Q&A: Addressing the harm of censorship

Watch on Odysee / Rumble

 

So it's been a week since the news of Skullgirls update; An update that featured various changes to it's sprites, cut scenes, and even the concept art in it's digital art compendium. The backlash has been pretty unexpected, yet definitely refreshing. People have been very vocal about how deleting eleven-year-old artwork, which was never a problem for the many years the game has been out, is censorship, and how that ultimately will hurt the game going forward. With the game receiving a spot at this year's EVO competition it seems as if this was the catalyst for the censorship, which proves my previous feelings that E-sports is to blame for this current push for “Safe designs” in modern games.

I've chimed in on the discussion with my two cents, as well as re-posted my old videos covering the history of Lab Zero and the events that lead to the developers forcing out the original lead programmer and artist, under questionable pretenses. The remaining staff decided to work under the new name, Future Club, which was picked up by Autumn games.

 

Above: good guy, Bossfight.

At the end of that thread, I stated that you should not harass the people involved in this situation, but voice their displeasure with the company and their actions. This is mainly aimed at those of us who had purchased the game back in 2013 and before the start of censoring art assets, but isn't limited to people were potentially interested in the game but have been turned off by the act of censoring the game's content.

On July 1^st , I received a response to this particular thread from a twitter user who had this to say..

This is a good question, and honestly, the best we can do is get as many people informed as to why censoring the material is actually harmful to both the consumer and the product. So instead of just answering the tweet, I felt that it's important to put out a video with my thoughts on this exact thing.

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Either this person is being disingenuous or public schools has failed them, or both.

         

First let's talk about the meaning of censorship, because there seems to be a misguided idea of what is and isn't censorship.

By the ALCU's defintion; Censorship is the suppression of words images or ideas that are “offensive” which happens whenever some people succeed in impaosing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. Censorship by the government is unconstitutional.

Keeping this in mind, we see people on twitter claiming that censorship of the content of skullgirls okay, because the so-called developers of the game are the ones doing the censoring.

This is wrong for two major reasons.

The "Art adjustments" within the patch included removing concept art form the digital art book

One. Consumers who had invested into the development of the game via crowd-funding, and the people who purchased the game after initial launch, did so under the impression that the so-called problematic content which has currently been removed was not an issue to them, and was actually part of the reason why they were interested in purchasing the game in the first place. Things removed such as fanservice, “racially charged” content and “references to hate groups” weren't enough to deter people from purchasing the game back in 2012, and were perfectly fine for years after the game's release, only to be toned down to be palatable for use within E-sports competition.

The "Soviet" announcer pack was a backer stretch goal removed from the game. 

Two. The current members of Future club are in fact not the ones responsible for the generation of the game's original content. That would be Mike Zaimont, Alex Ahad, and Zone, who all are no longer working on the game. That being the case, it isn't even the original Reverge labs team, and to a fault it's not even Lab Zero doing the censoring of this content. It's Future Club and Autumn Games, which are the ones making these changes.

Whether they have the right to do so is also a moot point, considering that the content that was removed or altered, were crowd-funding stretch goals that original backers had had for years before they were deleted in the new update.

Because it's been years since the game's release, the excuse given may be that they are considering this version of the game a “reboot”, in order to justify the changes, but the fact of the matter is, the company has decided to retroactively alter content that has been purchased by the customer. Which one would imagine would fall into “bait and switch” territory. The following defintion is from Cornell Law School's website.

A “bait and switch” takes place when a seller creates an appealing but ingenuine offer to sell a product or service, which the seller does not actually intend to sell. This initial advertised offer is “the bait.” Then the seller switches customers from buying the advertised product or service that the seller initially offered into buying a different product or service that is usually at a higher price or has some other advantageous effect to the advertiser. This is the “switch.” Normally, the switched product that the consumer buys is usually at a higher purchase price, an increased profit for the seller, or may have a less marketable characteristic than the product advertised.

Taking this into account, the product advertised was enticing, and appealing to the original crowdfunding audience, as well as the people who purchased the game later on, and the censoring of the content has altered the product into a different product as what was promised to both the original backers and the customers who purchased the game. The game's changes, according to the backlash, growing number of negative reviews, and the current steam user numbers, shows that the product could be considered less marketable than the product that was originally advertised.

The only discrepancy, here would be the idea that the original claim was disingenuous, since the original creators were at the helm of the project at the time of crowdfunding, and are currently replaced by different project leaders and upper management.

But let's move on to the second part of that question, and talk about the people who seem to believe that censorship isn't harmful. Which is probably the biggest lie you could ever tell yourself.

It's no secret that the people who are for the censorship of Skullgirls are often being revealed as bad faith actors who are only making these statements to score an ideological win against the people who are upset about the censorship. Welcome to the internet.

More often than not these bad actors often claim that the characters are “sexualized minors”, and the game is basically inappropriate pornography, are glad the changes have been made because now they are comfortable playing the game.

                     

However, anyone who makes this claim should probably take a moment to reflect on that statement considering the game has been on various platforms for multiple years without legal incident, no one was arrested or jailed for the creation of said content of the game, and these people who claim that this game featured sexually inappropriate depictions of minors have had the game in their own possession for years before they one day woke up and realized they were participating in the trafficking of illicit content. Funny how that works, huh?

So in basically making these false claims and justifying a company's censorship these people are partaking in enabling companies to continue infringing on the rights of consumers. Yes, this is indeed an anti-consumer practice and needs to be called out as such, because eventually, more people will grow to be tired of these practices and will refuse to play these games, thus causing Future Club and Autumn games to share the same fate as companies such as Daedalic Entertainment, the developers of the LOTR Gollum game.

So I hope this answers your statement. I feel strongly about the situation, because of what was done to both Alex and Mike Z, as well as the vandalism of art, some of which was fan art donated to the game for charity and fundraising. An entire storyline featuring a character's origin of being brutally beaten to death by his fellow (corrupt) policemen was altered because people were afraid of the racial implications, despite this being a homage to the 1989 film Robocop. The Black Egrets armbands were removed because of symbolism tying to that of the Nazi party, despite people understanding that this a fictional story and well adjusted adults understand the difference between fiction and reality.

Censorship is a problem not just because it stifles creativity, and imagination, it just shows that the people censoring things are incapable of handling topics they themselves are uncomfortable with, and that stifles cognitive development and maturity.

It's no wonder the people cheering on Future Club tend to be under aged and mentally underdeveloped.

- See you Next Bossfight.