Valve has put Ultimate General: Gettysburg on the Steam store main page | Hacker News Reader

Valve has put Ultimate General: Gettysburg on the Steam store main page

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109 pointsbdz134 comments

So, I'm not american, but I visited that page, and from the comments here I was expecting to see a confederate flag. Instead I see an old C90 style audio cassette?

Also, my grasp of American history isn't great, but the south lost this war right? And this particular battle at Gettysburg. And the Gettysburg address is fairly famous.

So, if not for the context of this being posted and then other comments here, I would assume this was a total non-event. Am I missing something? What's the supposed link between this and recent happenings with Apple store regulations and racist symbolism in the US?

edit: answering my own question, this particular cross-platform game got removed from the Apple app store as they were unwilling to edit it to remove the confederate flag from the game believing they shouldn't fall under the content ban as it was only used in historical context. It's not clear to me if it's presence is anything but a coincidence as it seems to be a well regarded game anyway.

The game in the link is the same game Apple removed. So the story is that Steam is promoting the same game Apple blocked.

The cassette tape seems to just be the graphic they're using for the top-page feature. The game's store page shows regular trailers screenshots.

All the corporations are pretending to be hyper sensitive to the church shooting tragedy, there has been a rush of some kind to blame the flag, although its a minor if any kind of factor in the issues of race in this country, especially in the south, Ferguson doesn't fly the flag anywhere and they have serious race issues. It's basically a marketing strategy under the guise of being supportive, its an old issue that many have seemed to hijacked the recent tragedy to push an old issue to the fore.

There has been a giant band wagon of support behind taking down the confederate flag at the SC state capital in front of a memorial, as its still seen by some like the nazi flag, or representation of a traitorous flag, for most, it represents slavery, so there is plenty of argument why its not appropriate in front of a government building. Personally, I think there are far worse crimes the U.S. flag represents (killing and past and current treatment of Native Americans, internment of Japanese, pointless wars that left millions of innocents dead in Iraq, Laos, Vietnam, the years of slavery under the U.S. government and the Presidents who owned slaves, etc) so there is a lot of hypocrisy in pointing out the issue with that flag and the history behind it. I lived in the south long enough to realize the issues with race are prevalent everywhere and has little to do with the flag, and hiding the history of it won't fix a crazy kid shooting up a historic church that had to fight for the right to worship during its inception in this country. I do think that its inappropriate to fly it in front of a government building, but wrong to use someone's tragedy as ammunition to push a long standing personal agenda that doesn't really fix why it happened.

Yeah, what he said. Well illuminated. Have an upboat.

I largely agree with your comments, but

> wrong to use someone's tragedy as ammunition to push a long standing personal agenda

Ugh. No one is using this as "ammunition." The shooting was a symptom of a problem. Acceptability of racism and pride in racist heritage are possible contributing factors to this problem. When the symptoms present themselves, it makes sense to use that opportunity as a reminder that the problems still exist and that we should take steps to fix them.

Although, we don't yet know what the problem is or if that's a symptom. If it is a symptom, then the flag is just another symptom.

I speak of course, that the knee jerk reaction wasn't even a day after the shooting based on people's misguided views and stereotypes of the south. Recent evidence points to the shooter having black friends, and talked of shooting up other places for non-racist reasons, so the whole race motivated thing could just be a ruse to gain notoriety. But sure, the flag thing is the most important thing the controversy loving media wants to cover since it distracts from the T.P.P. being passed, and waiting for all the facts to come in doesn't make for good ratings. Also, no reason to focus on the victims recovery from this tragedy, or the long history of the AME Zion church, or the struggles they've gone through in the past, focusing on the shooter is better.

It's totally ammunition, because its a side show, it has little tangential relationship to the actual event. It's grasping at straws to find a root cause we can fix.

> there has been a rush of some kind to blame the flag

This is the big thing that I just cannot understand. One day, someone kills several innocent people. The next day, the country is focused on it. And on the third day, we decided that a flag was causing white people to kill black people.

> One day, a white supremacist dude kills several innocent people. The next day, people are appalled that such racist ideology leads to mass murder. On day 3, people that have long been upset that a racist flag that the killer revered, that's representative of an ideology that was actively disenfranchising people on the basis of their race, is present on public buildings.

There, fixed that for you.

And still, no where in there, a single mention of the mental illness these individuals clearly suffer from that is utterly disregarded by society.

I'm curious why you think he was clearly suffering from mental illness.

Did he leave a long broken worded diatribe full of references to imaginary voices and animals? Did he have a recorded history of increasingly frequent or intense mental breakdowns?

Certainly just because someone commits mass murder does not mean they are 'insane'. They can merely be evil.

I think defining it as "evil" or "mental illness" is really just semantics. The fact is, someone murdered innocent people in cold blood. You're minimizing the issue by shrugging it off as "some people are just evil".

And you're minimizing it by claiming the targeted killing of these people is the result of mental illness. I'm sure it's very comforting to try and say "This guy must have been mentally ill", but that defense seems to be uniquely brought up when a mass murder is committed by someone white. School shootings, church firebombings, church shootings - these are all the acts of the "mentally ill", and not "terrorist attacks".

Aside from the fact that it mischaracterizes mental illness, it serves no purpose other than to throw an entire portion of the US population who lives with some form of mental illness into the camp of mass-murderers, and gives those who have not yet committed a mass murder (but otherwise share the same extreme beliefs) an easy way to distance themselves from a heinous act.

Congrats - you've made sure we continue to think of those with mental illness as crazy murderers, rather that this individual was a product of a culture that dehumanized those different from himself.

Maybe it minimizes mental illness, but at least it's more of an attempt at a response than "he was just evil". What do you propose we do with the purely evil people? How can we detect them early?

Also I think it's kind of a stretch to say calling this mental illness is propagating a poor image for all mental illness any more than calling cancer deadly makes ALL ILLNESSES sound deadly.

> I'm curious why you think he was clearly suffering from mental illness.

Because psychopathic behavior is classified in our society as a personality disorder?

> Did he leave a long broken worded diatribe full of references to imaginary voices and animals? Did he have a recorded history of increasingly frequent or intense mental breakdowns?

No, but he did write a > 2,500 word manifesto (I'm not linking sources, this is all on Wikipedia) justifying his actions and stating that he knew what he was planning to do was morally and socially wrong and that the people he intended to hurt were innocent. He confided in friends, over a full week before he carried out his plans, what his plans were. That seems to me a cry for help by any standard.

> Certainly just because someone commits mass murder does not mean they are 'insane'. They can merely be evil.

And that certainly stops the conversation and limits us from beginning to understand what is going on that is causing psychopathic behaviors to manifest. Calling it "merely evil" is dismissive. I'm much more interested in trying to understand what the hell is happening in our society by exploring the mental illness angle since it is grounded in medical science and not some nebulous "evil" or "insane."

edit/ I'd also like to say, I don't think it is minimizing mental illness to call mass murderers mentally ill. My own brother is diagnosed schizoaffective and I don't consider him a potential or future mass murderer just because of his health issues. That would be ridiculous.

The south lost, but they didn't handle it the way say Germany did WWII (internalizing a deep sense of shame for what they did and purging their culture of anything glorifying that period). They lost, but they didn't repent. Hence why we're still seeing this conflict today.

Apples and oranges, isn't it?

Hitler began a campaign for global domination and genocide. The South said "Fuck this, we're out" and seceded from the Union, then the North attacked it.

The South's motivation wasn't particularly great, but their actions didn't exactly tear apart the world and change it's development forever.

Yeah, I'm not saying the people who caused the secession were good people. There's a lot of evidence that they're not. But choosing to secede I would suggest is a fairly mature act.

If you're getting a raw deal politically then extracting yourself from said raw deal is probably a better option than starting a war to assert your dominance over those who disagree that your deal is a bad one.

I think the people in the South had dishonorable motivations for what I think were ultimately honorable acts. At least up until they attacked the North first.

And then Lincoln goes and proves that the South was right to secede, by suspending parts of the Constitution in the Union as he saw fit.

If you read the secession declarations, the slavery question was just the straw that broke the camels back.

The South fired first. (Fort Sumter)

And wanted to expand southwards in Mexico, Cuba and the Carribean in order to have a large slave-based empire.

I have not previously heard of that second part, regarding expansion. Do you have a reference for that? I would like to read more about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Circle_%28proposed_coun...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_%28military%29

If you're looking for a more serious reference, Freehling's Road to Disunion devotes a chapter to the subject.

You realize you just posted a link to an idea created by a secret society headquartered in the North, right?

That's what I get for citing Wikipedia. But the idea was also brought up by actual southern politicians, particularly in the discussions at the end of the Mexican War.

Ta-Nahesi Coates recently highlighted a number of sources.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-thi...

For extending slavery beyond the borders of south, see the quotes of Edward Pollard and Albert Gallatin Brown at the end of the post.

Yes, the South fired first but it was clearly much more complicated than a simple "they started it!" The North had made it clear they were not going to allow the secession.

This is part of why the South hasn't just dropped it. The war was started, in large part, over slavery but we learned that the United states are no longer united by choice.

This is part of the ongoing argument over state's rights vs federal power. The confederate flag is a racist symbol, but it's also a rejection of federal power over the states. Politics are complicated.

That's the modern, historical revisionist version, but the "state's rights" the South seceded over weren't a rejection of federal power over the states. Their complaint was that the Northern states were not returning escaped slaves or allowing them to take their slaves into states where slavery was illegal, and that the Federal government was attacking their state's rights by not forcing the Northern states to do so. That's not a rejection of federal power. See for example http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

I suspect the revisionist interpretation of state's rights probably comes from the 50s fight against desegregation.

The revisionism happened almost immediately after war ended. Basically, the South felt bad they lost a war over a really evil cause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy

I don't think you're saying anything that disagrees with what I was trying to say. Slavery was most or all the cause of secession. However, after finding they couldn't take their toys and go home the southern slave holding states had another reason to be upset.

It's a bit of a tautology really, but there isn't a conflict between State and Federal powers until there is a specific disagreement. The document you linked says as much:

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

> The South said "Fuck this, we're out" and seceded from the Union, then the North attacked it.

The Confederacy (or the states that would become it) were taking over Federal military forts. The first shots fired were by Confederate troops on Fort Sumter in 1861. While the northern states (what remained of the Union) went to war, the Confederacy was not without blame in providing them with an immediate cause (Fort Sumter) to rally around.

It's pretty well established that the South fired the first shots of the civil war when they attacked Fort Sumter.

Right, arguably what the Confederacy truly stood for is State's Rights, which is a totally good American thing, right? It's part of what our country was founded on!

It just so happens that their flagship "right" was the most evil and hateful thing to have ever happened systematically in America. That's why the defense of the flag falls short: in broad scope, it stands for something that really is actually kind of good. But when you take into consideration the details, it's racist as fuck.

Edit: to add on, this is the same argument as "Hitler had some good ideas". Not technically untrue, but they're far from the ideas Hitler as a figure really stands for.

The Confederacy never stood for state's rights. That's part of the Lost Cause historical revisionism. In reality, the Confederacy used both state and federal legislature in attempts to keep slavery legal when necessary.

I was taught that the southern states were simply for states rights and doing the "fuck this we're out" thing but that storyline is highly revisionist. They had dreams of empire as well. If you read what they were saying at the time it's scary and enlightening:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-thi...

That being said, I think the confederate flag is a terrible symbol to be proud of but the reaction to this game is a huge overcorrection. I have played it and it's a great game that gave me a ton of respect and insight into how pivotal that battle was. Leave it to us Americans to focus on learning the wrong lessons and applying simplistic rules to a nuanced situation.

The south didn't merely say "fuck this we're out" and secede. They raised an army and fought viciously to protect human slavery. The Civil War was a war for slavery. Fighting for slavery is shameful.

People today shouldn't be ashamed of what people in 1864 did; that's silly. But they shouldn't be proud of it, either.

That's the point I think 'rayiner is making.

Confederate flag controversies are a means of propagating the American myth that virulent American racism is a uniquely Southern trait and its primary form is based on proximate African ancestry. It's a comforting make believe that allows the American West off the hook in regard to indigenous peoples and Asian immigrants and Spanish speakers, and the states of the former Union off the hook for 100 postbellum years spent condoning Jim Crow and Federalizing its policies under the rationalization of sensitivity to well bread Southern sensibilities [not to mention the North's role in creating the events of the American West].

The current political motivation has far more to do with the shooting happening in a church [as was the case with the Birmingham bombing fifty years ago] than with some sudden realization that flying the Confederate flag represents an expression that going to war for the sake of preserving race based chattel slavery and the political advantage it afforded under the 3/5 clause of the US Constitution was a noble act. Were it nine black members of the Nation of Islam, Alabama wouldn't have pulled the Stars and Bars from the Statehouse this week...it's been flying a three wood from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and the Southern Poverty Law Center for many years.

Wha?

Oh, there's context not on this page, it looks like Apple decided confederate flags are verboten in depictions of the civil war.

Sigh.

Thanks for the context, I really didn't understand why that showed up on the front page :)

> Oh, there's context not on this page, it looks like Apple decided confederate flags are verboten in depictions of the civil war.

I wonder if they'd do any better replacing them with swastikas.

"We view apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate. If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app. It can get complicated, but we have decided to not allow certain kinds of content in the App Store."

I can create a racist song or book and sell it, i cannot create an historical game.... WTF

By refusing to show it - even in proper historical context - we're giving the Confederate flag more power.

This is just the latest "he who shall not be named."

Are the front page games chosen explicitly? I would have guessed they were automated but I have no evidence to suggest that.

I'm pretty sure Valve, like other online shops, have a content management team which optimizes the shop in all kinds of ways. Automation is probably heavily included but not completely running the shop.

iirc, they used to be curated, over time organic features were added to promote popular games, and the social update brought the "Recommended for you" pages.

You can tell explicit placement still goes on, as games that are in the news pop up, so do preorders of big titles, etc.

If I had to imagine, how it works now is theres several buckets of candidates, such as popular new releases, curated features (IE "New DLC Available" or "Preorder Now", "New on Steam" etc), and Recommended For You, and a certain amount of titles are shown from each bucket every time the front page is shown.

Depends on if you're logged in.

Valve made a huge update in the past 12 months, where if you're logged in, that shows games (and games similar to those) that you don't have yet recommended by the people connected to you. On the Steam homepage in Steam, about half the games in the top carosel say "Recommended for you".

As much as Apple's decision is highly contestable, I don't know if it is worth trying to make a PR coup by implicitly backing a racist flag. I know I personally wouldn't want to be remembered as being that guy. Anyway, well done Valve, I guess, stick it it to big bad Apple.

Edit: to illustrate my point a bit more I think there is a difference between simply proposing a game with historical flags in your store, which I think should always be allowed, and putting a controversial subject in front of your store for PR purpose. For me it's like saying: see, see in our store we have games with controvertial flags - come buy our games. I'm not confortable with that. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Edit: I misunderstood parent comment when crafting the below response.

> a racist flag

I'm curious, should all WW2 games be removed because of the facist swastika flag? Or games involving the cold war because of the communist flag with the Soviet Union? In both cases, atrocities that were an affront to humanity occurred with millions perishing in various camps.

Which brings up another question: Why stop at video games? Board games physically print these symbols that could be taken offensively. I ask because I have Axis & Allies and Twilight Struggle sitting on a shelf right here, but don't consider myself facist, nor communist, nor insensitive. I don't have a civil war board game but I bet they physically print those symbols too.

> should all WW2 games be removed

I don't want to remove nothing, apparently you've misunderstood my comment. It wasn't the point I was trying to make at all.

You should clarify your comment then.

Sorry for misunderstanding. As someone who grew up in the South, I have grown to hear the phrase "a racist flag" as one of those trigger phrases that is politically loaded. I now realize your point is about being in questionable taste when using it as a PR stunt.

I don't disagree with your overall point but I don't remember a lot of WW2 games featuring a swastika (well, besides wolfenstein 3D), they often replace them with other symbols. I'm in europe though, maybe it's different in the US.

That being said it's probably not comparable. If some US states still had confederate flags on some of their public buildings in 2015 it's probably not nearly as offensive as a swastika.

I can't help but notice that Wolf3D is still available on the App Store, swastika intact.

Perhaps these small developers are easier targets than Zenimax when deciding which apps to sacrifice for the sake of grandstanding.

Ah, so you’re German, too? xD

Most WWII games still use the real symbols in other places, and, while under German law Art is exempt from the Swastika ban (you have to endorse the swastika and glorify it to be illegal), no publisher actually tried to get their game classified as art yet, so they just remove it, as it's easier and less risky.

What is wrong with depicting a confederate flag in a game about the civil war?

Nothing imo, it's historic facts. But what is wrong imo is using the situation for PR purpose.

This is the point you were trying to make and I completely agree with you.

How are they using the situation for PR purpose? All they did was posting that Steam put their game on the front page, which any sane game developer would do.

Not at all. Steam is showing off the fact that it isn't led by vapid idiots.

It's important for gestures like this to happen to fight against the growing threat of 'social justice' fueled censorship. There's a big difference between not selling to people who want to wave the battle flag to trying to erase every depiction regardless of context. Standing up against such foolishness is important.

Is it a good game? That's all that matters. Maybe it's great, I personally don't know. I'll give the benefit of the doubt here that the featured algorithm uses controversy as a metric.

What would you call the move by Apple?

I don't see this as Valve using the confederate flag for PR purposes. Valve is saying "hey look, we're not swept up in this flavor of the week hysteria over the confederate flag, especially in the context of a historical game." I'm really glad they did this. Art is under assault by well meaning idiots who want to remove anything that challenges them or their preconceived notions. I'm glad Valve is backing up the developers who fill Steam with content, not leaving them hanging out to dry. If I ever want to publish art that is even a little bit controversial, I (and anyone else who's following this) know where to go.

I'd have interpreted Valve's move as saying "unlike product management at Apple, we understand the context of gaming enough to know that in war games, it's typical to use flags to represent opposing sides, and that there is no reason to believe that people are making or buying such games to make a racist statement" Apple's PR moving in banning the games was to make the statement "we are a sensitive company" but their unintended subtext of their actions was to highlight that that don't know or care to take into consideration the context of developers of gaming apps, and are happy to hurt them to make this statement, while not being willing to do the same to truly important partners, like the makers of the television show Dukes of Hazard, or any of the other TV shows, or movies, or books where that flag is displayed.

No one who actually cared about not glorifying the Confederacy would continue to sell Gone with the Wind, as Apple is doing.

> But what is wrong imo is using the situation for PR purpose.

Be clear that you are not implying Valve is doing this without offering any proof.

Also, what is your opinion on Apple using the shooting in Charleston for PR purpose?

But apple is the one who used the situation for PR purposes. Valve would have published the game one way or another, and that linked page is just how newly released games are displayed on the valve store. No special PR here -- someone from the developer probably paid to advertise it there.

It is worth noting that what is commonly thought of as the confederate flag today was actually only adopted as "a battle flag by the Army of Northern Virginia"; the historically accurate confederate flags are different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_State...

The flag probably would have been relegated to Civil War museums if it had not been resurrected by the resurgent KKK and used by Southern Dixiecrats during the 1948 presidential election.

But it's also worth noting that it has successfully become the symbol of the Confederacy in the minds of most modern Americans. If you show a map of the Civil War and designate Confederate units or territories with the first national flag or the Bonnie Blue flag, you'll just confuse the people trying to understand your map.

And, if you use the second or third national flags, well, you know? I suspect that Apple wasn't going to let those ones through either. It's not as though they have any distinctive pattern BESIDES the battle flag.

hmm.. In my mind it is the symbol of budwieser, cutoffs, rusted pickup trucks, twangy guitar music and rascism. I think I picked up on that growing up before I even knew it had anything to do with the civil war. As far as games go I think simply the use of blue and grey units would suffice for most games. They could use icons of their hats for example. I own several WWII boardgames and none of them feature swastikas and I don't feel confused or cheated by it in the slightest. Just my opinion tho.

I've seen a lot of WWII games that simply use the Iron Cross of German coat of arms as the symbol of Germany.

That said the CSA had a real flag, there's really no reason to continue using the flag of its arguably most famous army to represent the entire thing.

I think the people interested in Civil War games, would appreciate the realism in using the actual CSA flag.

Upvoted. No, the confederate flag probably should not be banned from being used in any context in media, ever. But while apples decision was wrong (IMO), it's also in bad taste for a competitor to promote material containing the flag solely as a PR stunt.

Apple decides to perform PR stunt to benefit from hysteria, while fucking over publishers/developers.

Steam perform PR stunt by giving one game promotion. I don't see how it is bad taste, especially compared to Apple actions.

Apple probably made a mistake and needs to adjust their policy. Steam deliberately did this because of that mistake. Apple didn't intentionally ban a civil war game for PR, they enacted an oversleeping policy that resulted in controversy for this game.

It seems like steam deliberately did this to thumb their nose at the situation.

Why is this a mistake? And not just policy as well? Or is it because Apple tests boundaries and backpedals when necessary and call it a mistake afterwards?

Well, how would you solve the task assigned to you: "remove all the apps in the App Store that contain this flag"

Do you look at every single result and scrutinize it? Oh and this needs to be done now, as in yesterday.

It's definitely plausible that they did not review each and every decision.

Maybe too their policy is against historical images as well. No exceptions. We don't know.

People love to hate on the App Store. This displaced game found a home on steam and they even boosted it up. Was this for the right reasons because it's truly a great game or was this a marketing stunt to show off their lack of censorship?

It's slightly distasteful regarding this polarizing topic. I applaud their bravery if it is anti censorship, but I sincerely doubt the cause is that noble.

It's a crappy policy, why can't we hate on it?

For all the 'south will rise again' talk, there's no actual chance of a national split in the foreseeable future. The civil war is 150 years old, and quite dead.

> It seems like steam deliberately did this to thumb their nose at the situation.

If by "the situation" you mean a rival app store censoring content that didn't deserve to be censored, why shouldn't they?

> It seems like steam deliberately did this to thumb their nose at the situation.

Was this deliberate? Or did some algorithm pick up that the game was "popular" (increased visits to Steam page, mentions on social media, etc) and automatically bump it up the promotion queue as a result?

> implicitly backing a racist flag

I don't see how Valve backs the racist flag. They back the game, specifically because it has been banned by Apple. But I don't see any sentiment toward specifically agreeing with the flag and all its meaning.

They aren't. The GP is wrong. That's like saying that a historical museum is implicitly backing a racist flag by having one in their civil war exhibit they are promoting this month.

There is nothing racist about promoting a game that uses 'a racist flag' in the correct context. In this case, a historical one.

Right, but they run the risk that the kind of people who are upset with Apple not because Apple have made a general boneheaded move but who are specifically exercised because Apple has removed their flag, will now see Valve as some kind of hero and start acting like Valve is on their side.

While valve may see themselves as supporting free speech advocates, they're also, incidentally and presumably (hopefully) unintentionally, pandering to, and risk validating, racist bigots.

How do you feel about imposing a blanket ban on said flag for PR purposes?

A company's prerogative, if they choose to do it.

I think if Valve chose to promote this and it wasn't automatically placed on the front page due to a surge in popularity, it's probably because Valve is trying to show itself to be a marketplace where no idea is censored, no matter how unpopular and that their competitors have asinine policies.

Look at the whole Hatred debacle. Some people think it's the most offensive game of all time and should be banned, but Gabe himself came out and said that that's no reason to pull the game.

Besides, when it comes to censorship in games, it's usually from gross misunderstandings or willful ignorance. Banning all Civil War themed games because they display a flag in a historical context is a good example. The game is in no way promoting the ideology behind the flag.

> Look at the whole Hatred debacle. Some people think it's the most offensive game of all time and should be banned, but Gabe himself came out and said that that's no reason to pull the game.

Someone at Steam did initially pull it off of greenlight though. Gabe re-added it later.

That's true, but Gabe came out and made a point stating that Valve as a whole didn't support that decision.

You're assuming that Valve is trying to make hay somehow by promoting this game, but I wonder if the game's placement is simply a result of a spike in sales by users who can't purchase it on the Mac App Store. I'm guessing it wouldn't take many purchases for the store's logic to pick up a historical strategy game as a trending seller.

Valve's position reminds me of Hatred disappearance/reappearance http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/17/hatred-gam...

In either case, it is in my opinion difficult to determine if this is good or bad PR, and if this is good or bad in terms of morals. However, more tendency towards provocation might bring the answer.

>a racist flag

When I look at the Confederate flag, it represents something completely different to me. It's the flag that my great-great-great-great grandfather fought for, not because he was a racist, but because he was 12 years old (he got discharged honorably for somehow getting enlisted below the minimum age) and wanted to protect his friends and neighbors.

The popular misconception was that anyone flying the Confederate flag during the war did so out of seething hatred towards anyone not white. The even more popular misconception is that by extension, anyone flying that same flag today does so out of the same reason.

For a lot of folks, it's just representative (if perhaps misguidedly so) of a lot of things that define "typical southern culture": redneck (used down here not always as a pejorative but as a lifestyle shorthand) "simplicity", blunt honesty when needed ("mouth of the south") and hospitality when not, and the sort of "God and country" stuff that you'd expect to find in a Keith Urban track. It's like waving a Texas flag, except nobody's tried to tie the Texan flag to the racism that was prevalent everywhere in the US during the Civil War (let's not forget that Martin Luther King Jr. didn't hang out with Abe Lincoln north of the Mason-Dixon line; he worked with Lyndon Johnson much later from Atlanta and Selma.)

So I think it's cultural blindness to simply treat the Confederate flag as nothing but intrinsically racist or even as equivalent with Nazi symbolism (or to treat it as worse; Amazon still sells Nazi paraphernalia, but has discontinued Confederate flags).

But I also think it's cultural blindness to treat it as having no negative connotations. However misinformed the reasons, the public views flying a Confederate flag as assenting to what they believe it stood for: racism or hate. So whether or not they're right about what it stood for, it communicates to them that you agree with what they think it stood for.

In terms of my own worldview, I find 1 Corinthians 8:4-13 [1] to be pretty applicable here (where the issue at hand was "is it okay to eat food that had been used in pagan worship ceremonies?")

The idea being: yes, sure, I know better, so it's okay for me. But if I eat that food (or in this case, wave that flag) in front of someone who thinks it's very wrong, I am in their eyes giving approval to something they see as wrong, causing them an issue of conscience. If they go along with me, they are knowingly doing what they believe is wrong. It is then a conscious offense for them, because they have a different understanding of the issue than I do. And I either force them to compromise their conscience to justify my behavior in their minds, or else I cause them to see me and my moral framework in a much worse light.

So then, if I have a Confederate flag in my house, whatever, I understand the significance it has to me. But if I fly it out in my yard, I am in my neighbors' minds backing whatever they think that stands for. So any other cause I support or view I hold is immediately suspect to them now. I do damage to more important issues because of my lack of awareness on a less important one.

[1] http://www.esvbible.org/1Corinthians8/

> The popular misconception was that anyone flying the Confederate flag during the war did so out of seething hatred towards anyone not white. The even more popular misconception is that by extension, anyone flying that same flag today does so out of the same reason.

I think that's a strawman. In actual fact the soldiers of the Confederate army were fighting to keep the system of slavery intact in the south. That's historical fact[1]. Most of them weren't monsters but what they were fighting for was monstrous.

Even though the flag Confederate may represent things like the valour of the Confederate soldiers it primarily represents the cause of the Confederacy, which was slavery. That's why it's a problem to glorify it. You can't reasonable separate the two meanings.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-thi...

They fought for 1000 different reasons, of course. They volunteered (at first), and the vast majority were not slaveholders. A common reason was simply to repel the invaders of the north from their homeland. The North made the first move after all.

I'm from Iowa, have no skin in the game. But its simple demonizing to make blanket statements about the intentions of vast groups of people.

> The North made the first move after all.

The Confederate troops fired first, at Fort Sumter.

The North still made the first move, by occupying the confederate fort and refusing to leave. This is middle school history, no need to hide the facts.

It was not a Confederate fort to begin with. It was a Federal fort, though construction hadn't yet finished on it at the time of that SC tried to secede. I'm not hiding any facts, you just had a bad middle school history teacher.

Whether or not they were slaveholders. The fundamental reason the South went to war was to preserve slavery. That many of the soldiers did not own slaves themselves does not clear the flag of its meaning.

Considering that the states were united until the south started to secede (again, because of slavery), I'm not sure how the war can be framed in any other way. The north can only be called invaders in the context of the secession.

The flag was the battle flag of one general. So what does it mean? Why did that general fight?

Its flown for lots of reasons. I don't fly it; its repugnant to me. But I didn't have anyone die under it.

So do you also think that about Islamic flag(s) and symbols? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_flags or does that get a free pass?

Apart from the atrocities committed in the past, it is today used by ISIS to butcher Christians and Yezidis.

Also used by Saudi to kill "deviant" homosexuals, witch-crafters and adulterers.

I admit I must plead ignorance on this point. I know ISIS is creating a bloodbath in the middle east, but I don't know the history well enough to comment on whether there's a flag that symbolizes that slaughter.

Out of curiosity, which flag do you mean? Be specific. One of the first flags on that page is the flag of Turkey so you probably don't mean all of them.

Can you please provide proof that Valve is using this as an opportunity for PR for the reasons stated?

The game was recently released, and because of Apple's attempt at PR by banning the game, would result in people going to Steam to purchase the game. The end result would be more sales, and more likely to get featured. Your suggesting this is not the case. Please back it up.

It is hard to pin down the precise motives of a large organization. But Apple is no stranger to embracing the zeitgeist when the mood suits them, e.g. the fast-tracking of the Fiore and Charlio Hebdo apps: http://readwrite.com/2015/01/13/apple-app-charlie-hebdo-mark...

Seems like they have like the maker put up a new cover image, pretty sure that stupid cassette tape wasn't the official cover image a week ago.

For anyone interested, Ultimate General: Gettysburg is a game made by the well-known modder of the Total War series of games, DarthVader.

His DarthMod series have been consistently rated as among the best, if not the best overhaul mods available for the series and rightly so.

They are really fantastic.

Context: http://rt.com/usa/269779-apple-civil-war-games/

Apple and other "major retailers" are pulling anything that includes the Confederate flag as content from their stores because, as we well know, the best way to respond to intolerance is to bury our heads in the sand.

More context:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9777854

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9779699

Thank you. I had no idea why this was showing up so high, but I was fairly sure it had something to do with outrage over something.

Puritanism never dies. It only gets sillier.

It's not puritanism. Every culture in the world behaves this way about different topics.

Apple, the world's babysitter O.o

(Why would a corporation willingly want to play this babysitting game? Doesn't that expose them to bunch of liability?)

They're not so much babysitting as pro-actively trying to get out ahead of what they fear could become a PR problem. The situation right now is there's a lot of legitimate public outcry and pressure to remove the confederate battle flag from being flown by government institutions in the South. This is expanding to various stores stopping selling the flag and even calls for renaming military bases called after Southern generals. I'm not saying that I agree with Apple here but I can understand them wanting to avoid any possibility of getting sucked into the controversy.

As someone who thinks the Confederate flag is a powerful racist symbol, this doesn't make a lick of sense. No one is pulling WWII games even though plenty feature the Nazi flag.

Mentioning a thing is not equivalent to endorsing it, this is like burning history books because they also depict the Confederate flag.

Agreed. If we had truly put this stuff behind us we would be able to defiantly stare down those symbols; instead Apple has cowered in fear: which is arguably handing a victory to intolerance.

We will have truly won when we can look at those symbols as nothing more than pieces of history: no emotion either positive or negative would be derived. We have won when we are so far removed from what those symbols mean that we simply cannot comprehend them.

If Apple's actions are anything to go by, that war never actually ended. These problems need to be faced, not made as though they don't exist.

Mentioning a thing and celebrating/embracing a thing are 2 different things.

Very few people/groups use Nazi flags for themselves anymore.

Yeah, these days it's primarily usa-based white power groups.

You can also use a symbol in modified form against the group using it.

For example by crossing it out, for example, or by using it in a caricature where one compares it with trash.

This symbol https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Anti-Naz... obviously contains a swastika, but is obviously legal even under current German law, as it does not encourage Nazism

If only it was so obvious. There was a case in 2006 I remembered were it apparently wasn't quite so for some people, http://www.dw.com/en/german-company-fined-for-selling-anti-n..., don't know if something similar came up again more recently.

The case you linked has been reversed by a higher court, though. And a German federal politician who was involved in that suggested a change in the law, but the government was against it.

I suppose the issue here is that Apple sees apps and games as abstract consumer goods, like toys or kitchen gadgets. In which context, they might see dropping these war sim games as no different from, say, Etsy dropping confederate flag t-shirts. After all, why should anyone want an app with the objectionable images? There are dozens of others without them; surely they'll do instead.

Of course if one considers games to be media content analogous to books or movies (or dare I say it, Art), such a view seems insane. Then again, one doesn't normally hear about curated gardens erring on the side of free expression, so maybe it's exactly what we should expect.

The problem is Apple specifically states that they don't view apps as books or movies. I don't have the exact context, but I saw it on here yesterday so maybe someone else does?

The language is quoted in other comments here. And yeah, I know about that, I was just commenting on the philosophy more than the legal terms.

It's sad that no one seems to have bothered to read the history behind the confederate flag and why it is associated with racism so strongly to begin with. It isn't because it was used by the confederate army during the civil war. It was only one of many flags used by the confederacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_State...

The confederate flag wasn't all that common in the south until the civil rights movement in the 1950's and 60's at which point southern legislatures specifically started adopting it as a symbol of their opposition to the federal government's efforts to force southern states to end segregation and enforce the civil rights legislation. In other words it was adopted by the anti civil rights movement explicitly to represent their racist cause. That is why it was put on the South Carolina state house and incorporated into flags of other southern states. That is why it is disingenuous to say it was placed there for 'historical' reasons.

Apple's apparent banning of all use of that flag in any context shows a lack of understanding for why it's problematic to begin with and an ignorance of the history of the civil rights movement.

Thanks for pointing this out. The history may not be quite as clear as you (and Wikipedia) say. But regardless, it's good for more people to know that these flags haven't just been flying there peacefully ever since the end of the civil war.

Here's a fairly thorough discussion: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jun/22/...

As that article points out, all the Southern states that started flying that Confederate flag for the first time in the 50s and 60s in response to the civil rights movement claimed to be commemorating the civil war too. So it'd be hard for Apple to come up with a rule that excluded racists who were using it as an anti-civil-rights symbol but not actual civil war stuff, and they tend to err on the side of banning everything.

The US civil war was only in 1865. I think if the southern states had tried flying the flag any earlier than WWI, they'd have been met with opposition from people rightfully thinking they were trying to restart the war.

True. The best way to deal with darkness would be to let it out in the light.

This is not totally true. Apple has clarified that

>We have removed apps from the App Store that use the Confederate flag in offensive or mean-spirited ways, which is in violation of our guidelines. We are not removing apps that display the Confederate flag for educational or historical uses.

They are working to restore some games to the app store.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/25/apple-bans-games-and-apps-f...

Clearly Apple is struggling to draw a sensible line here -- which is probably going to be very tricky. And they certainly should have come up with a reasonable policy before banning things left and right. But, nonetheless, it is no longer correct to claim that

>Apple and other "major retailers" are pulling anything that includes the Confederate flag as content

My problem is Apple didn't pull books with a Confederate Flag on their cover. They pulled apps. I am getting a little sick of the stand that developers are not considered for the same creative protections that book authors are. Its bad enough that companies are designing machines that restrict the people who make those machines worth buying, but this constant harassment that no large company would think to apply to movies, tv shows, or books is discouraging.

I can create a racist song or book and sell it, i cannot create an historical game.... wtf logic

The point here is, if you voice your opinion, your enemies will use this to voice how their opinion is different. You won't convince people with different opinions than your own to change, but just send them to your enemies.

Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/306660/

It looks like it's been available for about 8 months.

And then you realize that if we wouldn't have games about wars (be it civil war games or WWII games or whatnot), we wouldn't have this issue.

First they came for the people who waved confederate flags, and I did not speak out— Because I did not wave a confederate flag.

I wonder what the reenactment community thinks of all of this.

I'm wondering when this nonsense will stop.

This game is a history lesson for kids. You can't rewrite history, even if you don't agree with what happened. This is the equivalent of digital book burning.

Apple isn't removing all of the World War 2 games that contain Nazi symbols. I'm sure there are games that offend Native Americans and other minorities, but those aren't removed. Why?

In a related note, this just happened: http://news.yahoo.com/vandals-target-confederate-monuments-h...

"The graffiti reflects the racial tension that permeates post-Ferguson America"

...And it's excused. The reason I can't stand behind any of these latest protests is because it excuses criminal, savage, and animalistic behavior and this graffiti incident is just another example of it.

I suspect in 10 years, our racial problems will not be any better. Mostly because the media and politicians continue to create a divide for their gain and people that question the reality, like me, are silenced long enough that they just stop participating.

Did you just call black people "savage" and "animals"?

this straw man argument against confederate flags doesn't deserve any further discussions.

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