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!