Jimquisition: Rape vs. Murder

[flames09]

Self Defense - Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, God of War ect. Not self defense

Rape should be fine to use in the plot of a video game, hell not a mechanic! That would be a bit to far XD, but as a plot device it should be fine!

TO many white knights and social bigotry

 

[YukoValis]

It's strange.. you compare video game murder to real life murder, but you don't even touch rape in games, and instead go for just real life rape. You say rape is bad in real life, and yes it's a horrible thing, but what about the games that stop people from wanting to do it irl? Some say killing in games helps appease voilent feelings after all, shouldn't it count for rape too?

 

[Use_Imagination_here]

You raise many good and sort of alright points, but what you're saying basically boils down to "rape is a special kind of evil".

And well, it's not.

It's absolutely horrible but it's not objectively worse than torture, or murder, or basically anything I do for kicks in every sandbox.

As an example, there's the torture chamber in Skyrim which you have the option to purchase and then the option to burn someone alive, heal them of their wounds and repeat 15 times, which I'd probably say is worse than rape on the evil scale. And yet, no one in the media has so far managed to care. You want to know why?

Because people aren't disgusted by it. Sure people think it's evil, but it doesn't make their skin crawl. And so no one campaigns against, people don't care. You make a game with the option of rape and its OH MY GOD THIS SIMPLY A HORRIBLE THING THAT MUST NEVER OCCUR EVEN IN FUCKING STORIES. It's not for any moral or rational reason it's because it disgusts people.

Rape is being chastised as something horrible that affects many people, and it is and it should be. But it doesn't warrant a special mention in the list of things that you should never decipt, partly because such a list doesn't exist and should never exist. Because there's nothing special to it. It's just another way to be a monster.

 

[Impluse_101]

Thank god for Jimothy Sterling.

You know, I want to say that you did a good job at drawing that said line, and for all of what you said I do agree with. I'd say you handled the subject with a respectable and fair tone.
I also hope you don't get a lot of flak, but considering this reply will be posted after 17 pages of it are done...well.
I hope it wasn't too bad and hope you're having a lot of fun murdering all manner of demons and people and goblins and etc....
....and beating people in races...if you're a racing kind of guy.
...Tycoon builders....
Sim city....
...Educational games....
...whatever.

 

[Impluse_101]

Also.

WHY DO WE EVEN WANT TO INCLUDE THIS KIND OF STUFF? WHY?
IF YOU'RE REALLY IN A FIX FOR GET WRESTLE THE ONE EYED WIGGLING WELSHMAN, THEN GO TO YOUR LOCALXXX.COM SITE.

There's other perfectly reasonable willing simulators of sex out there! And also, ya know, Rule 34.

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

Great episode and all.

Can someone give me the name of the medieval sword fighting game? The one with the black and white filter.

 

[grumbel]

WHY DO WE EVEN WANT TO INCLUDE THIS KIND OF STUFF? WHY?

That's the wrong question. The proper one should be: Why should we censor it?

For example if you have a dark fantasy game where you play the bad guy, why shouldn't you be able to rape and plunder your neighboring villages? Could be a great game mechanic, changing troop morals and how other nations might see you. Such a game could be as cartoony as Dungeon Keeper or as authentic as a Paradox simulation.

Essentially, stop thinking like Japanese porn is the only way to use rape in games. Rape has been used tons of times in books, movies and so on, there is no reason why it shouldn't be part of gaming. Even such tame shows as StarTrek/TNG/Enterprise had numerous episodes covering it in one way or another.

Also this whole discussion is just a little late: Phantasmagoria had rape 15 years ago and it was written by a women (Roberta Williams) no less.

 

[Impluse_101]

WHY DO WE EVEN WANT TO INCLUDE THIS KIND OF STUFF? WHY?

That's the wrong question. The proper one should be: Why should we censor it?

For example if you have a dark fantasy game where you play the bad guy, why shouldn't you be able to rape and plunder your neighboring villages? Could be a great game mechanic, changing troop morals and how other nations might see you. Such a game could be as cartoony as Dungeon Keeper or as authentic as a Paradox simulation.

Essentially, stop thinking like Japanese porn is the only way to use rape in games. Rape has been used tons of times in books, movies and so on, there is no reason why it shouldn't be part of gaming. Even such tame shows as StarTrek/TNG/Enterprise had numerous episodes covering it in one way or another.

Also this whole discussion is just a little late: Phantasmagoria had rape 15 years ago and it was written by a women (Roberta Williams) no less.

...No...

The question is...
Why did you ever include this in the first place?

 

[shadyh8er]

My first thought when he said rape is used to make a villain look deplorable:

GRIFIIIIITH!

(No cookie for the reference).

So yes, correct on all counts Mr. Sterling.

 

[Blackpapa]

I hate this show as much as when it debuted. Scratch that, I'm ambivalent about the show, I just still hate Jim.

Rape can be either a mechanic (press X to bitchslap) or a plot device (cutscene). The second one is easy - games are not an inferior medium and should feel free to touch the same subjects as other forms of media. Seeing an NPC rape X is totally permissible.

Rape as a game mechanic is where it gets interesting. All those silly arguments Jim made are essentially a list of the differences between rape and murder. He did have a few good points though..

Rape is a new mechanic in games. We don't know how to implement it so we do it as true to reality as we can. This doesn't apply to murder - few if any games feature medically accurate death, for the most part it's dramatized or underplayed. People do not die easily. We've adapted the IRL death for gaming purposes. Enemies don't take a minute to die after suffering fatal damage. A rape mechanic can be trivialized in the same way murder was.

Now serious and true to life rape can certainly be a game mechanic and a very powerful one at it. The important part would be player choice. Let's that at a certain point there's an option to rape some NPC. We don't want to have that as a generic mechanic that adds +3 to strength and -250 to karma as that would downplay the significance - we want it to be a one-time event in high definition. Full facial and character animations and good voice actors.

So let's assume the player is controlling a psychologically damaged actor so that rape, in the context of the story would make sense. And we offer the player the possibility of raping some NPC. At this point we don't judge, just offer a neutral information that rape is possible. The player rapes the NPC or passes, and we try to make both options as neutral as possible. We don't incentivise either.

Some players will pick the rape option out of curiosity, some will pick it during their second playthrough. Some will decide to rape to get off on it. I'm guessing most won't. At that point we can use this powerful element to develop the storyline in an interesting way. If we're particularly crafty we can kick the player for making this decision. All in all we're creating a powerful emotional device.

You decided to rape the NPC on your own accord, you are a monster.

So yeah, Jim is an idiot.

 

[sigulf]

Like stated previously, and possibly multiple times(read as far as page 2-3, 17 pages is a bit long) killing is often fast in games, but it's not always the case.

I also would say murder is worse then rape, Death is absolute. There's no possibility to come back from it. rape there is a possibility to be healed both physically and psychologically with time, murder isn't that forgiving. But in games like stated, they do it fast and you just move on, it's not treated with details, you don't see the effects of murdering, and so you don't notice the moral problems with it.

The better ways to portrait the whole "rape vs murder" thing would be to put both on equal ground. How would the public react if there was a video-game where you played as a murderer? Seeing everything from his eyes, slowly stalking a pray, murdering it. and see the family's devastation? See how they suffer, seeing some family members performing suicide and so forth. This would portrait the psychological suffering of the families of the victims, something rape games does not. They don't show much(if any) psychological suffering from the rape. But it's assumed to be there.

Now the biggest reason IMO that rape is taboo, while murder is not. Is because many people either know a rape victim, or know someone that knows a rape victim, and so they have a closer view of the psychological problems in a "real life" perspective, However a murder victim is dead, and can't talk about the experience, and it's more rare to know family members that know other family members with psychological problems after having a close person to them getting murdered. Had it been the opposite, murder would have been considered a taboo, and rape might not have been such a "hot topic".

 

[Lonan]

I think you brought up some good points. Where killing a bad guys most people pay more attention to being a hero then how many people they kill. Where rape is you are the bad guy. Murder can be justified, rape cannot.

I found this video incredibly disturbing.

What disturbs me is all the effort by developers and people in general that goes into justifying murder in entertainment. The thing is, we find the murder in video games entertaining, we turn it into an art and a kill count. We turn people into targets.

I read about someone in the newspaper who said they watched luca rocca magnotta killing Jun Li, and they weren't even disturbed by it because they have seen so much violence in entertainment. That I find truly horrifying, even moreso than reading that magnotta raped the dead body. You can pass off magnotta as a psychopath, or someone who's just sick, but you can't pass off a society that's de-sensitised to murder.

In Mass Effect, there are plenty of occasions when Shepard can murder someone who doesn't threaten him (Saren's assistant on Virmire, who partook in very unethical experiments on live subjects) out of some abhorrent sense of justice.

Who are we, as gamers, constantly engaging in gratuitous violence on-screen, to judge someone who wants a rape game? Neither virtual murder or rape actually harms anyone. In games, we just get around the horror of murder by finding ways to justify, finding ways to de-humanise the enemy.

This is how genocide happens. In my field of study, Political Science, we learn that human beings are inherently compassionate and have too much empathy to allow us to kill others. But the Nazi's or the Hutu's or the Japanese Imperial Council wants us to kill. How do they get us to do it? By indoctinating us into believing those we would kill are not human. The Japanese at Nanjing would later report that they did not think they were committing murder when they killed people in absolutely HORRIFIC ways, they viewed it as nothing more than slaughtering a pig. That's how you justify murder to yourself, and how those in power get others to commit murder.

With all the effort that goes into de-humanising people in video games, just as those of non-white races were de-humanised (Do you think that with all the de-humanisation required to justify slavery, that raping a slave would be considered immoral at the time? It would only be considered immoral to murder, because that would be destruction of property.) it's extremely rich for someone who is seeking a murder thrill and a quick way to justify it, then turning around and saying that murder is acceptable in video games but not rape.

I think what's going on here is that we enjoy killing in video games, and we don't want that taken away from us. However, as moral creatures, we don't want to expand the immorality that already exists in video games, so defend the enjoyable status quo while opposing the introduction of additional immorality in order to feel like ethical people.

 

[dragonnewby]

Alright then, justify murder for me please.

It's certainly a hypocrisy that extends into our (and by our, I mean United States) government as someone who gets caught with some weed PROBABLY would've been better off forcing sex on someone in terms of punishment/jailtime. It's absolutely obscene that sexual assault, unless committed serially or against children, is almost always below double-digit prison sentencing. Not that it would be a GREAT deterrent (people still use drugs despite the harsher sentences), but it would speak well of our society at the very least.

I think Krahulik, unless there's more to that discussion, is starting to go a LITTLE off the deep-end too if he honestly equates rape with killing in videogames. Especially as someone whose family was threatened with both (by people who apparently have absolutely NO sense of irony) during the whole "Dickwolves" insanity.

Because many of rape accusations are false, and are used by women, to get revenge at men they hate. We have seen this happen lots of times. Woman accuses someone who did not do it, the man goes to jail for god knows how many years. It's bullshit, so judges are more critical now and are afraid to get long jail time to someone who did not deserve it.

 

[dragonnewby]

I agree with Jim. Rape is very much different from murder, in that it is basically an unnecessary act. Murder can be justified in violent or perilous situations,

PEOPLE, LISTEN! MURDER=/=KILLING.

Murder is a specific type of killing. Killing armed combatants in war is not, I repeat, NOT murder. Murder is unjustified killing. A justified killing is called justifiable homicide: it cannot be murder if it is justified. Manslaughter is an accidental killing. And killing armed enemy combatants in war is just called doing your duty.

The term 'murder' really shouldn't set soldiers off, because they (ideally) haven't murdered anyone, even if they have killed enemy combatants.

(Sorry to single you out Machine Man, you just provided an easy example. I realize that by 'murder' in the quote above you probably just meant 'killing' the way I'm using it. My point is semantic. However, it was a point I felt the need to make.)

You are kidding right? Soldiers are as much of murderers as anyone else, in fact they shouldn't even be in middle east, but that's a story for another time... There is no such thing as "justified killing", it's brainwashed idiots lying to themselves that somehow, it's "honourable" for soldiers to murder when it is not. Soldiers are horrible people who are forced to do horrible things to others, including innocents. There is no justification.

 

[SaunaKalja]

So hold on. Not only is there a game called Battle Raper, there is also a Battle Raper 2?

Oh world, how I love you.

 

[Maniclings]

Alright then, justify murder for me please.

It's certainly a hypocrisy that extends into our (and by our, I mean United States) government as someone who gets caught with some weed PROBABLY would've been better off forcing sex on someone in terms of punishment/jailtime. It's absolutely obscene that sexual assault, unless committed serially or against children, is almost always below double-digit prison sentencing. Not that it would be a GREAT deterrent (people still use drugs despite the harsher sentences), but it would speak well of our society at the very least.

I think Krahulik, unless there's more to that discussion, is starting to go a LITTLE off the deep-end too if he honestly equates rape with killing in videogames. Especially as someone whose family was threatened with both (by people who apparently have absolutely NO sense of irony) during the whole "Dickwolves" insanity.

Because many of rape accusations are false, and are used by women, to get revenge at men they hate. We have seen this happen lots of times. Woman accuses someone who did not do it, the man goes to jail for god knows how many years. It's bullshit, so judges are more critical now and are afraid to get long jail time to someone who did not deserve it.

"FBI reports consistently put the number of "unfounded" rape accusations around 8%. The average rate of unfounded reports for Index crimes is 2%.[2] However, "unfounded" is not synonymous with false allegation.[3] Bruce Gross of the Forensic Examiner's says that:

This statistic is almost meaningless, as many of the jurisdictions from which the FBI collects data on crime use different definitions of, or criteria for, "unfounded." That is, a report of rape might be classified as unfounded (rather than as forcible rape) if the alleged victim did not try to fight off the suspect, if the alleged perpetrator did not use physical force or a weapon of some sort, if the alleged victim did not sustain any physical injuries, or if the alleged victim and the accused had a prior sexual relationship. Similarly, a report might be deemed unfounded if there is no physical evidence or too many inconsistencies between the accuser's statement and what evidence does exist. As such, although some unfounded cases of rape may be false or fabricated, not all unfounded cases are false.[4]
"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape

how is that many?? even at 8% unfounded does not mean a fabrication.

 

[Iceismadnice]

I completely agree that rape is entirely different in terms of human perspective than death and murder. The argument he makes is sound throughout. However I find myself in disagreement that comedian Dave Chappelle's comments on his comedy routine were meant to justify the mindset of rapists. What he was trying to do was point out discrepancies in modern fashion by making them funny. It may not be too much of a stretch to connect his comment directly to rape but I highly doubt that was his intention.

 

[grumbel]

I completely agree that rape is entirely different in terms of human perspective than death and murder. The argument he makes is sound throughout.

So by that logic a game where you kill people first and then rape them later is totally fine with you? And a game where you kill your victims after the rape isn't all that bad either? Death as ultimate problem fixer?

 

[Iceismadnice]

I was agreeing with Jim's understanding of the different perspectives that men and women have towards rape and how the discrepancy in opinions for rape are larger than murder. The consequences and causes of murder can be understood or misunderstood by both males and females with less disagreement. The social morality of these two actions might have been the conversations fulcrum, but I was commenting on the other aspects revolving around it.

 

[ReiverCorrupter]

PEOPLE, LISTEN! MURDER=/=KILLING.

...snip...

You are kidding right? Soldiers are as much of murderers as anyone else, in fact they shouldn't even be in middle east, but that's a story for another time... There is no such thing as "justified killing", it's brainwashed idiots lying to themselves that somehow, it's "honourable" for soldiers to murder when it is not. Soldiers are horrible people who are forced to do horrible things to others, including innocents. There is no justification.

Haven't been on here in a while... but I'll bite anyway.

First off... this is a generally agreed upon distinction within the ethical community, which is comprised of philosophers with PhDs. If you think you know better then you'd better have a good argument. Which you don't. Your response was really just a series of baseless assertions without any logical inference or factual support.

Okay, someone walks into your house and starts killing your family. You don't have a right to kill them in self-defense? That rather simple example kind of shatters your position. Lol. I also guess we should have stayed out of WWII. Just let the Nazis conquer the world and wipe out everyone they hate, but at least we would go to the death camps with a feeling of moral superiority. Lulz.

I agree that we probably shouldn't be in the middle east, but the politicians are to blame, not soldiers. If your position is so extreme that you're unwilling to defend yourself or your loved ones then I'd say that you're the brainwashed idiot.

I'm not going to argue about what's objectively morally right or wrong because there's no evidence or proof either way. But I will point out that your value system isn't very conducive to you surviving in the real world for very long. If you reject the nature of reality that's your business. Reality doesn't really care. It won't pat you on the head, nor will it spank you. It's just action and reaction.

Pacifists are slaughtered, conquered and enslaved quite easily, and that's reason enough for me not to be a pacifist. You can be a pacifist because you live in a well ordered democratic society that defends you and allows you to express your beliefs. It's a society that has been defending itself through military force for hundreds of years. If you truly object to having your tax dollars go to pay soldiers then you should leave the country, otherwise you're just a hypocrite.