I want to offer a counterpoint, the overzealous enforcement of the stated terms will result in excessive censorship that will cause more harm than good. For example in this case, if you strictly follow the rule that prohibits "content that participates in racial intolerance" then this applies to games that portray racism to tell a story or to educate (such as a visual novel about the life of a minority in a very hostile, racist environment). And "content that participates in sexism" will also ban all games that do contain such events but is no way centered around it. Such as an LGBTQ Visual Novel depicting how a trans person is treated in society. So you are saying by strictly enforcing this rule, let's ban even educational content or just games that use such elements to show a point/tell a story.
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I see your point and I agree with you. Perhaps I didn’t explain myself. I believe the rules prohibit content that “promotes or participate” in sexism or racism. By “participate” I think it means “take part”, actively involving for a cause, not just mentioning a topic for educational purposes (that is something different, it’s not actually advocating or promoting discrimination, it’s the opposite: educating to not discriminate).
It’s clear when a game is just depicting discrimination to tell a personal story, and when a game is presenting sexual abuse for the gratification of the viewers. We all know the difference when we see it, right?
> By “participate” I think it means “take part”, actively involving for a cause, not just mentioning a topic for educational purposes
I had the same definition in mind for the term "participate". I'm not talking about works that only mention sexism or racism from an offhand remark, there are works that go extensively into detail. To sufficiently tell its story, a game may need to "get down and dirty" with its imagery and scenes. To Kill a Mockingbird had many openly racist quotes and violence stemming from racism. If we strictly enforce the rule that prohibits content that takes part in openly showing racism then we are also banning works like To Kill a Mockingbird.
> It’s clear when a game is just depicting discrimination to tell a personal story, and when a game is presenting sexual abuse for the gratification of the viewers.
You are right that it is clear, but currently, the rule you quoted only prohibits the games from participating in sexism and racism, the rule makes no distinction between depicting this content for the gratification of the viewer and for a different purpose so enforcing it strictly will result in excessive censorship.
I recommend the proposed change to an extensive revision of the rules rather than excessive censorship.
I couldn’t agree more with you. I for sure support your suggestion that a revision of the rules is needed. That is probably the best solution that avoids the two extremes (either excessive censorship like you mentioned or not enforcing the rules at all, both equally bad I’d say).
So, moving forward, how can we ask for a revision of the rules?
We could make a thread on the feedback forum section to propose the change to the Itch.io ToS (and also better enforcement). Hopefully, we can form a constructive discussion around this issue with the mods and also other Itch.io users on how to modify the rules to properly single out problematic submissions.