Videogame Company Comes Under Fire for Promoting Sexual Coercion and Exploitation
A mainstream online videogame store, with an estimated 35 million users under the age of 18, is facilitating gamified sexual coercion and animated pornography featuring genitalia, ejaculation, to users of all ages. This is occurring through the Steam® video game distribution platform, which was developed by the Valve Corporation.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation is calling on the videogame distributor to remove these games and is asking the public to email executives about their concerns.
“Sexual exploitation is not a game,” said Dawn Hawkins, Executive Director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. “Steam, a popular videogame distribution platform that could be likened to the ‘Walmart of online videogame distribution,’ is selling games that normalize and promote sexual coercion and exploitation. These games, House Party and Porno Studio Tycoon, are easily available to an estimated 35 million children who buy videogames off of Steam.”
“The House Party ‘hook up’ game is literally training its users in predatory tactics for sexual assault, and even sex trafficking, which plague real, living people offline in high schools, universities, military bases, and more. The game includes disturbing features that allow users to increase their odds of ‘having sex’ with a woman in the game if they manipulate and coerce women into sex acts. Different game scenarios include blackmail using nude pictures, increasing women’s alcohol consumption, impersonating a friend through text, and jamming a woman’s cell phone reception to isolate her in a room away from other party goers. Users ‘win’ the game by having sex with women at the party. The sexual encounters are blatant animated pornography, featuring genitalia, ejaculation, and more.”
“The game Porno Studio Tycoon centers around sexual themes where the user acts as the pornographer. It includes sexual sounds, hypersexualized characters, and generic depictions of sex acts, although there is not full nudity. This game promotes and glamorizes the exploitive industry of pornography, where performers frequently experience physical and emotional trauma, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
“Steam sells and promotes these games to users of all ages and requires only a simple click of a button to pass through a tepid warning that the material may not be suitable for all ages. These games are in direct violation of Steam’s own policies against pornographic or patently offensive content.”
“The National Center on Sexual Exploitation is calling on Steam and its parent company Valve to remove these games from their store and to install and enforce a more robust policy against selling games that normalize or glamorize sexual exploitation. Concerned individuals can email Valve executives here.” Hawkins concluded.
This story was originally broken by NoFap®, a well-known pornography addiction recovery company. They published two in-depth stories about it, located here and here.
NCOSE reached out for comment and their spokesperson’s response included, “We do not think that Steam should be advertising pornographic games to children. Furthermore, as more people become aware of the existence of porn addiction, they are becoming increasingly mindful of inadvertent porn exposure in their daily lives. Valve should restrict such content to a specific area, available only to those who are interested in viewing it, but easily avoided by those who are not.”
A Research Summary of the public health harms of pornography is available here.
