The Sony censorship policy and what caused it

Russell - regarding the radicalization stuff, I was more pointing out that there are real measurable effects on people that come from the media they're exposed to, but I wasn't necessarily using that as an argument in favor of what Sony is doing. In fact, I don't think Sony is even using that particular argument. They're more worried about negative PR from a kid seeing one of these games on a stream from a PS4. Most of the issue that developers are running into with Sony right now stems from content being released for the US market, which will never see laws regulating what content is available. I don't think they're trying to get ahead of anything like that.

Again, I'm not advocating that we ban content or force it to be censored, but if a platform holder, movie theater, retail store, etc. decides that they do not want to allow the sale/viewing of particular content in their privately-owned space then what's wrong with that? There's no constitutional right that forces Sony to put tentacle porn on their PlayStation consoles.

As for a butt shot in DMC5, no, it's not going to be "the thing" that hurts women (in the broad sense of "hurt") but it will certainly be one of the thousand cuts, which is kind of the reason there's a movement away from those things being the norm in culture. That said, I personally have no issue with Capcom or whoever else making whatever kind of content they want to make and selling it to whoever wants to buy it. It may be gross or disturbing to me but I actually have almost no personal reason for why content shouldn't be made available. But...this is Sony's platform and the people who want to be on it need to abide by Sony's rules.

Leo & Jeff - in all seriousness, does the stated vs. interpreted age of a character really matter? If a character is explicitly designed by its creator to look like a 10 year old but then their bio states that they're 1000 years old and they are the subject of sexual exploitation in a videogame, does the age of the character really matter? Does it suddenly become acceptable and okay simply because the game says they're old? Because if that's the case then you've just made the loophole for pedophilia (and no, I'm not saying that you support pedophilia, but rather I'm turning your argument around to show you why I find it weak). I understand the point you're trying to make but the end result is that these are still games where male players treat young-looking female characters as exclusively sexual objects, and Sony is hesitant to embrace that.

I find it kind of bizarre that there are so many real issues affecting the world of games (severe crunch, abusive leadership, terrible underpay, burnout, mismanagement, etc.) but what we're focusing on is that 1 platform holder is asking a handful of publishers of a handful of games to tone down just how much female sexual objectification their games have. I mean, with DMC5 aside (which was de-censored in the US after release, anyway), all of the games affected by this are visual novels or Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball 6.

 

Morgan, what exactly is the stance or point you're trying to make here? I honestly can't tell; you keep bouncing all over the map on things you bring up and then later seem to contradict. You bring up strawmen that nobody was talking about. You make arguments then don't back them up with evidence.

And since I've put the question to you, I'll answer it for myself as well.

I'm opposed to Sony's policy. It's the principle of it that bothers me. None of these games that are being affected affect me in any shape or form. I had no plans to play any of them before the policy was enforced, nor do I expect to play any of them at any time in the future. Sony could have outright denied them on their system altogether and it wouldn't change my life one bit.

What does bother me is that the simple fact that they are doing this now means that eventually it may creep into a game that I actually want to play. It bothers me that like you say, there are much bigger issues out there but they've decided to do this. It makes no sense, it's stupid. It doesn't make sense in any kind of arbitrary 'cover your ass' way, because again, there's much worse out there. If they really REALLY cared about 'protecting the children', then there would be a much larger effort. It's completely pointless as every other platform out there is allowing the same content; other platforms with a much more family friendly image. It makes no sense and doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Is Sony allowed to do this? Yes, you'll get no argument from me on that. That doesn't make it any less stupid.

 

I'll run down a couple of the points I was trying to make:

-Exposure to media DOES impact people, along with other influences, and our culture-at-large should be aware of that.
-Sony isn't worried about how sexy games will affect their customers or children, but they are very worried about PR from that kind of content ending up associated with their platform.
-Sony's concern in this is mainly due to the fact that they are clearly the winner of this generation (almost 100M PS4 units sold compared to less than 40M Xbox Ones and Switch still early in it's lifespan) and have the most to lose going into the next generation.
-It's Sony's platform, they can control what content ends up on it. This is no different than Walmart refusing to sell music with explicit lyrics or movie theaters refusing to run movies with certain ratings. (On this note, movie studios cut content to get ratings for big films down to PG-13 on a regular basis, but nobody seems to complain much about that.)
-The content being affected by this is minimal and specific. Considering the other games that have gotten wide international releases since this policy was enforced, I have no concern about this spreading to other games.
-The policy is actually an old one, but they just weren't enforcing it until last year. To me, THAT is the problem, that they started to enforce this all-of-a-sudden and it's being harmful to Japanese developers who need to invest time and money to address these issues.
-Censorship of all kinds has been present in gaming since the beginning, so I find it bizarre that people only care when it involves censoring young-looking anime girl's nude bodies in low-sales visual novels.

 

Yeah pretty much everything you wrote there points to how stupid the policy is, which is my main beef with it. In regards to your last point, is not the specific content that's being censored that's the issue for me, just the fact that it is getting censored. To put it in perspective, If the 'censored' versions were released on all platforms in their 'censored' versions and no 'uncensored' versions existed, I would have zero problems with it. Just the fact that other 'uncensored' versions exist on other platforms gets my ire. Just the fact that they feel they need to impose this I think is totally stupid. I think it has certainly generated PR for them, but not in the positive form. But I'm sure they don't care, as the old adage goes, any PR is good PR.

 

If you look at the thread title, it shouldn't seem all that bizarre at all.

At the end of the day, my concern isn't so much titty flesh, as it is the potential of it being a slippery slope in which some potentially valuable non-porn games, but ones that still deal with sexual matter may simply not get developed period since one of the largest platforms wont sell it.

Jeff Cooper brings up a real good point, if both versions were an option, we wouldn't be discussing it at all.