[QUOTE=Gray Altoid;49556095]I'm not saying they were forced, coerced, threatened, or anything other than convinced with rational arguments. What I am saying is that maybe, just [I]maybe[/I], the fact that she is a person working in the government and has over 7000 followers and is verified on Twitter may have gotten her foot in the door, so to speak.[/QUOTE]
And then the question is: Why does this matter and why is it worth making such a big stink about? As far as I can tell all she did was send them a letter with her concerns. She didn't band together with other congress members to form an Anti-Twitter Video Game Committee. Legal action was not threatened on them. Are people saying that she shouldn't be allowed to speak her mind on this issue because of her position?
Unless there's something going on we don't know about, this is all on the developers. They had no real reason to shut the game down unless they themselves wanted to. I don't know what to say if they really thought they were in big trouble just because a congresswoman sent them a letter.
Complain about the devs shutting it down all you want, or the reason it got shut down, but there really is something horribly ironic about thinking that people speaking their mind on something is wrong because you think it's tantamount to government censorship.
(To be fair Gray Altoid I'm not really sure what your position on this is??? But I've seen this sentiment expressed by people in this thread and I see similar feelings expressed around the forum all the time.)
I think that Gray Altoid is just frustrated with people misconstruing "A congresswoman seems to have more clout, which could have been a deciding factor in them deciding to take it down vs some random nobody, despite it still being totally fair thing to have done," as "OH SO YOU'RE SAYING THIS CONGRESSWOMAN HAS NO RIGHT TO DO THIS HUH," and being very provocative about it.
I think his concern is with an innocent statement of fact, a mere observation, being taken to mean this ridiculous assault on her character and her position.
Basically just picking fights with people for no reason.
[QUOTE=Katska;49556159]
[B]Complain about the devs shutting it down all you want, or the reason it got shut down,[/B] but there really is something horribly ironic about thinking that people speaking their mind on something is wrong because you think it's tantamount to government censorship.
(To be fair Gray Altoid I'm not really sure what your position on this is??? But I've seen this sentiment expressed by people in this thread and I see similar feelings expressed around the forum all the time.)[/QUOTE]
That's pretty much it. I just think it's a bit lame but I'm not gonna start burning flags over this.
[QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;49556171]I think that Gray Altoid is just frustrated with people misconstruing "A congresswoman seems to have more clout, which could have been a deciding factor in them deciding to take it down vs some random nobody, despite it still being totally fair thing to have done," as "OH SO YOU'RE SAYING THIS CONGRESSWOMAN HAS NO RIGHT TO DO THIS HUH," and being very provocative about it.
I think his concern is with an innocent statement of fact, a mere observation, being taken to mean this ridiculous assault on her character and her position.
Basically just picking fights with people for no reason.[/QUOTE]
That too.
Ok, cool.
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
I just realized I kind of made the mistake of forgetting what it was you said in the part I was quoting when I was typing that post at some point, and just sort of ended up directing things towards the thread in general. Whoops, I think.
[QUOTE=Antdawg;49556021]Fine, semantics. Yes, she's a member of the legislative branch. But she's not a member of the executive branch, which means that she has no power in this case. Literally the most she can do is vote on bills in congress and participate in House committees. Senators have more powers, such as confirming appointments of cabinet members and justices. But #1 she's not a Senator and #2 Senators have no authority in cases like this either.
[editline]18th January 2016[/editline]
Yea obviously. But the only people who would have reasonable authority in cases like this are the President, their cabinet, and the Supreme Court maybe (if the former two step over their bounds).
[editline]18th January 2016[/editline]
Why the fuck are people here seriously pretending that a member of Congress' House is this government authoritarian wielding massive powers? It is boggling my mind. She didn't even coerce the developers of this thing to take it down, she literally just wrote a letter of concern. Facepunch trying to create controversy from nothing, yet again. Strangely this always seems to happen when it's a woman involved in the controversy.[/QUOTE]
I seriously have no horse in this race, all I think the people in this thread are putting forward is that someone that holds a Congressional office in the United States has more influence over people than some random member of the public. Which personally, I think is a totally understandable position to have.
No one is arguing that she used some sort of legislation to persuade these people to shut down their app. I'm not even saying that she forced them to do it.
If I sent a letter to these devs that said, "Hey, your game using my social media information makes me feel uncomfortable. Would you please remove your app from the App Store/Google Play store?" I feel 99% certain they would just ignore me. But since they received a letter from a Congress person, on stationary that reaffirms her position as a person with some sort of influence in the United States, they took their game down.
Yes, this random Congress person has no direct power to take their game down. But if I receive a letter from a Congressperson telling me to please stop doing what I am doing. I am going to stop doing what I am doing. Or at the very least take a good hard look at what I am doing and feel pretty nervous about it.
What boggles my mind is that you don't think that she, by virtue of simply being a member of Congress, DOESN'T have some sort of influence over peoples actions.
Also, to clarify. I don't think this is a clear cut case of "censorship" (whatever that means nowadays), she simply asked the devs to suspend the app and they complied after seemingly agreeing with her concerns. As far as the devs are concerned, they recieved a letter from the government telling them it would be wise to suspend their app. It doesn't matter that she is some random Congressperson, to the vast majority of people in the US they simply see members of the Government as the Government itself.
I don't know if anyone is saying she doesn't have more influence, but to say it's automatically strong arming regardless of content or context is ludicrous.
I do not understand. You are all here arguing "OF COURSE SHE HAS MORE POWER AS CONGRESSWOMAN". What kind of power are we talking about?
The only reason, IMO, she has sent that letter with professional formatting is so that devs would pay attention to that, nothing more, nothing less. I am not going to talk about her not even trying to intimidate in the letter.
If you made a pretty popular game, which criticism about your game would listen to: from a random youtube no-name lets player or from TotalBiscuit?
Considering the devs [url=http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/14/10773026/stolen-twitter-game-pulled-from-app-store]straight up said they removed the game because they didn't want to be negatively associated with harassment[/url] (read the whole piece, it's actually pretty interesting) and this pressure against it has been building up for a while, I'm finding it really hard to call this 'censorship'.
This isn't censorship. This is more akin to the UN's 'strongly worded letter', the only difference is that the people who received the letter decided to listen to the complaints.
Did they pay attention to her letter more because she's a congresswoman? Yeah, duh. But they could have just as easily ignored it, since that's all it was: a letter. Isn't that what a lot of people do these days? Just block it/mute it and move on?
(also to the guy who posted 'taking my games away from me', isn't only one of those quotes about an actual game not being brought over- and even then you could just import it- and not just a cosmetic change, which, last I checked, doesn't constitute as 'oh you took an entire game away from an audience'?)
[QUOTE=TornadoAP;49555821]You do realize this is literally what congressmen and women do outside of voting in congress right? Congressmen get very little actual power, their power comes from a majority of them voting together, so they exert what very fucking little influence they have to try to get what their constituents want such as writing letters. Now whether or not this is actually what this congresswoman constituents want is a whole different question, but I think it's safe to assume so since it seems like this woman was elected on a platform of such actions.
And seriously, I doubt anyone here who is against the idiotic suggestion that this is government censorship would actually bitching if some CEO sent in a letter to the guys asking the same thing and the devs shut the game down. If the CEO actually used his own power such as his company or his wealth to shut the game down, yeah I'd be pretty fucking pissed, but that's not what happened here at all.
But whatever, it's so much easier to make your opponents look silly by using a ridiculous hyperbole that is nowhere even close to reality.[/QUOTE]
I understand that. I was referring to the people earlier in the thread saying something to the effect of "She just wrote a letter using a letterhead" and things like that to try and say that she wasn't acting in an official manner. She WAS operating in an official manner and using the clout that comes with her position to try and achieve what she wanted. To deny that is ignorant, and there were people denying that. It's not a comment on her actions themselves, but on how people will try to justify things differently when something does or doesn't agree with their particular politics. That's literally it.
[QUOTE=Silence I Kill You;49556904]I understand that. I was referring to the people earlier in the thread saying something to the effect of "She just wrote a letter using a letterhead" and things like that to try and say that she wasn't acting in an official manner. She WAS operating in an official manner and using the clout that comes with her position to try and achieve what she wanted. To deny that is ignorant, and there were people denying that. It's not a comment on her actions themselves, but on how people will try to justify things differently when something does or doesn't agree with their particular politics. That's literally it.[/QUOTE]
She represented herself as a Congresswoman but this was not done in any official capacity. Congress did not make a motion for her to do this, and it does not have the function to do so. She did make her seat clear (as it seems she does most of the time) and that certainly gave her an informal podium to step up on and be listened to, but it wasn't an official action because Congress has nothing to do with it besides the fact that she is a member.
[QUOTE=CoixNiro;49540530]But hey, what do [I]all of these industry professionals[/I] know?
Oh, slap the recent valkyrie drive decision on top of that while you're at it.[/QUOTE]
[url=https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1492063&p=49557232&viewfull=1#post49557232]To prevent this thread from being derailed, I responded in the Unpopular Opinions thread.[/url]
[editline]18th January 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=Fangz;49551800]Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park mourns the loss of Stolen:
[media]http://twitter.com/mikeshinoda/status/688076492882849792[/media][/QUOTE]
I pretty much agree with this. I think it's case of the congresswoman not really understanding the context of the app and how harmless it is. It's no different from any automated way of grabbing people's personal info, and if she's got a problem with the app, she should extend it to anything that automatically grabs personal info, which should lead to the actual personal information itself being the problem. Otherwise, the app should have stayed up.
[editline]18th January 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=Silence I Kill You;49556904]I understand that. I was referring to the people earlier in the thread saying something to the effect of "She just wrote a letter using a letterhead" and things like that to try and say that she wasn't acting in an official manner. She WAS operating in an official manner and using the clout that comes with her position to try and achieve what she wanted. To deny that is ignorant, and there were people denying that. It's not a comment on her actions themselves, but on how people will try to justify things differently when something does or doesn't agree with their particular politics. That's literally it.[/QUOTE]
I don't know if I would feel scared if I saw a letter from the congresswoman - I'd probably do whatever it takes to figure out what her problem is and communicate a possible solution. If it isn't a straight up lawsuit and, if in our discussion, it is revealed that she won't be pressing charges against me, then I shouldn't have to take anything down. I think this is a fault of personal integrity on the team behind Stolen as opposed to the congresswoman herself. To say otherwise treads dangerously close to saying she shouldn't speak her mind because of her position.
[QUOTE=wauterboi;49557128]however what irritates me is when in a game like Smite transforms a God like Neith into something stupid.
[t]http://i1.2pcdn.com/node14/image/article/201305/21/20130521214426a0dhc3v0wslh5xdo.jpg[/t]
And she isn't the worst of the Smite gods either[/QUOTE]
To be honest, Egyptian mythology had some real dirty stuff in it. Had the devs remained closer to the source material, Isis would be healing people with magical blowjobs.
[QUOTE=jimhowl33t;49557267]To be honest, Egyptian mythology had some real dirty stuff in it. Had the devs remained closer to the source material, Isis would be healing people with magical blowjobs.[/QUOTE]
Are you using this as an argument against what he's saying?
[QUOTE=Take_Opal;49557329]Are you using this as an argument against what he's saying?[/QUOTE]
Nah, just putting it out there. Sometimes what feels like pointless sexualization turns out to be true to history. He could have picked a better example than a character based on ancient Egypt, a place and time where noblewomen often strolled around in see-through clothing and other Victoria's Secret tier stuff.
[QUOTE=Antdawg;49556021]Strangely this always seems to happen when it's a woman involved in the controversy.[/QUOTE]
Was Jack Thompson also a woman?
[QUOTE=Arctic-Zone;49557059]She represented herself as a Congresswoman but this was not done in any official capacity. Congress did not make a motion for her to do this, and it does not have the function to do so. She did make her seat clear (as it seems she does most of the time) and that certainly gave her an informal podium to step up on and be listened to, but it wasn't an official action because Congress has nothing to do with it besides the fact that she is a member.[/QUOTE]
If she is representing herself as a congresswoman, using official letterheads and such, then she is operating in an official capacity. I'm not saying what she did was wrong, but any time a congressperson uses their position in congress for anything, weather it be to vote on a bill, or to gain a "podium to step up on and be listened to", they are acting in an official manner as the holder of that congressional seat.
[QUOTE=wauterboi;49557128]I don't know if I would feel scared if I saw a letter from the congresswoman - I'd probably do whatever it takes to figure out what her problem is and communicate a possible solution. If it isn't a straight up lawsuit and, if in our discussion, it is revealed that she won't be pressing charges against me, then I shouldn't have to take anything down. I think this is a fault of personal integrity on the team behind Stolen as opposed to the congresswoman herself. To say otherwise treads dangerously close to saying she shouldn't speak her mind because of her position.[/QUOTE]
I never said she couldn't, and I never said she forced them to take it down. It was their decision to do so, and she has every right to speak her mind, regardless of position. But when she used her position in congress to give weight to her letter and opinion, she operated in an official manner. It's for her constituents to say if she was right or wrong for doing this while representing them.
[QUOTE=jimhowl33t;49557267]To be honest, Egyptian mythology had some real dirty stuff in it. Had the devs remained closer to the source material, Isis would be healing people with magical blowjobs.[/QUOTE]
Honestly, that sounds hilarious. Feel free to respond to the post moved into the Unpopular Opinions thread - I edited it out to keep this thread from being derailed. I'd love to talk about the video game subject.
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