Recently, the site admin team took the unprecedented action of unpublishing a run; this news post talks about what happened and the changes we're making to the site
movie rules as a result.
In brief, a user submitted a run for an
unlicensed game containing a graphic corpse in the end credits. During the judging process, the focus was around determining if the game ran afoul of the existing
adult game policy and the game was deemed to not fall into that category. After the run was published with the offending end credit censored, multiple TASVideos members spoke up to let site staff know that the game itself was explicitly focused on acts of genocide. We unpublished the run as soon as we became aware of the sensitive nature of the content.
To say it upfront, the site staff would like to collectively apologize to the affected communities for not understanding the nature of the game. This run never should have been published in the first place and we've adjusted the
movie rules page to clarify the site's policies around these types of games and content to note they are not permitted on the site in any form:
- Games and content that break our site conduct policy are not permitted
- Specifically, this includes games and content that promote targeted harassment, violence, and/or bigotry towards specific individuals
- Games and content deemed adults-only are not permitted
There were multiple points where a lack of cultural knowledge and awareness led to the run being published and going forward we want to make sure we're diligently identifying runs like this in the judging process before they're published. We feel the rule changes adequately cover this case without being overly restrictive and hope the changes along with your feedback, even for published runs, helps prevent a situation like this happening again. We'd like to thank everyone who spoke up and helped us understand the situation better and we always welcome that same constructive feedback.