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Comment by doe88 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

You should clarify your comment then.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

> 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?

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.

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 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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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?

>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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