OK, I thought I was done, but I'm going to give myself one last chance to try and clarify what I'm trying to say (plus give some suggestions of other evil actions) without the "freshman English bullshit" (I think? I don't really know what that even means).
I never mentioned anything about things I might be excluding by implementing those infamous features. I didn't exclude anything to include those options as a matter of fact.
You're not necessarily excluding things by implementing other things, but there will be things that you can't do in the game, just by the fact that you won't have programmed them in. Maybe they weren't explicitly excluded, but they won't have been included when rape was.
There are tons of evil things you can do (for varying degrees of "evil") that aren't rape, and would probably be more interesting from a gameplay perspective. For example:
- Kidnapping people and ransoming them back to their families for massive amounts of money
- Selling kidnapped people into slavery, or enslaving them yourself to have them build a giant gold statue of you, fight for your amusement, join your army, etc.
- Cooking your dead enemies into meat pies and selling them to the unsuspecting populace
- Deposing the king, taking over, and imposing draconian laws to imprison and execute all who oppose you
- Bribing the doctor in town to steal people's organs and give to you to sell on the black market/make potions out of
- Buying up all the houses in town and renting them at extortionate rates and never doing any repairs
- Burning down the homeless shelter
- Burning the farmer's fields so the people have no food to eat, then selling them imported food for massively inflated rates (or just letting them starve)
- Sneaking into people's homes and poisoning their food
- Putting addictive drugs in candy and giving it away
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.
Oh but it does fly right trough it, the same way you are the one that decides if you character will be a good or a bad fellow. It is exactly the same thing. They are called options exactly because you get to decide which ones to take. They require player input to be triggered. Having the torture option is exactly the same thing as having the option to drop an item whenever you feel like doing it, mechanics wise. Emotionally it is different story, which the player can still control in the end, so why the fuss? You can disable those options through the option menu, meaning they will not be present in the game's action list. It simply doesn't make any sense to me being against gaming features that are not forced upon you; something that only triggers with your own will.
You can't just absolve yourself of all responsibility by saying "It's the player's choice!" Sure, you're not
forcing anyone to chose the bad options, but you're putting them in where most games don't.
Games are always limited by what actions are possible in the game world. In most games, you
can't rape people. The game doesn't make it a bad thing, it makes it downright impossible, the rules of the universe won't allow you to do it.
If you put the option to rape someone in the game, then regardless of how it's handled in the game, regardless of how bad the consequences are and how much the game makes clear that it's an evil action, it becomes something that you are
allowed to do by the game. And you can wave your hands and say "it's the player's choice!" all you want, but you're the one giving them that choice, and pretending you had nothing to do with it is completely dishonest.
Like I said before, having true "choice" in a game is impossible, there are always things you can't choose to do, and so by putting rape in the game, you are putting priority on rape as one of the choices possible to make vs an infinite number of other choices that could be made instead (and, while the other immoral choices might offend some people, would probably be much less controversial). And that's the "why" I keep asking about. I know you want to offer a wide range of player choice, but why is rape
specifically a "choice" that you want to give priority to, despite evidence it might not be the best idea?*
(*And I just want to make clear, I'm not trying to imply it's some kind of subconscious rape fantasy on your part or anything, there are plenty of reasons: Shock value, stubbornness, want to make some kind of statement about something, because nobody else is doing it, historical accuracy, it's the most evil action you can think of and so it needs to be in a moral choice game, etc.)
EDIT:
OK, one last point, and this
is from a game design perspective. If you did decide to implement rape in the game, one of the things to look out for is how it's implemented. And obviously, I have no idea how it is/would be, but here's a potential pitfall I can see:
Depending on how the morality system of the game would work, I would imagine that raping someone would be a very evil action, get you a lot of "evil points" or area notoriety, or however it works. The problem you would have to worry about is, not making it the quickest and "easiest" way to be evil. Because then you might run into the problem of people playing the game who want to be evil, who pick the rape option just because it "makes" them evil the fastest...it would still technically be their "choice," but one which the gameplay implicitly encourages because it's faster and easier to be evil that way vs stealing money from the temple or whatever. And that, I think, would be even worse than making it a mandatory part of the plot, because it would completely trivialize it.