So adding a content warning can be a quick conversation between a few people, whereas AAA games would have more hoops to jump through to add any such warning. While that franchise recognizability helps players know what they’re getting into, games being made by hundreds of people are hamstrung by protocols smaller teams aren’t. “So that exact reason why they’re so appealing also means there’s this potential for misunderstanding, for people to not know that the game they’re buying might have something that’s uncomfortable for them.” “No offense to God of War, but you know exactly what you’re getting when you buy God of War 15, right? Where most often tend to not only be new IP, but they tend to be offering something fresh and innovative,” she says. A big game marketed by huge companies is more established when a player buys in, so there’s less unknown to deal with than an indie game people may just happen upon. Short says she feels the separate standards between AAA and indie games when it comes to content warning feels wrapped in franchise recognizability. “So nobody is expecting anything from it, right? They’re expecting it to just be violence and whatever, but because Boyfriend Dungeon was trying to help people and they did warn people that there is a character who was a stalker, he’s a scary bad dude, then people were like, ‘they should have done more.’ They didn’t do it perfectly, therefore they get torn down because they tried at all.” Despite some heavy subject material, Cyberpunk 2077 (and most AAA games) don’t feature any content warnings, which are more commonplace in indie games. ![]() I kind of bounced off it myself, but there is a lot of crazy crap in there and they don’t tell you upfront,” Northway tells Fanbyte. “My husband’s playing Cyberpunk right now. Northway pointed to Cyberpunk 2077, which has plotlines about sexual assault, suicide, and other possibly triggering subject matter, but only features a warning about a since-altered sequence that could trigger an epileptic seizure. Sarah Northway, Lead Developer for I Was a Teenage Exocolonist echoed that sentiment, and says she felt the inclusion of the content warning was, in and of itself, opening it up to a criticism not often levied at AAA games with much more explicit content. This is just y’all being kind of dickheads because, to a point, ‘okay they added the content warnings, why are we still having this conversation?’ It just felt like a hate mob for no reason.” “It was just like, ‘alright, this is no longer constructive criticism. “I understand wanting to have that trigger warning for stalking because that is very scary for a lot of people, but I feel like it got blown proportion,” Lalonders says. Eric, the antagonist of Boyfriend Dungeon. ValiDate Lead Producer Dani Lalonders tells Fanbyte she thought the backlash the game received was “very stupid,” and stopped feeling like meaningful criticism after the content warning was updated. For Short, she says this was an indication that some of the criticism was coming from people “not operating in good faith.” Boyfriend Dungeon’s content warning as it exists today.įor other indie devs, the controversy that followed Boyfriend Dungeon was both a disheartening example of online harassment, and a learning experience for how to handle content warnings in their own games. Then a bunch of people decided to take advantage and get angry for unrelated reasons that there was feminine or queer-friendly content taking up space.”įor a window of time, Boyfriend Dungeon became a lightning rod for criticism of its inclusion of the stalker plotline, to the point where voice actor Alexander Gross received online harassment for just playing Eric, the character the content warning was referring to. “Because, honestly, it was mostly just, we had a slightly inaccurate content warning for a few days. “I’m sad that people think was controversial,” Kitfox co-founder Tanya Short tells Fanbyte. The original warning, shown at the beginning of the game, said the dating sim/dungeon crawler “may include references to unwanted advances, stalking, and other forms of emotional manipulation.” The “may” was doing a lot of heavy lifting, as the stalking storyline was actually the game’s main plot.įollowing the criticism, the content warning was updated, but the floodgates were opened up for Boyfriend Dungeon to become a case study in the effectiveness of content warnings, and weaponizing the issue to tear down games that were inclusive, sometimes by people these games are for. ![]() ![]() It’s been a year since Boyfriend Dungeon came under fire online at launch for a content warning that developer Kitfox Games admits was insufficient.
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