Video Game Temporarily Removed After Thousands of Complaints
Washington, DC – Steam, a popular online video game store used by an estimated 35 million children, has temporarily removed the pornographic House Party game from its online store until the developer makes undisclosed alterations to the game.
Controversy:
“The video game company Steam cannot simply pixelate scenes of rape,” said Dawn Hawkins, Executive Director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. “Steam has temporarily removed the House Party game after thousands of concerned individuals contacted company executives to complain about the game’s pornographic and sexually coercive scenes. Apparently, they are requiring the game developer to apply an in-game censor, which traditionally is a mild censor that only pixelates genitals and breasts.”
“At the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, we believe the game’s problems go beyond simple animated pornography to include the actual functionality of the game itself. This game both normalizes and instructs its users as a virtual how-to manual of sex crimes and misogyny,” said Dawn Hawkins.
“Earlier this week, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation wrote a letter to Valve Corporation executives asking them to remove this game and institute robust policies to ensure such content no longer appears on Steam.”
“The developer of House Party released a letter defending the game as a ‘parody’ and a ‘joke’ and dismissed concerns about the game being harmful and misogynistic, but this claim falls flat in the face of rampant sexual exploitation on college campuses, in the military, and in our communities. We are experiencing a crisis of sexual exploitation, and games that instruct and reward players for mimicking these real abuses only promote and perpetuate these harms. And that is no laughing matter.” Hawkins continued.
“We are calling on Valve Corporation and Steam executives to robustly and publicly improve their policy against pornographic content and to create a policy against sexually exploitive content,” Hawkins concluded.
About the Game:
The House Party ‘hook up’ game included disturbing features that allow users to increase their odds of ‘having sex’ with a woman in the game if they manipulated and coerced women into sex through blackmail using nude pictures, increasing women’s alcohol consumption, impersonating their friends through text, and jamming cell phone reception to isolate a woman in a room away from other party goers. Many of these sexually coercive actions would likely amount to rape charges if they occurred in real life.
The sexual encounters are blatant animated pornography, featuring genitalia, ejaculation, and more.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation spoke out against this game two weeks ago after the popular pornography recovery organization, NoFap, broke the story about how Steam openly advertised this game to users of all ages.
For screenshots of proof visit here.
