From interview to story: Putting together a story about sex game censorship

I interviewed New York University Game Center director Naomi Clark last week about game censorship on Steam and Itch.io

Hi, folks,

Today, I’m publishing the full interview I did with New York University Game Center director Naomi Clark for a story that was published on Game File last week. That story, Crackdown on sex video games goes wide, alarming developer and impacting award-winning titles, is an amalgamation of news and interviews that covers a developing story about the role credit card companies sand payment processors have in the censorship of video games.

Last Thursday, indie marketplace Itch.io published a new policy regarding how it approaches NSFW games and other content that’s published on its platform — and that it had de-indexed thousands of games in order to review everything NSFW published on the site to make sure it met those policies. Valve Software did something similar with its Steam platform earlier in July in removing dozens of games that were deemed unacceptable for the platform, largely games that included incest or rape. Both companies did this due to pressure from credit card companies and payment processors, like Mastercard and PayPal, after a group called Collective Shout started a campaign against so-called “violent and unethical” porn games.

It was a big, rapidly developing mess. (And it’s still developing! As of Thursday, Itch.io has started re-indexing free adult NSFW content on the platform.) There were a lot of moving parts, and for Game File, I wanted to pull in interviews so that people involved could speak to the issue.

I reached out to Clark after seeing her post about the censorship on BlueSky. She’s both an expert in the industry as a whole and the developer of Consentacle, which is a two-person card game about learning consent in an alien relationship. She was a great resource in understanding the context around the issue. We ended up speaking on Thursday morning for 30 minutes. With permission from Stephen Totilo, who commissioned and edited the Game File story, I’m publishing the full interview here on Save Spot.

One of the things about journalism is that you’ll have this fantastic, eye-opening interview with a source but you’re often able to only quote a fraction of it in the story. I thought this would be an opportunity to speak to how I pull from interviews to build out a story. But first, the interview.

Naomi Clark on Itch.io’s new NSWF policy

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Nicole Carpenter: Would you start by introducing yourself — both your work at NYU but also your personal stuff, too?

Naomi Clark: My name is Naomi Clark. I have been making games professionally for about 25, 26 years now. I've worked on a lot of games over those years, both digital games for many different platforms, and more recently, designing tabletop games and role-playing games —probably best known at least in recent years for my card game Consentacle, which is a mature-themed game about navigating consent and intimacy with a partner who is from a different planet than you. It's about humans trying to figure out how to have sex with aliens. I'm also the chair and director of the NYU Game Center, which is the game design program at New York University, where we have about 300 students who spend several years learning to make games and launch games.

How does this situation with Itch.io and the censorship of adult games impact the video game industry, including your students at NYU?

Since I started working in games, way back in the late ‘90s, games have really been going through a huge revolution in terms of accessibility of the tools. More different kinds of people than ever before can make games. It's no longer just for people with access to extremely expensive hardware. It’s also a real revolution in the kinds of things that games are about. The old stereotype was like, Oh, you know, games are basically just about fighting things and maybe going on adventures and whatnot, or strategy and puzzle solving. Nowadays, people make games about almost any subject that you can imagine. And that's true across a lot of different fields. There are nonprofit organizations funding and making games about various types of global crises or about serious issues around the world. There have been games written about serious wars and humanitarian crises, and a lot of people are making games about their own experiences autobiographically.

I like to say that what we're very invested here at NYU is looking at games as a form of culture that can be just as meaningful and address the human condition in just as many ways as any other form of culture, like music or or painting or literature or the theater and drama — anything that that you wouldn't be surprised to find in a play or a poem or a novel or a film. You shouldn't be surprised to find these same kinds of subjects in games. However, the rest of the world has not really caught up with this way of thinking about games. More and more people are kind of sitting up and being like, I didn't know there could be games that have this type of feeling, like a peaceful feeling, or feeling wonder, or expressing what it's like to have a newborn child. The list could go on and on forever, but I think that we're still in a phase where people are increasingly figuring out or noticing that games can do that.

There are a lot of people, especially in older generations, who still think of games in an older mode. That they are frivolous entertainments for kids that are sort of mostly for wasting time. They're not something that you would go to for meaningful communication with the creative point of view of an artist or a storyteller. And that games are or may be little suspect because they are violent. I think what we're seeing in this current situation is that people are thinking, Oh, maybe games are pernicious in that they're corrupters of children, or that they trivialize serious or difficult topics, or that they are just being used as erotic titillation devices. I think these are all older and antiquated ways of looking at games, but they still prevail in a lot of circles as a stereotype about games.

Here at NYU, our students are contending with that. They're figuring out ways of expressing all sorts of ideas through games, through the way the games are played, through the stories that are in those games, and doing experiments. Many of them are very personal, or they're about difficult subjects. Sometimes they're about something that happened to them in their own lives, and sometimes those are difficult, or they deal with abusive situations or sexuality or coming out — all sorts of things. I think it's very important to the future of the games industry and the students that I teach are able to explore that full palette. I think what's at stake when people try to restrict the acceptable topics for games is nothing less than the stunting of an entire creative form. I take it pretty seriously.

We do have a lot of students who do games with what I would say is sensitive content right. And it's exactly games with sensitive content that are kind of right in the crosshairs, whether intentionally or not. Because, like yesterday, is when people discovered every game with sensitive content is now suddenly invisible on the single most open platform, with the largest catalog of games that are just made by anybody who tries their hand at making games. And it's not just, it's not just sexual content either, right? All sorts of games have been affected.

I was just looking at the NSFW tag, and there are two games that show up, when there were thousands before.

Yeah, many thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. Itch has grown so much in recent years because it’s open to anybody. There’s no price of entry. I would say every single one of our students here will publish a game on Itch at some point during their college career. I think it’s true of most programs where students are making games as part of their coursework. That’s precisely because you do not have to pay to publish a game via Itch. It’s an open platform where anybody can put something up. Think of it as a cross between a slam poetry night that anyone can come and do a performance at and a big public square where anyone can put up public art.

I think it's both exceedingly difficult to manage for the small team that's running it, and very fragile. Fragile and vulnerable, I think, is what's really coming out at this moment. They do sustain that site and that incredible openness, which is free for all these students and for a ton of other up and coming creators, because there's some games sold. And a lot of the games that we're talking about that are being affected by this are entirely free games. But they're still not available, even though they have nothing to do with payment processors. But, yeah, because it has to support itself, and because people are selling games on there to support themselves themselves too, they're vulnerable to this type of censorship from payment processors deciding that some kinds of content is unacceptable, and payment processors that, frankly, you don't know anything about games right, may have outdated ideas about games, and probably don't care.

This is something that sex workers have had to deal with for a while now, right? Why has it expanded to the active censorship of games on places like Itch.io and Steam now?

It was in 2021, I believe, that there was a very successful campaign that just started with a few people to go after PornHub, right? There was like one director of a nonprofit that was advocating against trafficking people. And then I think there was a hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, who took this up as a cause as well, and texted the CEO of Mastercard and said, Hey, you should stop doing business with Pornhub. And then there was a lawsuit that was of women who had videos of themselves on PornHub against their will from when they were minors. Of course, like, that's absolutely terrible, right? And it's good that they were able to pursue a lawsuit and get those taken down, but along the way, over the course of a few years, they chose to also attack the problem through payment processors. It goes back from before 2021 as well. I think that the most recent wave, and the way it’s really focusing on sex workers, and now expanding into any kind of adult content, or even sensitive content really stems from that era. For a hedge fund manager like Bill Ackman, he could just call up a CEO and Mastercard to change their course. It becomes a very, very easy pressure point for anyone with access to power, to just be like, you know, I'm going to just get one guy to change their mind. And, you know, in activism, that's often what you're looking for. You're looking for very key, influential people who are going to set policy. But in this case, the activists are, I'd say, anti-sex work, feminists and the anti-pornography feminist movement, which is, of course, like not in agreement with whole other wings of the feminist movement that are in solidarity with sex workers who want to do sex work and the idea that sex work is work, and with LGBTQ communities as well.

Being able to see stories about love and intimacy and sexuality is pretty critical for people who are figuring out their own sexualities against the headwinds of a heteronormative society. Being able to actually see and understand that and come to terms with their own feelings is part of what allows LGBTQ people to exist.

I think it may be important to make the point that this is what the problem here is. Not that people are taking down CSAM or abusive content sexualizing children and minors, or even the types of stuff that was removed from Steam — incest and sexual violence games. The problem is that the penumbra of those types of problematic content can expand, and indeed already has expanded, because of the uncertainty and confusion about what’s allowed. Because of a lack of transparency, because these sort of orders are being handed down more or less secretly, from a CEO or from a legal department, and it's not even clear, for instance, for developers on Steam or Itch what kinds of content would or wouldn't be allowed, because we're no longer talking about content that's illegal according to laws against child pornography. That is a line that's, I think, been held very successfully by many platforms over years, because it's against the law. But now we're in a territory where it's not. It's not about being against the law. It's about whether an activist group can successfully convince a bank or a payment processor. The payment processor sometimes blames banks also for this, applying pressure that they should ban certain types of content from being accessible by anybody and make that decision for all of us.

It's terrible for the industry as a whole, and people are kind of uncertain and confused and scared and it has spread beyond what those organizations, like Collective Shout, were intending to target almost immediately.

What would you say to a game developer who’s like, Well, I don’t make those types of games. This doesn’t apply to me. Why should I care?

I would say, Look, we have to be able to explore all kinds of topics if we want games, as a creative form, to develop and evolve and really explore their full potential. I think if you look at games now compared to 10 years ago or 20 years ago, they are so much more rich as a medium, and that's in part because we went and explored all of this territory. And if we allow people who do not understand games, who are not invested in that, who think of games as only being childish, meaningless entertainment that are only about violence and titillation, then, yeah, they don’t care.

You don't want them to be the ones to decide, here's what you can and can't play, here's what you can and can't make a game about because they have no idea what they're talking about. They're not even in the position of a platform holder like Steam or Itch, who are curators of games, who are thinking about what kind of games they do and don't want to be selling. We're talking about people who have nothing to do with this industry or this creative form calling shots in a way where they're having their ear bent, being pressured. Collective Shout had some pretty rude words about what they perceived as the opposition in games as being perverted fetishists or whatever. But clearly don't care about what was potentially being lost here.

It starts with, with child porn, and then now the pressure is to expand it to legal forms of content that people find unsavory or harmful or don't want kids to see. Because they're rallying cry, that we have to protect the children from seeing this upsetting stuff. If you start seeing that kind of rhetoric, and if you get into it, there are some games which are no longer searchable on Itch, which are about the autobiographical experiences of people who have survived abuse, like Nina Freeman's game Last Call. Or my student Jennifer Jiao Hsia’s game Consume Me is about eating disorders and growing up as a teenager and navigating feelings about her body. [Note: Both developers have since posted publicly that their stories had been delisted for different reasons.] She had it labeled with a sensitive content tag, because there's some upsetting stuff in there, but it's actually exactly the kind of story and experience that would be appropriate for teenage girls to play and see, like, oh, this is about someone like me. It's an autobiographical story about dealing with that. Are we willing to lose that kind of story? Look, in the 1980s maybe somebody would read a Judy Blume book, right? But in the 2020s, an adolescent, a teenager going through a lot of stuff in life, is going to play a game. That's what we're trying to do here is explore that territory, and I think that we're endangering that. Who's going to be the arbiter of what should kids be exposed to? Is it all sensitive content? Who's actually going to decide, and if it's not based on the law, if it's based on the whim of a banker or a CEO? I think we're in really big trouble as a medium, and every, every single game developer should care about that.

Do you see queer developers being impacted disproportionately here?

I think there are a lot of queer developers who are making adult games. Obviously, it's not exclusively queer developers making those games. There are plenty of games on Steam and Itch where the audience and developers are not queer, but it is, I would say, a very large niche of queer people making games for other queer people. It's important because, I would say, it's less about trying to make money and striking it rich in those communities. It's more people making games for each other to say, look, this is how I express the joy of my life, and figuring out who I am and who I love and my sexuality, and making games that are semi autobiographical or sort of fantastical in a way that's autobiographical, and getting to connect with other people, have other people play those games. In some ways, it's a type of community service or community building to make games that have adult content, or that are about intimacy or romance or relationship in ways that might be more or less explicit. So I think, you know,

I would say probably queer creators are disproportionately impacted for that reason, and also are disproportionately disturbed and alarmed by what's going on because there's just a very long history, even before the current federal administration of the United States, of LGBTQ creators being demonetized from platforms like YouTube or being reported as inappropriate content. That's because some political opponents are like, I don't, I don't think kids should be exposed to two boys kissing or something. That's been weaponized again and again, over and over again. Or, you know, oh no, somebody said the word transgender. And so now it has to be, has to be forbidden, or it's too controversial. LGBTQ creators have seen that happen over and over again, and players as well, there's a significant alarm that if they are going after this, even content that's not illegal, but that's taboo, or that's upsetting, or that you wouldn't want a child to see. What's going to be next? Is someone going to try and report or turn a payment processor against a wider swath of people, like any mention of transgender people? Since we are in a federal administration now that has passed executive orders saying, like, no federal funds of any kind may be used to say or do anything related to, quote, transgender ideology, which just means trans people. So trans people are already basically banned from any kind of federally funded activity, but not everybody's complying with that. And so what's next is a climate in which it's not impossible to imagine a bank president or a payment processor saying, well, yeah, maybe it's too risky for us to have anything to do with selling anything that has to do with trans people. Target has pulled a lot of pride and LGBTQ stuff off its shelves, and they're like, yeah, we don't want the trouble. If it's not just a department store, but then a bank or payment processor saying, yeah, we don't have anything to do with that, then just a huge win on censorship that will destroy communities.

What’s the way forward? How do people push back against something like this?

It's very difficult. I think it's going to be terrifying, even for large companies like Valve, to [go against] some of the biggest financial titans in the world that do trillions of dollars in revenue. Even Steam, the largest PC game platform in the world, is only, like a 10th of 1% of the revenues of payment processors. To sort of have that be threatening is apocalyptic. A lot of people are upset with those platforms and saying, Well, we have to convince the platforms to do better. It's my hope that the platforms, like Steam and Itch, can use some of the outcry and honestly the reporting on this issue to help negotiate something that is less dangerous, less potentially metastasizing than censoring all sorts of content.

Who knows? That's all very closed door meetings. Nobody will know whether they're successful in that. But we have to hope that that's the first line of like, can they? Can they work out a deal? The community has to rely on stores like Steam and Itch and even Epic Games Store, who hasn't really been affected in this probably because they only sell larger games. They have had to kind of rely on those stores to actually advocate for games, to be the ones who are like, hey, you know, some games are about difficult topics, and that has to be okay.

Second, you know, I think it's actually kind of unfair that a small development team like the one behind Itch.io has to bear all the weight of figuring out how to cope with these trillion dollar companies coming down on them. I think part of the problem is that the ecosystem has gotten — there are only a few platforms And that's just a general trend in the digital economy over many, many years, consolidation and approaching something that looks like a monopoly. There have been a lot of calls within the last 24 hours for alternative storefronts. But really, it’s not easy to run this type of business, right? And it's not very glamorous, either, and it's just full of people complaining. And before Steam, Valve was a game developer. Now, almost all their business is just running a storefront. It can be all consuming. And they do it, of course, because it's incredibly lucrative, and I'm sure that to a lesser degree, that's true for Itch as well. But there aren't that many people that want to do this that have the interests of the game industry at heart.

But maybe we will see some alternatives cropping up. Maybe there will be some alternatives to using traditional payment processors. A similar thing has happened in Japan, I think, with all sorts of mature content being successfully pressured out of online marketplaces by banks and payment processors, and they've been able to set up alternative economies that use other forms of payments — direct bank transfer or mobile payments or cryptocurrency, things like that. You know, like none of those things are problem free, but I feel like there's going to be more investigation into that kind of thing. And I sense even from it is announcements that what Itch is trying to do is set up a system in which people have to certify whether their games only have content that that meets a list of criteria demanded by the payment processor, and if they don't, then maybe there will be some alternative payment processors, but you know that those games will no longer be able to accept Visa and Mastercard credit card payments. For a certain slice of the market, there are people who really want to play games that deal with serious topics, or that are erotic games of a certain kind, they'll still probably find a way to pay for them, but it is going to take a lot of diversification of this bottleneck of reliance on this small number of huge companies that can be manipulated.

The process

The interview with Clark was about 30 minutes long, which ends up being roughly 3,000 words — 1,000 words longer than the piece that was published on Game File. As you can see form the interview, there were a ton of topics Clark and I touched on during the interview that I didn’t have space to include. That happens a lot with interviews, unfortunately, and it’s the job of the journalist to distill the conversation down to its most salient parts to accurately reflect what the expert source has said to tell an interesting, true story.

I decided, after speaking with Clark, that her input would be best used to reflect the broader context of the situation. The facts of what’s happened are the facts, and I could use other reporting to go through that. Clark has a unique perspective as both an educator and a game developer, so I wanted to highlight that — how Clark felt the influence of payment processors and credit card companies could impact the the adult game community and the wider industry.

I record most interviews (with explicit permission from the person I’m speaking with) but also take notes while we’re talking. I make notes and write down timestamps of stuff that I know I’ll use in a story, something my future self always thanks me for. So, for instance, when Clark said that the censorship we’re seeing is “nothing less than the stunting of an entire creative form,” I made a note of it on paper. That’s a really impactful quote that nails down exactly what she’s saying without mincing words. Another part of the interview that I knew instantly I’d wanted to pull out was the bit about the spectrum of games that Clark’s students make — and why it’s important that they’re able to play around with lots of different ideas, even ones that might make some people uncomfortable.

Clark’s interview is what drives the section of the story under the “broader impact” header, and started with the quote I made note of above, about the “stunting of an entire creative form.” The rest of the section uses the interview to show how Clark backed up that statement, pulling directly from what Clark said about her experience as an educator, game maker, and researcher.

Other times, I’ll re-read the interview in full and highlight or pull out quotes into a new document — stuff that is of high news value, showcases the energy of the interviewee, or succinctly demonstrates the core thrust of what they’re saying. I review these quotes as I’m writing in pull them into the story as needed.

What’s next?

I’ll be back this week with an issue about legal reporting — how and why I trawl court systems to keep on top of lawsuits and other documents. But also breaking down the financial details of it all; I spend hundreds of dollars on legal documents that are “public information” but locked behind government paywalls. I think people should be able to read these, so I make them available in full in the stories I write about them. It’s something that I was often reimbursed for when I was at Vox Media, but now it’s a cost to me as a freelance journalist. I wrote a little about it on BlueSky:

But I’m going to write up a full post covering everything legal and court reporting for next week.