The online videogame store Steam has come under fire from thousands of individuals for hosting the game House Party, which features animated pornography and manipulation of women into sex through blackmail, intoxication, and deception.
As we learned from the infamous case of Brock Turner, where alcohol was used to assist in the rape of a young woman, it is vitally necessary to combat the rape myths that such activities have no consequences or harms.
After the game was briefly removed for edits, the game has been brought back onto Steam’s online store, and the developers of the House Party videogame have stated that “the entire story of the game is 100 percent in-tact… and there have been no changes made to the content of the game.”
The only edit to the game is that the sex acts have been partially blocked with black bars. Yet there are already several “un-censor patch” add-ons that other developers are promoting so people can remove the black bars and play the game with full pornographic nudity.
This is not a solution.
The entire theme of the House Party game is to normalize and instruct its users as a virtual how-to manual of sex crimes and misogyny.
ACTION: EMAIL THESE EXECUTIVES
Florent Schiffer, Community and Localization: florents@valvesoftware.com
Yahn Bernier, Corporate Director: yahn@valvesoftware.com
Karl Quackenbush, General Counsel: karlq@valvesoftware.com
Tell them that this game needs to be fully removed from Steam’s online store. Ask them to publicly state its policy against pornographic or sexually exploitive content that normalizes rape or violence against women, and to instill consistent enforcement of these policies. This is a problem that needs a top-down solution so that other games like this one are not sold on Steam.
Steam has been trying to block emails based on the subject lines or the text within the emails, so if you write your email in your own words that’s most likely to make it through their filters. If you need more information about the problem you can learn more here.
If these emails don’t work for any reason, let us know by emailing public@ncose.com, and we can get more email addresses!
