting to be careful about what info and media is allowed to be put up for extremely edgy games, but making games in this weird liminal state of 'permanently pending deletion' feels ridiculous. People rely on its API for everything from rom-scraping to things like backlogged. If you're going to make a database of games meant for public use like that, you have a responsibility not to editorialize. It's fine if you wanna have policies around stuff. It's fine if you want to avoid adult screenshots. I'll even accept maybe only letting certain levels of editors make changes... but you have to accept this stuff exists and is part of the artform. If people can't use backloggd for half of the PC-98 catalogue, what are you good for?
5. If you had a magic device that could instantly beam rhetoric and information into a person's head, what's the one thing you wish people knew about all of this?
I think some people have a hard time grasping that there isn't a one-to-one relationship between porn and desire. Sometimes porn isn't for "Getting off". A lot of the time it isn't. Sometimes it's feelings to stew in. Sometimes it's to feel bad. Sometimes it's a lens to analyze yourself by. What if you're afraid, or disgusted by the things that arouse you?
For people who are like "I like stockings, so I look at girls in stockings and get off", real messy stuff like "I like when the bottom cries because I have unprocessed guilt over having sexual desires that were instilled on me a child" just looks like "You get off on people being sad and hurt". Realizing porn can operate on the same levels of abstraction as any other artform makes a lot of the transgressive art out there make sense.
I once explained weird porn to a vanilla friend like... "Weird porn is people processing the horrors of being aroused," in much the way weird art is about processing other kinds of feelings we don't quite understand.