At 11/19/13 10:23 AM, CrackerJack30 wrote: Some will hate you for this, some will like you, in this special case I would agree with your decision. As long as there isn't too much censorship on NG, most people here will accept such actions - even when they have to bite their tongue from time to time.

But that's wrong
http://strawpoll.me/732754/r

I actually saw that game and I thought it was a bit of a distasteful idea, but I have seen worse. I didn't play it but I didn't think it would garner any unusual attention, possibly that it would eventually get a low score and simply get blammed. However, seeing things from the eyes of the Sandy Hook parents, I can understand taking it down and would respect this website less if it ignored the pleas of those affected and upheld its rights for their own sake, a practice that rarely sees a positive outcome.

It was good that most of the parents understood the message and simply thought it wasn't worth it, I only hope there weren't too many who will go on to condemn this website from the face of it.

At 11/19/13 09:51 AM, NeonSpider wrote: I know this reeks of "If you don't like it, do it yourself" but really the only way to be satisfied is to do something yourself. Be your own boss. Do things your way. Go for it!

Like asking the throngs of people upset about YouTube's G+ integration to make their own video portals. This argument is retarded.

At 11/19/13 05:27 AM, MightyFool wrote: I have an idea! Let's vote!

http://strawpoll.me/732754

not a bad idea, but the way you presented it may induce a bias, who is more likely to browse this topic? people who agree with Tom, or disagree with Tom? also, it isn't that simple, both the reason he gave, and the decision are individually important, while I do not agree with the reason he gave, respect for the victims, I do understand that there are other reasons it might have been wise, though unfortunate, and do not have the information to make such a determination.

At 11/19/13 10:26 AM, MightyFool wrote:

At 11/19/13 10:23 AM, CrackerJack30 wrote: Some will hate you for this, some will like you, in this special case I would agree with your decision. As long as there isn't too much censorship on NG, most people here will accept such actions - even when they have to bite their tongue from time to time.

But that's wrong
http://strawpoll.me/732754/r

To be honest, I wouldn't create a poll knowing full well there are a bunch of kids on this site who want to keep pretending that freedom of speech = freedom from accountability.

my support, you have it.
your site (kinda), your rules.
dont know the game, or the author
if it was removed for things you defended in the past, it must've gone past the limit of good taste and common decency

At 11/19/13 10:43 AM, spiritofdoom wrote: my support, you have it.
your site (kinda), your rules.
dont know the game, or the author
if it was removed for things you defended in the past, it must've gone past the limit of good taste and common decency

Then the site motto needs to be changed to "Everything by anyone we choose"

Well I'm never reading News 8 (wtnh.com) again.

At 11/19/13 07:54 AM, MightyFool wrote: I thought Newgrounds together with 4chan were the last true free speech bastions of the Internet. Such a shame you made this decision Tom.

Newgrounds will turn into a political correct shithole in a few years, watch my words.

There's a difference between political correctness and courtesy. If this were a general game about school shootings, it might not have attracted as much attention. Some might have linked it to Sandy Hook and say it's too soon, but the developer could say it was a general dissection of the effect of guns and thus should be judged for its merits. If that kind of game had been taken down, that would be political correctness; censorship for the sake of not having the slightest possibility to be taken out of context and offend a small group of people that may or may not exist.

The game that was made was explicitly made based on the Sandy Hook shootings and so it hit very close to home for the parents who were affected. They basically re-experienced their children's deaths and no-one should have to do that. That's discourteous; placing your message in a light that will blatantly offend, shock or horrify a specific set of people either for that exact purpose or simply because the artist didn't care about those that he would clearly affect. The game was taken down because the people who were directly affected expressed their concern, not a band of activists, pleading for the sake of a minority group.

4chan is a perfect example of this, no-one there cares about free speech anymore, it's just about saying stuff that will rile someone up. They're not expressing an opinion and invoking their right to have it, they're saying something glaringly offensive in the hope that someone will be offended and revel in the fact that they can do nothing about it. If anyone tried that here, it would just get blammed or ignored because no thought or passion would go into it. This game had a message, and a passionate one, but it was expressed in the wrong way, so it received attention, which garnered criticism.

Just imagine you were the parents in this situation, seeing a game based on your child's death. You would be mortified that anyone would want to make or even play a game based on that, and you would come to ask why anyone WOULD want to play a game with such a subject matter. As it happens, the parents did seem to check the game before they asked for it to be taken down, and some of them did understand that it was trying to send a message rather than to just be offensive.

This is simply a case of there being less people directly involved in the original event than there are who weren't and so the majority just wouldn't understand what those people must be feeling. It wouldn't be as easy as "go somewhere else" because it would stick with them just as badly as their own children's deaths. This is a very specific case that I think Tom made the right decision on. If he makes a habit of it, I'm sure you'd be all too eager to show him the error of his ways.

Sorry for the long post!

i dont know how gun control works there in the US but here in my country if some is caught useing a gun in daylight and not hunting in forest or some place far away from civilization you go to jail and you risk life sentence and im not kidding our weapon dealing here the police practicly knows when and where the gun was shot because when you buy a gun you give the police all your data and finger prints(legal terms) if you get caught with a gun without autorization they take your gun +5-15 years behind bars and guns are a tad bit expensive here so no one really buy's them only the rich people who like going on trips and hunt for fun normal person would not waste its money on.... guns

Just dropping my 2 cents in here.

I've never been one to shy away from making very distasteful shock-value content. I've always enjoyed the freedom to both express myself and just be a total asshole here on NG. That's kind of who PsychoGoldfish is.

But in the duality that is my life, Josh Tuttle is first and foremost a father and a family man.

If my kids were ever taken away from me in ANY tragedy, and somebody created something that recreated them dying, I would be very upset. Now, I would probably not fight the existence of that content, but I can imagine it would certainly reopen any emotional wounds I suffered.

The parents of the Sandy Hook victims don't have the dual life I do. Maybe a part of them gets it, maybe not. The media, however, only wants to take things like these games and exploit them for ratings. And the way the media handles these things would definitely just re-open the wounds of the families.

Taking this game down is not about money, or stifling creativity. The game wasn't removed when it was submitted, it had a good run and a lot of people received the message it was created to send.

This was about one parent respecting other parents and just doing something to maybe ease their pain a little.

We've been doing a lot of good things here on NG the past few years. We've done a lot of growing up. It would be a shame to let some media controversy pull us back down.

At 11/19/13 10:56 AM, Rustygames wrote:

At 11/19/13 10:43 AM, spiritofdoom wrote: my support, you have it.
your site (kinda), your rules.
dont know the game, or the author
if it was removed for things you defended in the past, it must've gone past the limit of good taste and common decency

Then the site motto needs to be changed to "Everything by anyone we choose"

Nonsense. Flashes get blammed and flashes that break the rules (like being stolen, the flash in discussion is not rulebreaking in my opinion) get unpublished by portal mods. If anything, the slogan has been always wrong.

Looking back at the thread, I see that most are disappointed with the given moral card as reason for taking the flash off. It woul have been probably more honest to say straight up something like "I am sorry guys, but due to our past offensive content we have lost most advertisers so we have to play more nicely now, otherwise we go bankrupt and have to take the site off."

That's the situation. The moral point is valid and respectable but Newgrounds can literally not afford to lose advertisers over one offensive flash. It doesn't matter if you don't find it offensive. The advertisers show their products and are not happy to see their baby clothing next to a school shooting game. Yes, it sucks. But I want to see Newgrounds survive through those already financially pressing times.

I do however fully understand that Tom didn't say it like that. It doesn't sound good and it's just punching holes in the blanket of hope. Saying it outright would also give the advertisers a tool to put more pressure on Newgrounds to take more stuff that they find questionable off. In all honesty, the way he handled it was the most smart way in this delicate situation that is gathered with landmines left and right.

At 11/18/13 11:58 AM, TomFulp wrote: Over the years, a number of highly offensive games and movies have been published on Newgrounds and despite the hatemail and being dropped by just about every ad company in existence, we held firm on a policy of anti-censorship. Today, however, I pulled a reversal on that policy and maybe it was a huge mistake or maybe it was the right thing to do, I'm sure there will be a variety of opinions on the matter.

It's not like we don't already slip on the censorship policy. We've removed racist and homophobic stuff (moreso than YouTube I would say) and we remove shovelware games built off common templates with zero passion.

This game, however, had a certain level of artfulness and craftsmanship to it. There was a visual and technical quality that revealed a serious level of effort and passion. It also had a political message I personally agree with; a statement on gun control and the problem of gun violence in the US. It attempted to demonstrate how things can play out differently with changes in our gun laws. It made you feel and it made you think.

It did so, however, in the context of the Sandy Hook massacre, recreating the event and putting you in the role of the shooter.

Newgrounds has faced harsh criticism in the past for standing firm on not censoring distasteful material, namely games about school shootings. All I can say is that this game took things to a new level in terms of the age of the victims and the realism of the terror they faced on that day.

I was personally contacted by Sandy Hook parents and they expressed their understanding of what the game was attempting to communicate, but also expressed the sadness and horror it made them feel, and their desire to have it removed. Today I'm choosing respect for the Sandy Hook parents over respect for NG's censorship policies.

Either decision on this matter puts a knot in my stomach. I'm of course interested in hearing thoughts on the matter, especially from artists on the site.

No , the Censorship is big mistake , if we do this a loot of great games , movies , everything will be ruined like the Pico School.
I absolutly agree with CyberDevil if you do this NG will be really bad , imagine a NG when everything will be checked , thanks
to this almost every submission on the NG may be named `Politically Uncorrect` and blammed.

Please dont do that , its like ACTA , Please dont kill the NG !

You are an idiot. We have had zero threats from any of our advertisers, and money/advertising isn't even a factor here. Look at the sites that advertise on NG. REALLY look. It's all games cashing in on big boobs and anime, not big corporate brands that have to worry about damage control.

It's probably hard for some of you younger kids to empathize with, but most of us NG admins are well into our 30's and half of us have families of our own. We're not the same angsty kids we were back in the early days of NG and as we've grown, so has our respect for people touched by tragedy.

At 11/19/13 11:26 AM, Asandir wrote: Looking back at the thread, I see that most are disappointed with the given moral card as reason for taking the flash off. It woul have been probably more honest to say straight up something like "I am sorry guys, but due to our past offensive content we have lost most advertisers so we have to play more nicely now, otherwise we go bankrupt and have to take the site off."

At 11/19/13 11:31 AM, n21s wrote: No , the Censorship is big mistake , if we do this a loot of great games , movies , everything will be ruined like the Pico School.
I absolutly agree with CyberDevil if you do this NG will be really bad , imagine a NG when everything will be checked , thanks
to this almost every submission on the NG may be named `Politically Uncorrect` and blammed.

Please dont do that , its like ACTA , Please dont kill the NG !

Oh quit overreacting. Stuff like Pico's School is never going away. And we're not going to be taking down movies just because they might be controversial. We're just trying to be decent people (I know that's a concept many of you have a hard time with). This will be like every other stand Tom has ever taken on the site. Everyone will rage about how its going to end Newgrounds, and in a year nothing will really have changed.

At 11/19/13 08:14 AM, Troisnyx wrote:

At 11/19/13 08:09 AM, MightyFool wrote:

I have a simple answer to this -- the limit to one's freedom is the freedom of another.

Live and learn.

So my rights end where your feelings begin?

No, but your rights end where my rights begin. If everyone claimed the freedom to bash the Sandy Hook people who were dead and profit off it, that would not leave any freedoms for parents to be parents, and do the right thing for their lost children -- i.e. love them, and speak out as they do.

I speak as someone who has lost my mother and three siblings -- it would be so easy for people to claim the freedom of speech to slander my mother and siblings, but the whole purpose of freedoms is to make us human -- and untrammelled powers only makes us inhuman, and you know it.

many people have tried to counter this by saying "if you don't like it, don't watch it" this is not the issue, The matter at hand is whether you can love, and morn your loved ones with such content around, or even possibly when exposed to it, I disagree with this, seeing others use your tragedy, and even perhaps trivialize it, might be painful, but it will not make you callus to it, and I believe that emotional pain does not trump freedom of expression, the line for quite a while has been set at slander, or lying to damage others (as well as copy write laws), and this does not reportedly do that, so although you may feel pain, your rights are not being trampled on. (or at least no more so then can be avoided without trampling the rights of others even more, one's rights do not end when another began, their is quite a bit of overlap)
Moreover, I believe that if anything, censoring this does more to hurt your rights then it does to help it, you would want to stand up for what you're lost ones believed in, correct? Do you think they would want this? For their story to be swept over the rug, and efforts to advance laws that would have stopped their murder swept under the rug, while hurting the ability of others to speak freely? If you truly want to remember them, should you not act for their interests, instead of to minimize your pain?

At 11/18/13 11:58 AM, TomFulp wrote: Today I'm choosing respect for the Sandy Hook parents over respect for NG's censorship policies.

i really respect your choice Tom Fulp, and i admire you for doing so, because this proves you have a good heart, and you care about people's feelings.

however, i hope you will not start removing everything with even the slightest humour and/or violence from the portal, because that would be.. err too much.

also, you said that you will remove games that are ''shovelware''.
why? i think games, as long as they dont offend someone or something, should not be removed like that, because its not bad that those games are made from companies...

just saying.

At 11/19/13 11:34 AM, PsychoGoldfish wrote: You are an idiot. We have had zero threats from any of our advertisers, and money/advertising isn't even a factor here. Look at the sites that advertise on NG. REALLY look. It's all games cashing in on big boobs and anime, not big corporate brands that have to worry about damage control.

It's probably hard for some of you younger kids to empathize with, but most of us NG admins are well into our 30's and half of us have families of our own. We're not the same angsty kids we were back in the early days of NG and as we've grown, so has our respect for people touched by tragedy.

Good job on not reading not all of my post. I said that respecting the children and the wishes of the parents if respectable. and a good reason to take the flash off. What Wade said earlier in this very thread made it sound to me like advertisers play to - albeit a very small extent - a role here and I based my post off that. Yes, I was probably wrong and misunderstood his posts. And don't call me a clueless youngster. I lost a fair amount of my family members in tragic ways and can - although of course not entirely - relate to the feelings of the parents.

I am however disappointed that you decided to straight up insult me. Will not waste my time in the future to stand up for the site when the admins run wild on me for that.

At 11/19/13 11:44 AM, chris-the-stick2 wrote: also, you said that you will remove games that are ''shovelware''.
why? i think games, as long as they dont offend someone or something, should not be removed like that, because its not bad that those games are made from companies...

The problem with shovelware is there are essentially sweatshops out there that reskin the same engines over and over, several times a day, for the sake of running some Mochi ads or whatever and getting some views on NG. The problem was getting worse and worse before we cracked down. Even now there are a lot of dubious games that should probably be removed, but we do give some wiggle room. It would be preferred that every game be submitted by the people who made it and that they made it with a passion for that individual game, vs the desire to just get as many games up each day as possible under multiple accounts.

At 11/19/13 11:57 AM, Asandir wrote: I am however disappointed that you decided to straight up insult me. Will not waste my time in the future to stand up for the site when the admins run wild on me for that.

There. You took the bait.

Honestly, I don't believe you're an idiot. You actually contribute a lot of good stuff on the site. However, I knew seeing something on the internet that offended you would get under your skin. So, should I censor myself because calling you an idiot hurt your feelings? Should you suddenly drop out of a community you obviously love because of one decision one admin made?

o shit o man moderator fight holay crap

At 11/18/13 11:58 AM, TomFulp wrote: Over the years...

You are in control, Tom. You have discretion. There is no need to draw hard lines in the sand about what is and what is not suitable for submitting to the portals.
Taking issues on a case-by-case basis is difficult; it requires examination, analysis, and sometimes the guts to break from precedent. For this reason, we are all too often tempted to simply create a "law of the land" - some big blanket of a rule from which to make judgments in black and white.

It's a violation of law for someone to run a stop sign. There is however, nothing in the law that dictates whether or not a police officer shall issue the offender a summons. The police officer has discretion, and should be examining all the facts and circumstances surrounding the offense (is the violator rushing to the hospital because they're about to give birth? is it a crowded intersection during rush hour? and so forth). A cop shouldn't automatically write tickets when he observes offenses - that's lazy. He should write tickets when he has examined the totality of the circumstances and determined that a ticket will be an appropriate means to deter future unlawful driving behavior.

"Right" or "wrong" are not things that I have a place to judge. Just know that I think you've done well to make an executive decision here in the face of two conflicting ideals, and to have done it under your own consideration rather than a written-in-stone mandate.

Keep up the good work.

I've been visiting this cite for years, and in my adolescence I would have very much been against this decision. But today I can be a little more reasonable, or at the very least apply my education. I agree with Tom's decision here. Although it does violate a long-time policy of Newgrounds it seems to me that we have encountered a classical ethical dilemma of necessary evil. Kantian ethics provides no means of answering this dilemma and we are left with the answer given by Jean-Paul Sartre - Choose. This is your site Tom and this was a tough decision. From a purely logical perspective I believe you chose the lesser of evils given that people who are genuinely interested can still find the game. I ask though that you be careful not to treat this decision as a policy in the future. Anytime someone objects to certain content the situation and the objector's arguments must be considered within their unique socio-cultural framework. Sometimes this will mean a letter stating that while some may object to a submission's content you feel that it successfully achieves a degree of artistic representation that while shocking is not intended to be offensive and thus has a place on this site. I am sure you have written several e-mails to this effect. In short I support your choice Tom and hope that you will continue to treat evaluate these issues on a case-by-case basis using the same reasoning and judgement you applied here.

At 11/19/13 12:01 PM, PsychoGoldfish wrote:

At 11/19/13 11:57 AM, Asandir wrote: I am however disappointed that you decided to straight up insult me. Will not waste my time in the future to stand up for the site when the admins run wild on me for that.

There. You took the bait.

Hook line and sinker ;)

At 11/19/13 12:01 PM, PsychoGoldfish wrote: There. You took the bait.

Honestly, I don't believe you're an idiot. You actually contribute a lot of good stuff on the site. However, I knew seeing something on the internet that offended you would get under your skin. So, should I censor myself because calling you an idiot hurt your feelings? Should you suddenly drop out of a community you obviously love because of one decision one admin made?

You are right, you shouldn't censor yourself. I am indeed "gifted" with a thin skin so to say. Losing family members and my own unpleasent health situation ate away from me. That is however, not an exuse for turning my own speculations into facts. I am glad that we talked about it and I will stay with Newgrounds as long as I can. In lots of ways, it helped me to push through and small things like keeping my weekly interviews up motivate to keep going.

Too bad i didn't have the opportunity to try it but i'd agree that keeping stuff on NG cleaner is a good idea specially in topics like school shootings and other pretty hardcore stuff promoting hate towards certain types of ppl. There's nothing bad in some really funny gay jokes and even racial ones as long they're not really full of evil. In the end there's no point in keeping 'no censorship' policies when it hurts the site, rendering less revenue and pushing ad companies away. ng for me is a place of brilliant creation, real art and entertainment, not a front of political battles where some guy can be controversial just for sake of being in the spotlight. cheers tom.

Holy shit, 20 pages in 24 hours...

I think you've done the wrong thing, but for the right reason. If i was in your position i would have done the same thing out of respect for the parents, but don't just go folding on us for any old pressure group. thankfully this was probably a once in a lifetime thing.

This is not the first time that Tom delete a game because bad press.

http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1310682

NEWGROUNDS IS DEAD
It just became a stupid place, in the past people could come here and post whatever work they had done and that was it.

Tom was a good guy, now everything is about money

No more killing celebrities and clubbing seals...