I played Horses

I played Horses, the controversial game banned from Steam, and then Epic. 

The game developers mentioned they revised the game several times trying to appease Valve, which is a losing proposition because they were never going to review a game in the first place. Valve in general does not want to individually check individual games for individual context. This just makes them look like the monopoly they are, being unaccountable and unanserable, and their unspoken censorship code is now the defacto industry standard. For a time they had language that said they would not publish games that were "straight up trolling" but how do you define this? Much like the billion dollar CS gun skin gambling market they oversee and profit from, as well as taking 30% of all computer game revenue for themselves, videogames are now in thrall to a bunch of indifferent tech bros from Bellevue who should really be getting some fresh air. 

Horses for better or worse has a kind of crude look to the models and scenery. It would not look out of place 10 years ago in the same genre of Unity art game. Models have incomplete or studdering animations that don't loop correctly. Certain triggers are hard to find. The game has a lot of rough edges that come down to being built by normal people and not dedicated AAA developers. 

All the nudity in horses is censored, which feels like a figleaf done to try to get the game unbanned. Or it's hard to tell if it was there in the first place. It's hard to play a game like horses where a the theme is dehumanization, and part of that dehumanization is forced nudity, and have that nudity be covered. And then you load up Marvel Rivals and half of the skins for female heros have their ass all the way out. Everyday we are beset by contradictions and double standards and have to pretend things are "fine". The real danger is pointing out these contradictions - even though it will do nothing. Power needs to live within and enforce double standards as a way to assert itself. This happens to also be one of the main themes of Horses.  

Within the world of the game, sexuality is strictly policed by an unmentioned and unspecified moral code. Sexuality for pleasure is not allowed, but is allowed as a method of subjegation and abuse, but only by those in power. If you cross this line and do something "sinful", you are then permanently dehumanized and subject to the abuse. Participating in the abuse is not sinful.

The Farmer is caught between these contradictions and as a result cannot hold onto them. There's several scenes where he gets drunk and dons a horse mask like the ones his captives are forced to wear. It's revealed that he wears a locked chastity belt and cannot pleasure himself. He has a fucked up little shrine in his room dedicated to body parts and the various sins / virtues of different limbs. He participates in the abuse, and he knows it's not normal, but can't say that it is because he's so afraid of being dehumanized and reciving the abuse that he puts out. 

If Valve puts Horses back on the store, it risks being de-banked by payment processors, which would put itself outside of the rest of the world. Its fine living within this contradiction because Gabe Newell gets to buy another yacht.

I think Horses is going to be more infamous for getting banned than it's actual content. I saw two movies that were banned at the time of release, Pink Flamingos and Battle Royale. Pink Flamingos also features people living in a contradiction, but has the catharsis of Babs shooting them to death in front of reporters. Battle Royale also lives within a contradiction, but all I could think of was that school shootings are sadly so common now that we don't need the military to force whole school class to kill each other every year - it happens by virtue of living in the United States. 

There is nothing more fucked up than reality. Out of all these pieces of media the most disturbing thing I saw was a homeless person in a wheel chair in the middle of the road, slumped over from the fentanyl, holding some kind of sign begging for money. it was raining. We are all several bad turns from being that person.