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A moderation article from Ars Technica.

According to the article, Garry's Mod has operated under very relaxed rules from its start in 2006, leaving server admins to create their own more restrictive rules as they wanted. However, it recently adopted a game-wide rule banning Nazi glorification, which includes "display of swastikas, the nazi salute or any other glorification of nazism, even for 'roleplay purposes'".

Apparently the ban came about because of a change of heart from the game creator, Garry Newman, over the years as he grew older and became a parent. From the article:

"When I was younger, in my 20s, I had the attitude that anything goes," Newman said in a direct message conversation with Ars. "People shouldn't be on the Internet if they can't handle the real world. It's not my job to babysit your kids."

Now, as a parent, Newman said his attitude became "less black and white. There's a gradient of time where you're giving your kids more freedom online and you're trying to let them into new areas to explore because you think they're safe. We really should make sure as much as possible that the assumption is correct."

"I think to myself, what if they get on one of these servers with these [nazi] nutters," Newman tweeted. "What will they learn? What will come to be acceptable to them?"

I thought this particular change was interesting for a few reasons:

• NationStates adopted a similar rule change in May 2021, and just recently ran into controversy when trying to enforce the change against old content.
• The article mentions the 'anything goes' attitude about moderation in the 2000s, which I posted some thought about a few months back.
• The rule change applies to roleplay content. A few weeks back we had a discussion on how to handle roleplay content with our discrimination rules, and decided that it should apply to them too. Essentially we made the same decision they did, just on discriminatory content instead of Nazi glorification (which has always been banned in Wintreath).