Legion said:
While I understand the sentiment, doesn't that mean you oppose modern military shooters in case they cause a reaction for a soldier suffering from Shell Shock/PTSD?
Should we have our media not portray anything that could negatively impact somebody suffering from an extreme level of trauma?
I don't see how one can be justified and the other not. Like how people claim that "Boobs promotes sexism" but very few will support the idea that "Violent games promote killing."
It just seems somewhat hypocritical to me.
The first thing I'd reach for is that MMS' are more explicit about what their content is. No-one is going to be ambushed by the fact that soldiers get shot in CoD, whereas even I would be loathe to describe the Witcher as a rape simulator =D
On the other hand, I did think of violent assault and I have no answers to that as far as PTSD
On the bigger issues of rape/versus killing (because in every form of fiction the former is treated a lot worse than the latter and I imagine they're cues which you've probably experienced to, although intellectually you may not agree with it. Think of how villains are portrayed when they rape someone, versus straight up killing. Or the way revenge flicks contain violent death and sometimes even mild torture but almost never has the sympathetic protagonist raped someone. Or the Penny Arcade rape scandal, versus it's normal killery content). I think the big thing is that there is really no upside to rape. There are a lot of reasons, debatable but there, we've decided as a society it's acceptable to kill people. And war is generally not disapproved of as an end to a means, which is why we fund it and train people to do it. Whereas very few societies approve of rape as a means to an end. And rape almost exclusively involves a defenceless victim and a senseless crime, whereas the soldiers who die, on the first-world countries side at least, are normally in a superior position, bravely laying down their lives for something. I'm still thinking about it, it's not something I've fully understood and these are my best guesses so far, but thats the way I feel.
I kinda wish people think hard before they include sexual violation, maybe because, unlike death and violence, it#s something that's very easy to avoid if you don't want to tackle it head on. But I'm not calling for censorship. I do think we can agree that taking a dark and painful theme and using it in a superficial manner because you want your game to be recognised as dark and painful isn't a sign of maturity in a game, and is something we often look down upon. It's like 90's comics, instead of embracing more complex themes, they've substituted the same simple campy plots with blood instead of sparkles and to my mind this is definitely how the Witcher uses rape (although not at all how it uses politics and racism. Hence this weird thing where half the game is legitimately mature and half the game is aping maturity in a juvenile fashion). I really don't think many people would describe the Witcher as exploring the difficult situation of rape in any kind of deep way.
...so in conclusion. I guess the main thing is, because you can not have a rape scene in an action film fairly easily without impacting the overall enjoyment of the product, I prefer it when the directors only choose to include it for a very deliberate and important reason because it's an easy way of avoiding some people pain and it's one less subject to be mistreated, with very little advantage to using it in a superficial way (without being exploitative), whereas with death and war it's much harder to avoid them without changing the action film nature, so its more reasonable to want to include it. I think that#s probably why I feel the way I do
