Your people created the language and you are making them sad. Have a nice day.

Problem is, some of the games forums are extremely dead, or worse, non-extant. At that point it's shouting into a void.

Hey, i'm only low life gamer. but I do know that bugs generally don't appeal to my fellow buddies, capiche?!

Why are people limited to ONLY expressing themselves in a civilized manner? Why should they check themselves before swearing? Why do they need to reflect on the purpose of their post before sharing?

We are not writing professional reviews... we are not getting paid for sharing our thoughts. Our reviews are not appearing in gaming magazines. We are gamers, sharing our thoughts and feelings on a game. Games are ultimately about having fun, an emotional experience, not a cerebral one. I hold that it's inappropriately restrictive to have the position that reviews need to be dry, clinical, methodically analytical products, purged of "uncivilized" words, rather than something that conveys the EMOTIONAL and visceral experience of the gamer.


As I said above, we are not professional reviewers, nor should we be expected to behave as such. Not everyone has a great or even good vocabulary. Not everyone speaks English as a first language. People aren't all adults even. While striving to better oneself is always admirable, I don't support any kind of mandation towards that end. It's completely unfair to tell a teen that they should display the same standards as fifty year old, decades-long, nationally recognized professional reviewers. Most gamers are never going to be sesquipedalians (most people for that matter).


Oooh !!! SOLID idea ! I'm sad that +1 is all I can give.

Oh wow, that's a lot of responses; thank you chaps! I hope you don't mind me bulk-replying to your messages.

So, just to clarify a few things:

Regarding swearing not belonging in reviews: I think this should be up to the reviewer really, which is why I don't think there should be censorship in reviews (more about this below). You can argue it's distasteful but I think it can be part of the tone. I've written analytic, cold-blooded, business-like reviews where I intentionally avoided using swearing or profanity. However, there are times when I like adopting a more informal and colloquial tone, and I will fancy using swearwords. Maybe not OTT like the AVGN, but if that's how the reviewer wants shape it, so be it.

Regarding my comment on censorship on reviews for children's games I'd like to add a few clarifications that may not have been obvious in my original post:
1. I was not aware that this is an 18+ site. Knowing this now, censorship makes even less sense in my eyes.
2. If it were up to me I wouldn't censor any reviews. The only reason I mentioned the family-friendly game reviews is because I don't play them myself and I can see somebody who cares enough making a case for it. But the reality is that's not my fight; I'm not going to be reviewing Ponyworld 8 any time soon.

The opt-in censorship is actually a good idea, but then again, allegedly we're all grown-ups here. If you're old enough to lie about your age to create an account then you're probably not going to learn anything you don't already know around here. ;) ;) ;)

And just to hammer the point home: I wrote a review for Cloudpunk. One of the things I wanted to highlight was the cockpit view. Once I was done my review wouldn't post and I was getting no feedback as to why this was happening. Take a guess at what the problem was... Exactly, cockpit was not allowed because I guess it contains the word cock. This and the character limit just put me off from writing reviews. I'm enjoying Highfleet at the moment a lot and I have so many good things to say about it... but I already know it's not going to fit!

Anyway, is there a way to bring this to GoG's attention or other channels to request these changes?

It goes both ways, not just negative reviews. There are devs that are abusing the system here and it's silly. It doesn't help anything except make user reviews completely useless, both when people post stupidity because a game is too 'woke' or be cause the developer has people creat accounts seemingly with the only intent to post reviews. I agree that disabling reviews and ratings would be preferable to the current status. Link to the Steam reviews. Let them do the heavy lifting (that's a joke of course, but it's what a lot of people do already; check the game out on Steam before buying).

I'm going to say no to this one. Swearing about a product doesn't really tell me anything.

If you say, "This game is ass." (for example) What does that mean exactly?

For all I know, the issue is entirely that the trousers that the player character wears really accentuates his buttcheeks in a way that is really distracting from the task of slaughtering enemies. You really wish that he wore a longer shirt or maybe just different trousers that were not nearly so tight around the ass because looking at that ass is making you uncomfortable.

Or maybe you're just angry because you can't get the game to work with your specific gamepad. The keyboard controls are totally fine and very nice actually. People that have some other gamepad will also run into no issues. It's entirely the gamepad that you invested money into that is the issue because the developers never tested the game on it and therefore don't know it doesn't work with the game. You're calling the game ass because you are just that butthurt about it.

Or maybe there's a VRAM memory leak in the game, but it only affects the specific really expensive video card in your expensive computer. Can't test them all. You're really angry about it because you spent all that money on your hardware only to end up with a worse framerate than us laptop users with integrated graphics.

How very American of you. I mean, I'm not even disagreeing with you here – in principle at least. Swear words do signal a loss of temper, and losing your proverbial shit over a video game, that's just not healthy, is it?

Nonetheless, "civilized discourse" is literally the politicized justification for far reaching censorship in the USA, and from there, e. g. through google and meta, in the rest of the world. It's one of the key methods of tone policing, that means, minorities and the minoritized are not allowed to express their justified anger in an actually visible/disruptive manner. Their hopes, rights and their dignity is taken away in an orderly and 'civilized' manner (a process that should raise our German neck hairs profoundly). Are they to plead for their lives only with the words their masters' God allows?

Yes, "it's only video game reviews", I see that very clearly.
Also, it's only video game reviews on GOG, a teensy site that anchors somewhere between the toes of Valve Corporation, where it holds on for dear life.
And besides, a review filled to the brim with swear words is not likely to be particularly informative.

On the other hand, we're discussing the issue of political review bombing by fake reviewers in a thousand places on this forum. GOG clearly can only remain a viable business partner to game developers if they curb the tide of fake reviews in its entirety. Now I see the very same people who call this utter necessity "censorship" (and even invoke the dystopian nightmare of socialist George Orwell's "1984") clamoring for clear cut censorship of swear words to retain standards of "civil discourse".

But reviews have no standards of discourse whatsoever as long as lying political commenters get to review a game as if they had actually experienced it.

In any review, honesty should be the first consideration, and tone maybe a distant fourth. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of foul language among friends – and the gaming community was pretty much "among friends" a dozen years ago – but if your friends pass the opinion of some clickbait youtuber as their own just to get you to hate and boycott a video game they've never played, absolutely everything is wrong with that.

If I disliking some product why would I wasting time and effort coming up with witty cursing? Short and sweet, then moving on.
NMP
Fucking eh, that is so much right!
Bingo!

I don't expect people to keep their Bridget's Concordance & Book of Yo-Yo tricks at hand, but I can at least expect a minimum standard of a writing level that could pass for secondary school writing class in whatever tongue you would call native. Or is asking for decorum, rhetoric, and clarity of tongue a bit much of a demand?

People can review in their native tongue, it should be reminded. It seems GOG and users oft forget this.

Hey guys, I'll simplify this for you.

Should you be able to express your opinion about a game without having to resort to swearing? Yes.
Is it kind of ridiculous that even in a review of games that are literally porn you can't say "f***"? Also yes.

Thanks. It's easy to get carried away.

Yeah, I get it and I can relate. I myself can't take this kind of stance since I've got fairly rapidly expanding family in the USA. Still, the call for the abolishment of swear words is a quintessentially American one (they'd all die of a heart attack if they had to watch British TV in the evenings ... I mean Morgana even got bonus points calling Alex "little fucker" ... inside joke, sorry). Even my liberal as fuck cousins lower their voice and mutter under their breath when they say "shit". It's their upbringing, they can't help it.

Maybe the protest against what's going on in the States right now must reject those exact Christian/Republican demands to civil discourse, with a vengeance. Thanks to these standards, this is one of the key forms of free speech we do not have, that is censored online (not talking about insults, just swear words).

While I kind of agree with both your points (requests), they don't impact me much, and you can certainly get around the first issue, by linking to a post (or series of posts) in the game's specific forum ... which means you can also get around things like editing and updating.

Swearing, which is something I do regularly, but only in a meaningful way and in proper context, is easy enough to go without, at least for me. We all have to avoid it in certain situations anyway.