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Indie Game About Discovering Pornography Banned From Steam
You Must Be 18 Years Or Older To Enter is a curious kind of horror game. Your parents have left the house unattended so you take the chance to boot up your PC and log onto the internet to, well, look at pornography.
While there is mature imagery, its graphics are presented with ASCII letters. The game, offered free of charge, made it through the Steam Greenlight process back in March and has received positive reviews from critics for being an "untraditional" horror experience. However, as one of the developers James Earl Cox recounts in his Gamasutra blog post, the game was ultimately pulled from the store. We reached out to Cox and he said that in his discussions with Valve, the company seemed to believe that the art was clearly pornographic by Valve's rules. He then said:
In the brief exchange we had with Valve, I tried to ground the conversation by pointing out how widely received the game was on the grounds that it isn't porn. For instance, Tokyo Game Show displayed it in their Indie Pavilion without a single question, and that's a nation with serious censorship laws.
We've reached out to Valve asking them for a reason why the game was pulled and will update this article if we hear back.
Our Take
It's strange that 18 Years Or Older To Enter has been removed from the Steam Store given it doesn't fit any legal definition of pornography and attempts to craft an intriguing interactive experience out of sexual anxiety, something that games don't tackle often. Given the huge number of games on Steam that have sexual content for the purposes of titillation and comedy, Cox's game being removed from the store feels like a double standard more than anything else.
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