They're both art and entertainment, just like movies, literature, music, theater, and a great deal of traditional artwork. Nothing which requires that quantity of creative input and expression can fail to be art and most art forms have their origins in entertainment to begin with. It's worth remembering that Shakespeare wrote to entertain his audience and make a living as well. As far as changes to old titles, they can be annoying, but unless someone goes out of their way to destroy the original version it's not that terrible unless it's done purely as a form of censorship. Movies get re-cut all the time and even books sometimes receive revisions.
Quite frankly, all of those games are so utterly absurd and completely divorced from reality that I can't see them ever leading to any real life crimes, which is the only concern I could ever see being reason enough to ban them. If your concern is about gender equality, I think they also made a game about women raping a man at one point.
As far as Rapelay went, I don't like it myself but it was produced solely for sale within the nation of Japan, which has completely different laws and cultural standards and was never officially distributed within the United States. In the time it took for the mainstream media to discover its existence the developers in Japan had already responded to criticisms by taking the word "rape" off the boxes and out of the titles of their games and proceeding as usual, except for mocking the controversy in one of their later releases. There's an entire sub-genre of games like that in Japan and any attempt to regulate them in the West is utterly useless because they will never be released here. As such, its safer to just avoid the censorship issue entirely.Sober Thal said:I don't think rape is a 'slippery slope' when deciding to ban a form of media that puts you in a rapists' shoes and tells you go at it, rewarding you all the way. I think that's what that rape lay game was.
Quite frankly, all of those games are so utterly absurd and completely divorced from reality that I can't see them ever leading to any real life crimes, which is the only concern I could ever see being reason enough to ban them. If your concern is about gender equality, I think they also made a game about women raping a man at one point.