If thousands of "people" are murdered in a video game, fine, so long as reasonable precautions are made to insure that game is played by people old enough to distinguish fantasy from reality.
Likewise if thosands of "people" are raped in a video game.
Pixels don't really bleed or suffer. They don't have parents, siblings, or children. They aren't physically or psychologically traumatized by what arrangements the programmer puts them into or the user accesses.
I am absolutely certain there are people- even people on this board- that play violent video games to "blow off steam" and release tension, and that the vast, vast majority of them are never going to actually carjack someone or take a baseball bat to someone's head.
Likewise, there are people who play pornographic video games to release a different kind of tension, and as long as they don't take their fantasies into the real world (which I have no evidence they're any more likely to do than the players of Doom, GTA, Manhunt, and whatever other video game becomes the press' whipping boy tomorrow), what business is it of anyone's what they do in the privacy of their own home?
Erotic images of rape have existed in Japan for a long, long time. And their rate of violent crimes is far, far lower than that of, say, the United States.
I don't have to play Manhunt, or Rapelay, if I think I'll find the content disturbing. If I get a bug up my butt that these games even exist, well, I think that probably says more unpleasant things about me than the people who play them.
I live in a society that assumes (excluding occasional fits of mass hysteria) that most adults can make responsible decisions, and that the occasional nutcase doesn't warrant banning Taxi Driver just because of what that nutcase might do. Because if it isn't Doom, Taxi Driver, or The Catcher in the Rye, it's the Bible or Alice in Wonderland or... Well, the nutcases will find something, no matter how suspiciously a school views black trenchcoats.
That Japan has a level of cultural insecurity that causes them to ban games on behalf of people who would never be part of the potential market for them... Well, that's both noble and kind of sad. Noble in its sensitivity; sad in its willingness to try to rearrange their culture and amend their right to expression in the hopes of appeasing those outside the culture.
Hopefully the high-minded protestors will return their attentions to places like Darfur where actual women have been raped en masse.
Likewise if thosands of "people" are raped in a video game.
Pixels don't really bleed or suffer. They don't have parents, siblings, or children. They aren't physically or psychologically traumatized by what arrangements the programmer puts them into or the user accesses.
I am absolutely certain there are people- even people on this board- that play violent video games to "blow off steam" and release tension, and that the vast, vast majority of them are never going to actually carjack someone or take a baseball bat to someone's head.
Likewise, there are people who play pornographic video games to release a different kind of tension, and as long as they don't take their fantasies into the real world (which I have no evidence they're any more likely to do than the players of Doom, GTA, Manhunt, and whatever other video game becomes the press' whipping boy tomorrow), what business is it of anyone's what they do in the privacy of their own home?
Erotic images of rape have existed in Japan for a long, long time. And their rate of violent crimes is far, far lower than that of, say, the United States.
I don't have to play Manhunt, or Rapelay, if I think I'll find the content disturbing. If I get a bug up my butt that these games even exist, well, I think that probably says more unpleasant things about me than the people who play them.
I live in a society that assumes (excluding occasional fits of mass hysteria) that most adults can make responsible decisions, and that the occasional nutcase doesn't warrant banning Taxi Driver just because of what that nutcase might do. Because if it isn't Doom, Taxi Driver, or The Catcher in the Rye, it's the Bible or Alice in Wonderland or... Well, the nutcases will find something, no matter how suspiciously a school views black trenchcoats.
That Japan has a level of cultural insecurity that causes them to ban games on behalf of people who would never be part of the potential market for them... Well, that's both noble and kind of sad. Noble in its sensitivity; sad in its willingness to try to rearrange their culture and amend their right to expression in the hopes of appeasing those outside the culture.
Hopefully the high-minded protestors will return their attentions to places like Darfur where actual women have been raped en masse.
