Gangway!
w00t? No need to flame […] I always found the argument that "I'm your elder, so I must be wiser" very rude and frankly counterproductive)
If you are much older than I am (36) than there is a high probably than you have learned that: 'we shouldn't discount what others say just because we might disagree with them' before I did. This type of knowledge is something we teach to kids, at least this is what happens from where I come from. I think now you understand why I reacted the way I did. Being called a kid is not exactly a compliment.
Then we're about the same age. You're a year older, so I kneel to your superior XP pool
What I reacted to, however, was your very hostile reply to a completely sensible post. In your original message, you seemed to be honestly asking what people would think about adding atrocious actions to a RL. Rickton replied with some points that are important to consider before doing something like that, without condemning where you're coming from. Then, you were the one who got overly emotional and accused him of being immature, just because he pointed out that it's not completely unproblematic to add rape into a computer game.
Touching upon this, but hopefully getting on with the discussion, I'm not too fond of the emotional/rational dichotomy you seem to be using. I sincerely think that emotion is an extremely important part of human intelligence; amongst other things, it constitutes some essential justifications for why we have ethics in the first place. Without emotion, there can be no reason, only rationalism.
And so: Coming from the "simulationist" side of things, it's justifiable to claim that the player should be allowed to do evil. I'm all on board here, considering emergent gameplay. In a RL, it makes sense to allow killing the villagers instead of running their petty errands and leaving your hardearned gold in their shops. Now, some game explicitly disallow killing friendly NPCs, others will let people react badly to evil PCs, yet others will just feature NPCs who stand unimpressed by as you hack down their neighbors for no apparent reason. Different solutions work well for different types of games, of course.
Implementing rape and torture (to stay with those examples) takes it a step further, though, and can't
solely be justified by saying it's up to the player how the PC acts. The reason is that these are corner cases that need to be explicitly developed and coded. There are other, similarly specific actions, you are going to leave out, whether it be training birds, making paper, sleeping, shitting and pissing (yes, seriously
), helping out at the orphanage, whatever. As a designer, you need to justify (to yourself, at least) why you are putting effort into including some of this and excluding other things. For fun? To make a point? And you must acknowledge that you giving the player this particular agency has to do with how the PC is portrayed. I recently read a related discussion, where Red Dead Redemption was mentioned. (I haven't played it myself, so I'm just paraphrasing what others said) The game includes prostitutes with which the PC can interact. He is explicitly prevented from having sex with them, because he's a married man, and this is to say something about his moral fiber. However, he will gladly kill prostitutes by tying them to the railroad tracks and waiting for a train. In an example like that, the "simulationist" argument doesn't really hold water. The designers specifically disallowed one immoral act and allowed another. The only logical conclusion is that the hero of that game is designed to be a misogynistic asshole of the first degree. If the designers would disagree with this reading, it makes them the assholes (or just stupidly inconsiderate), IMHO. As a side note: Don't fall into the trap of believing that it's somehow controversial to allow sadistic murder of prostitutes. This features in many, many mainstream games, and the "value neutral" portrayal of such violence is something we should rather work against as game enthusiasts.
Taking a step back and considering films with controversial content, for instance, there are a whole bunch of movies, eg. splatters, torture porn, and actually most action movies, which portray different kinds of violence for the entertainment value. There are also movies which take on difficult themes and try to treat them in a respectful and serious way. On the subject of child molestation, an example might be
Mystic River. I think there's room for both kinds (and various expressions which fall somewhere in the middle, being at once spectacularly gruesome whilst trying to make a point). And, for instance, stories about heroic men exterminating aberrants in the name of good isn't exactly a modern phenomenon. Yet, as an audience and certainly as a creator, I find much more satisfaction in films/games/whatever which treat their mature themes in a mature way. I grew up with Peter Jackson's
Bad Taste and all that, so I couldn't care less about the Nth installment of
Saw. Stuff like that seems to me more or less a wasted effort, although I guess each generation needs its collection of "shocking" media. Still, I applaud a movie like Pasolini's
Salò, which is one of the most stomach-churning movies ever made, and on level that makes stuff like
Cannibal Holocaust seem just lame.
Treating a subject matter in a serious way will probably not piss off the people who actually matter. Some prudes might principally scoff at a game which features certain crimes, and many victims of said crimes will want to avoid such games most of the time. But I think, if you want to include rape, for instance, you should do it in such a way that even a rape victim would say: "This game gives a realistic/meaningful portrayal of rape, and whether or not I would want to experience the game myself, I respect the designer for making it." I think victims of particularly violent crimes never stop thinking and talking about their experiences (Primo Levi makes this point about survivors of the Holocaust), although they might feel uncomfortable with rape jokes at a dinner party. Treating the topic of evil isn't only "acceptable", it's actually very necessary to do, for us as a society and as individuals. In other words: If you
do feel like there are no issues raised by the addition of rape and torture in your game, it probably means you should just leave it.
So ... in a RL/open world game ... I would love to be allowed to control an evil protagonist, if it made me feel like I went away from the game somehow richer in experience. If it's "just for fun", though, I think that adding something like rape is in bad taste, so much that it might put me off trying the game in the first place. And please note that I'm talking about explicitly implementing sadism here, in which case the argument that "it's the player's choice" really doesn't fly. Sure, every now and then I play ADOM and end up exterminating Dwarf Town just for laughs. But I would not approve if Biskup had added the option to gratuitously molest children in his game.
As always,
Minotauros
PS. 2013's RL of the Year,
Noxico is sex-themed, and I think it's even planned to feature procedural rape. To me, that seems pretty "meh" at best, morally repugnant at worst; in any case, of course there's room in this world for a game like that, and I don't believe anyone becomes a bad person from ASCII fantasies about giving rimjobs to centaurs.
