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Back in June, Valve issued expansive Steam guidelines that said games would only be removed from the platform for illegal or “outright trolling” content. At the time, we noted that the unclear definition of “trolling” left a lot of wiggle room for Valve to still define what is and isn’t acceptable content in a game.
Yesterday, Valve took a stab at clarifying what defines “a troll game” in its estimation. These clarifications are welcome, but they raise some questions about how agnostic Valve’s purported value-neutral moderation really is.
The many types of trolls
Some of Valve’s definitions of trolling seem relatively clear-cut. Most everyone would agree that Steam should remove developers that are “trying to scam folks out of their Steam inventory items” or those “looking for a way to generate a small amount of money off Steam through a series of schemes that revolve around how we let developers use Steam keys,” for instance.
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