What makes a "troll game"? Valve attempts a Steam-wide definition

Last June, Valve issued expansive Steam instructions that games would be removed from the platform only for illegal or "lagging" content. At the time, we found that the unclear definition of "trolling" left a lot of leeway for Valve to define what is acceptable content in a game.

Yesterday, Valve tried to clarify what defines "a troll game" in his estimate. These clarifications are welcome, but they raise questions as to the true Valve neutral moderation in value.

The many types of trolls

Some of the Valve definitions of trolling seem relatively clear. Most people would agree that Steam should remove developers who "are trying to defraud people of their Steam inventory items" or those "looking for a way to generate a small amount of money through a series of solutions the developers are using Steam keys, "for example.

There is a little more subjectivity in determining whether a Steam title is what Valve calls "a game-shaped object". The company defines this category as "a grossly made software that, technically and barely, exceeds our bar as a functional video game, but that's not what 99.9% of people would say is" good "" .

There may be extreme cases where a game that some consider "broken" is a game that others consider brilliantly as "art". For the most part, however, a game that only 1 in 1,000 people would consider playable establishes a good selection threshold for what deserves to be removed from Steam.

The determination of the "troll game" begins to be felt in games and developers who, according to Valve, "try to incite and sow discord." This is similar to the justification valve used in June to remove Active shot, a new game that planned to let the players assume the role of a school shooter or the SWAT team trying to stop it.

Doug Lombardi of Valve said at the time that Active shot was removed from Steam because it was "designed to generate indignation and cause conflict through its existence". This designation came despite the fact that the developer stated that the game was "a dynamic SWAT simulator in which dynamic roles are offered to players" and that it "would probably remove the shooter's role in the game after the reaction. popular at the idea ".

As the developer also noted at the time, "there are games like Hatred, the post office, the Carmageddon and etc., which are even [worse] compared to Active shot and literally focuses on shootings and mass murders. "

Good faith vs bad faith

the Active shot The case comes in the only thing that Valve says unite all these different developers of trolls: their malignant motives. A troll developer is a developer who is not "really interested in the good faith efforts to create and sell games to you or to anyone," the company writes.

While the efforts of bona fide developers can obviously lead to "rude or inferior games" on Steam, Valve says that "bad people really do bad games". And it's those bad games of bad guys that Valve does not want on Steam.

In the absence of a device for reading the mind, determining the motivations of a developer is not an easy task. Defining what separates a good faith effort to sell a game from a "troll" involves a "thorough evaluation" of the developer, says Valve, including "what they've done in the past, their behavior on Steam as a developer ", as a customer, their banking information, the developers they associate, etc.

This type of information seems to have been taken into account in Valve's decision on Active shot, whose developer Lombardi said "had been involved in many misrepresentations, copyright infringement and abuse by customers. But Lombardi went further than that by saying that "while the developer behind was also a troll, we would reject Active shot if it had been submitted by another developer. In other words, Valve determined that the game itself was intrinsically "trolly" and that no developer could have had a pure motive to manufacture it or sell it.

This is a perfectly defensible position for Valve in keeping order in its shop window. But it's a value-sensitive judgment of content that seems to go against the philosophy that Valve herself adopted in June: "If you're a gambler, we should not choose for you the content that you can or can not buy. As a developer, we should not choose the content you are allowed to create. "

In June, Valve stated that it did not want Steam game registration to be considered "a reflection of Valve Values". In trying to determine which games are "bad people" who "are just trying to incite and sow discord", however, Valve always intrinsically communicates value judgments about what is acceptable or not on his showcase. .

Through the exception of "trolling", Valve can judge the motivations of its developers and set absolute limits to the "incentive content" is allowed on its platform, while maintaining the facade that does not interest him. on Steam. "It's an interesting balance exercise for the most important and influential PC game store to maintain.