Let's talk about censorship.

When people criticise developers like Ubisoft for not including female playable characters in a game like Assassin's Creed: Unity, it does not prevent the game from being made! Nobody is forcing anyone to include female characters! There is not some guerilla army of political correctness enforcers waiting to round up and destroy game discs because of their bullshit content! Politically unempowered groups - such as feminists in gaming culture - cannot force change on anyone, because THEY ARE UNEMPOWERED! Their lack of political power is the source of problem?!? I'm amazed that people consider this a complicated or contentious statement.

The majority of decision-making power in the games industry rests with predominantly straight, predominantly white, men, and their disproportionate possession of political power has a profound influence on gaming culture. That's not to say that herds of straight white men gather round in meeting rooms and devise secret plans to oppress minorities in their game designs - few people actively make a point of putting bullshit politics into their game for its own sake - but when a team is up against a wall, the decisions of how to assign budgets and manpower will tend to be made by a straight, white man, with all the bias and assumptions and experience that comes along with that. Adding female protagonists would cost time and money, and they just don't consider it a priority. And why should they? Why would a demographic that has always been catered to at great length put much stock in issues of representation? It's a perfectly rational explanation, but understanding the process doesn't change the end result that you've made yet another game about featureless white guys stabbing people in the face.

Where there is censorship in the games industry, I would say it comes from two sources. The first is government regulation of things like sex and violence, which isn't something developers can directly control (indirectly, they can always lobby or vote for different politicians, etc). The second is internal censorship within companies, of the sort where an executive (who has probably been too busy with other things to look at your game until a few months before launch) will look at an alpha build of the game and demand changes based on 'what the players want' - think of this as the kind of censorship that censors commercially risky design decisions, like having a non-white protagonist. How can you tell that these are the only sources of censorship on a game? BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE ONLY TWO GROUPS OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE ACTUAL, DIRECT POWER OVER THE DEVELOPMENT TEAM.

If a game critic calls you out over an ill-judged racist joke in your game (for example) and it goes viral and sparks a wave of public disappointment and lost sales, that's not censorship! Even if a distribution platform like Steam removed you from their store, or a magazine refuses to write about it, that's still not censorship! Your game is still intact, just as you made it - nobody has forcibly destroyed your master copies or thrown you in jail. What many angry defenders of the status quo describe as "censorship", I would describe as "your audience reacting to the design choices you have made with your product", just as they would if you manufactured a car with a giant spike protruding from the center of the steering wheel. Developers face a simple business decision over whether to adapt to this or not. And is it really so surprising that, as the average age of gamers continues to rise, there might be a growing segment of the market who react like grown-ups when presented with bigotry??

Oh man, and can I just take a moment to say how infuriating it is when self-declared True Gamers wade into discussion threads about immature content and start defending the developers on their behalf? I should preface this by saying that there really are some issues of nuance and context to bear in mind when calling out shitty games and the people who make them - for example, only insiders will understand the events that steered the game into its final form, and few of those in the know will be in a position to speak out about them. Speaking of which, I read a great thing last week about how the power structure of a typical corporation basically shifts all sense of responsibility onto someone higher up the ladder and then out onto the conceptual shoulders of "shareholders", which basically frees all frontline workers and managers from feeling personally responsible for anything they do, but sadly I can't find the link for that. Sorry.

But no, when you read some perfectly valid criticism of a game you've helped to make, and then see some random kid in the comments giving a flimsy and inaccurate defence on your behalf, when YOU know the REAL reason why something came out a certain way is because of some seemingly-unrelated decision an engineer made six months ago which slowly escalated into a serious technical limitation which you simply don't have the necessary resources to correct, but because your contract forbids you from discussing such things publicly you have to just sit and watch this ignorant child make you look like a plum... well, you have to learn to take some deep cleansing breaths and move on.

If you ever feel the urge to publicly second-guess the development process that led to something terrible being included in the game, please consider not doing that instead.