Last week, the game, in which players prowl a school campus from the point of view of an attacker, had its scheduled release canceled by Valve Corporation, the software and technology company that operates Steam.īut far from backing away from controversial games entirely, Steam has now decided to “allow everything” on its platform, it said on Wednesday, carving out disqualifying exceptions only for content it finds to be “illegal, or straight-up trolling.”ĭoug Lombardi, a Valve spokesman, emphasized that Active Shooter would never have made the cut.
It was a role-playing game called Active Shooter, however, that recently inspired broad protest, including condemnation from the parents of victims of the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. Others have more innocuous titles that conceal the darker thrust of their game play: In the forthcoming Kindergarten, for instance, cartoon children are shot in the head by the school principal or hacked apart by the janitor. Some of the titles recently available from the online video game marketplace Steam have names - like Suicide Simulator - that are fairly self-explanatory.
