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Comment by irusensei | Hacker News Reader

Aparently the person who recently started a censorship campaign against games that lead to delisting not only porn titles but also horror and other categories from itch.io is on the board to decide what its defined as adult content.

> Collective Shout, a small but vocal lobby group, has long called for a mandatory internet filter that would prevent access to adult content for everyone in Australia. Its director, Melinda Tankard Reist, was recently appointed to the stakeholder advisory board for the government’s age assurance technology trial before the under-16s social media ban comes into effect in Australia in December.[1]

I have no idea what the hell is going on and it all seems very coordinated but I hope the pendulum swings back so hard next time it takes at least half a century for Tipper Gore to resurrect again.

1- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...

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this is so, so, so much worse than Tipper Gore

Games (and cartoons) is a format children are drawn to. The new avarage age of exposure to porn is 11. The market has not been able to "self-regulate", rather the situation has gotten worse with more non-porn games adding, not just sexually charged, but now purely pornographic content. GOG (!) has proper porn games on their frontpage.

So it's time something is done about it.

I will try not to recommend any games to any child moving forward, and instead direct them to other hobbies. Because not only are games mostly a waste of time anyway, but they're also turning into an entrypoint to pornography.

No, this is a genuinely unhinged take. Mario is an entryway to pornography? Are you fucking kidding me?

Mario in particular no, because Nintendo is actually pretty good about keeping away from that stuff. Let's say... Palworld? Perhaps so, given that it can be purchased on stores that also feature pornographic titles.

You can literally toggle a switch and never see any pornographic title

And set up family-managed accounts this way as well, to be clear.

One of the things I've learned as an adult is that moral busybodies like this are, on average, horrible parents who would rather tell the powers-thay-be how the government should raise their kid (and everyone else's), than raise their kid themselves.

Because, ultimately, this whole reaction and performance isn't about the kid. It's about the parent.

Exactly, all these groups of parents with their sensitivities offended constantly, are the ones refusing to actually take charge and responsibility for what their children do.

It's parents that don't want to put in the effort to actually monitor what their kid is doing they want to hand a kid an ipad and let the ipad only let them see things they feel are good, but not actually have to monitor what the kid is doing because government ipad content is babysitting/raising their kid for them.

That's good and it's especially good when accounts have parental access controls which include a setting to disallow certain child account settings from being changed. The benefit of doing that is to help people avoid seeing the pornographic titles altogether, which actually supports the thesis that a non-pornographic game can be an entry for someone to start playing pornographic games. Otherwise, what's the point of the setting?

Early Newgrounds would like to disagree...

> I will try not to recommend any games to any child moving forward, and instead direct them to other hobbies

I think this has always been the correct approach, from the very inception of video games. In the absolute best case scenario, playing video games is a sedentary activity that is educational or facilitates creative expression, but that's the absolute best case and educational games have proven to be a borderline farcical concept and relatively few games allow for any sort of real creative expression at all. What's left is a kid sitting on his ass staring at a screen, and that's without getting into any of the potentially harmful influences.

Restricting access to video games used to be more normal I think. When I was a kid my mom had an egg timer that she'd use to meter me and my brothers. 30 minutes of Sim City a day, then I had to go outside. A lot of my friends, the ones with responsible and engaged parents, had similar arrangements. Somehow our culture seems to have lost this, as it also lost the premise of cellphones not being permitted in schools. At some point our culture seems to have simply surrendered to the commercial interests of tech corps and forgotten about what's best for kids.

It's disappointing to see this opinion, observe kids playing videogames and there is a lot of different reactions and learning going on. If you see bad behavior, then limit that. My son has been learning dealing with frustration because you have to deal with that to win a level at a videogame

Observe kids playing with virtually anything else and they'll be more active than when playing with video games. Video games have very little of value to offer.

> mostly a waste of time

I'm not trying to get you to change your mind about what you recommend to children but it's worth saying that gaming as a hobby is only a waste of time as much as any hobby.

Other hobbies build transferable skills, abilities, knowledge or muscles. A very small number of video games can do some of these, but it isn't the norm.

Not everything is about productivity and gains. People are allowed to be happy.

No, no, I'm crazy. Because some have kissing, we should ban TV and movies. They're a waste of time (because it doesn't promote me as a source of labor) and are a gateway to video pornography - the horror!

> Other hobbies build transferable skills, abilities, knowledge or muscles.

I'll go with a popular one with this crowd: chess. What "skills, abilities, knowledge or muscles" does playing chess improve other than things directly related to playing chess? I can think of game theory but that also seems like it could be improved by playing other games. I think you'd agree that chess is a game and a waste of time but you'd probably not agree that it's bad that it's a waste of time; wasting time is rather the point. Time flies when you're having fun, as it goes.

If kids were sitting on their ass for many hours a day getting fat playing chess, I'd be concerned about that.

So some people have an unhealthy relationship with their hobbies and that means... what, exactly? I seem to have lost track of the point you're trying to make. I was just saying that "mostly a waste of time" is what hobbies are supposed to be.

Modern video games are frequently engineered to be addictive, and even when they aren't they demonstrably have a lot of addictive potential. Somebody who gets addicted to skateboarding will get active, get fit, and maybe break a bone. A few weeks later the bone will heal but the active habits will remain. Somebody who gets addicted to video games will stay inside, get accustomed to sitting on their ass, and quite likely get fat. Statistically, that kind of damage tends to stick around for a person's whole life.

Saying "its a hobby like any hobby" glosses over the obvious fact that not all hobbies are made equal.

> Saying "its a hobby like any hobby"

I didn't write that. I wrote it's "only a waste of time as much as any hobby" because the person I replied to wrote that they don't want to recommend video games as a hobby to children due in part to it being a waste of time. It's moot that the hobby is a waste of time because the point of it is to be a waste of time. They might not want to recommend games as a hobby to children for similar reasons as to what you detailed but that's different from not wanting to recommend the hobby because it's a waste of time.

He wants the world to go back to the 70-80s where kids went outside... and did drugs, smoked, and generally caused chaos regularly with their friends behind the school or at a 7-11, instead of going home and playing league or some other game with their friends online.

Games are like books. Saying books are worthless because they don’t build “transferable skills” is absurd. But it’s obviously true of many books and sure, the most popular books don’t. But as a whole they definitely do.

lol, kids have been accessing porn and adult content for centuries.

Every generation has its own freak out about it and ends up making things worse.

Making porn harder to access for kids will just make them sneakier. This is all just a cover to add more surveillance into the life of adults.

I recently watched Dee Snider's testimony to congress in 1980s and it's almost the same thing but with music and album covers. And even there his answers was to properly raise your child and watch out for the stuff they consume. Like... being a proper parent.

I checked GoG and saw no porn games on the front page. On steam you have to go out of your way for such games to be recommended for you.

Your comment about sexualization of normal content is also wrong. If you compare remakes of classics like Dragon quest 3 you'll notice the new versions are way more prude than the originals. There was even recent drama about it.

> On steam you have to go out of your way for such games to be recommended for you.

Go on steam, not signed in and go to new releases. I promise you there are porn games right there on the first page of results. Often of a very degenerate nature. I don’t even need to be authenticated to see that. But I do need to go out of my way to verify my age, if I click on a call of duty game or something.

No it doesn't. You clicked something for those to appear. Go ahead and open https://store.steampowered.com with a private browser window. I don't see any porn game unless you categorize games like Umamusume as porn. In that case you have a problem not Steam.

BTW your use of "degenerate" word suggests you have a bias.

I clicked and there is absolutely is content that is not acceptable, to me, visible on the front page. Everyone has a different opinions of what’s acceptable, which is why we have ratings systems so society can draw a line.

If a platform doesn’t curate then governments or the legal system, or lobbyists targeting payment providers will step in.

I see a lot of violent stuff, which I think many parents wouldn't find acceptable. I also see a little bit of weeb shit, which again may be unacceptable. I don't see anything which is obviously pornographic; the closest I see to that is an ad for Witcher 3, which I know to have nudity which could reasonably be called pornographic, however nothing in the ad hints at this. It is clearly a violent game though.

And again, studies have shown violence in video games does not increase violence in kids as they grow, in fact it tends to be an outlet, so it should be up to parents to control what they see as acceptable for the kid they are raising.

This push for governments to restrict EVERYONE's kids because a group of parents dislike something is insane, if you don't want your kid to play/watch something, the enforce some damn rules on your own kid.

Then .. don't let your kids use those games? Why should my kids be restricted because your puritan sensitives were upset.

Fascinating that someone who explicitly enabled sex content on their steam account is having a moral panick about sex content on steam.

Thou dost protest too much?

>I checked GoG and saw no porn games on the front page.

Well, they did. They do rotate games from time to time.

https://i.postimg.cc/rmx7Tyz5/GOG-selling-porn-2024-10-19-21...

This was taken in October last year.

It's getting quite overt.

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