It could be for dramatic or other gameplay reasons, but remember also that not every bit of gruesome [sexual and other] violence in Grand Theft Auto is interactive or even shown in a cutscene. Some things take place off stage, and the details are left to your imagination.
I haven’t played games since the early 1990s, but I was always annoyed that I couldn’t shoot the dog in Duck Hunt. (Also, I threw a heck of a lot of eggs at rabbits.)
That’s a special case. If you never tried to shoot the dog, you are some kind of saint.
Back To The OP
GTA just never appealed to me. I do however, love games where you play giant monsters and eat hapless tiny humans (Movie Monster Game, Rampage, I Was An Atomic Mutant). I do own a few Mortal Kombat games. I feel the odds of my ripping off an opponent’s head or tearing out their heart in real life are quite low. If the violence was less cartoony, I don’t think I’d want to play.
Killing people who are unjustly imprisoning you and (I assume) conducting medical experiments on you is not murder.
Yeah. I don’t think that game would bother me, honestly.
This seems to me to be overwhelmingly the missing piece here. I haven’t read the paper that this dilemma is presumably laid out in, but I don’t see a reason to compare these two things at all, much less to feel like there’s a dilemma presented by them.
In video games (all games) you make choices to try to accomplish something. One of the natural conflicts that can occur in a game is somebody is trying to stop you, so you “defeat” them. You kill a chess pawn. That is not satisfying the urge to kill people in positions of low authority, it’s satisfying the urge to do a little strategy and feel smart.
It seems safe enough to me to assume that if someone programmed an entire game where you sexually abuse people, sexual gratification by fulfilling those urges is actually the objective. If there are games where you do sexual crimes over and over again to accomplish strategic ends, I am not aware of them, and please don’t tell me.
There’s one dilemma that is, if someone has urges which would be destructive to satisfy in real life, should they be permitted to seek virtual resolution of them (and maybe there’s an analog between sexual pathology and someone driven by an actual compulsion to kill, but that isn’t the question here). There’s another dilemma that is, is violence in media bad for you. But I think those are two qualitatively different questions, not one big one.
It’s not just a gamer’s dilemma, a lot of fictional media portrays physical violence differently than rape or pedophilia.
I think it’s because violence is shown as a problem solving tool. Not without justification, when we had a Nazi problem, we “solved it” with lots and lots of violence. Dangerous criminal? the police use violence or the threat of violence to bring the person into custody. In movies and video games, the protagonist is presented with problems or conflict and may at times use violence to solve his problems. Even though GTA allows self serving violence, killing or attacking someone for jollies or to steal something, violence depictions retain a certain amount of acceptability as a path to accomplishing tasks.
Rape and pedophilia don’t solve problems. They start and end with a powerful person harming a less powerful person for their own enjoyment.
Except there are games, like GTA, where you don’t have to run over people, but you can choose to. It’s actually pretty common. I remember my little sister murdering NPCs in Ultima 4. That was like, what? 1987? It wasn’t for the plot, it was just a little thrilling to be “evil”.
But finding it a little thrilling to sexually abuse someone doescfeel very different.
IMHO, the only way to determine whether sex games, or killing games, actually increase or reduce crime is to run some sort of actual scientific study. For obvious reasons, such a study could never be done as an experiment, and if you were to - as an alternative - go about interviewing pedos or murderers whether such games would have, or did, cause them to be likelier or less likely to commit those crimes, you may not get an honest response.
That being said, though - if I’m not mistaken, Japan has a lot of erotica that would be downright illegal in the United States, so they could be used as some sort of hypothesis control group. But there are so many cultural variables also at play that it would be hard to apply any Japan lessons - good or bad - to what America or the West might be like if it too had such porn.
I’ve never been into video games beyond Solitaire. I guess I was pretty naive about them as well. When my son was in grade school he loved playing video games. He would request specific titles and I would get them for him.
For one game he told me I should go to the store early because there would be a line. So I went to the store, stood in line, then asked for the game (It was Call of Duty). I had the name and platform written on a post-it note.
The kid behind the counter asked me if I was buying the game for someone. I told him that was none of his business, and he initially refused to sell it to me! Then I told him it was a gift for a coworker and he sold it to me.
That got my curiosity pinged. I asked my son to show me one of his games. He showed me GTA. His character walked into a bar and picked up a pool cue. Cool, I thought, he’s gonna shoot pool. No, he hit someone over the head with the pool cue, ran out and drove off. I was a bit shocked.
Japan has, I am not making this up nor am I exaggerating, a comic called Rape Man. IIRC he uses his super powers to rape women who need raping. Japan has, last time I checked, the most violent media in the known universe.
Definitely. Chess is an extreme abstraction, and with more modern games the crazy things you can do make it less abstract in a visual sense, and give you more flexibility to do weird stuff. Running people over in GTA is less obviously abstract than, like, jumping on a little mushroom guy was in 1987, and Mario is more obviously violent than a chessboard because you see a guy killing a little guy. But I think there’s still obviously abstraction occurring. To me there’s a distinction between the choices within the narrative of GTA or Ultima and you as a human person sitting there playing. All video games are “role playing” in that sense. What’s happening on the screen might be that you’re choosing to do mayhem or bloody murder or it might be that you’re carefully trying to level up as a gardener or whatever, but in your human mind you’re just using the game inputs to see the game produce results. Your strategic objective might not be as straightforward as capturing the king, it might just be to see mayhem.
I think it’s clearly different when you’re playing the role of doing sexual abuse on screen because sexual abuse is sexually gratifying to you in reality. It’s pornography. If there’s a phenomenon of people doing child abuse (in a game) as an activity that is interesting in some abstracted, non-sexual way, I would be surprised by that. I suppose there’s nothing but good taste preventing someone from doing it; making a video game that has real video game mechanics and is an abstraction of doing sexual abuse. In that case I think the “dilemma” is easily resolved in the other direction: that would be the same as any other game. Except for taste.
The difference isn’t moral, it’s neurological. With the exception of a very few, very specific cases, humans are not going to get a rush of addictive brain chemicals from killing a character in GTA. It’s just a thing happening on screen that gets you to the next screen.
Furthermore, the GTA scenarios all handwave real-world consequences which would quickly put a stop to the rampages pictured. That is why it is fun. In real life, if you walk into a pool hall and try to hit someone with a pool cue, chances are you’re the one who is going to get beat up. If you crash a car into a crowded business, hitting the wall will not be pleasant for you. There is no pleasure in this action that translates into a real world scenario.
But sexuality is a very deep and plastic driver of human behavior. While there are certain basic in-born preferences, what is presented to provide stimulation can build the strength of our reactions. It’s a driver of partner bonding. As the same set of Sights and Scents and Sounds provides us with orgasm repeatedly, our attraction to that specific SSS group is strengthened. If the game provides essentially sexual content, then young people are likely to pleasure themselves with those scenarios in mind. This releases a brain-bath of addictive chemicals which the mind now associates with the SSS features presented by the game.
Now, will they go forward in life seeking out waif-like adult women? We can hope so. But it is a far more dangerous situation, aimed at far more helpless victims. And sadly, far less likely to end in a real-world consequence limiting the actions of the perpetrator.
I think (for me), it boils down to a few things
I reject the idea that, just because the movie industry and others lump “sex” and “violence” under age categories, there’s a moral connection between them that we need to address. Sex and violence serve very different social goals. Most people will engage in consensual and pleasing sex in their lifetimes. Most people will not attempt to commit murder or extreme violence.
Sex crimes represent a specific harm you don’t really see in video games. People who would want to partake in rape aren’t interested in essentially tapping an NPC and saying “You’re raped” in the same way you’d shoot someone or hit them with a car while careening down a digital sidewalk at 70mph. I can’t really think of games where you can draw out murder in a meaningful sense (maybe you can use a low power weapon to shoot a high health boss in the foot over and over but that doesn’t get you much). The sort of scenes and interaction you would need to make sexual assault “worth it” (especially if we’re to stretch this to saying it’ll fulfill pedophillic desires to the point of mitigating them) just don’t compare to “I sat on a balcony with a rifle and shot civilians in Saints Row for twenty minutes, just 'cause”.
On the other hand, even brief scenes of actively committing sexual assault will serve to normalize the behavior or potentially lead people to seeking media which “does it better”. So now you have to worst of both worlds where it fails to satisfy the drive in potential real world sex offenders and also opens the mental door for people who previously had that walled off through basic social conditioning.
Yeah, that was Prototype. The plot of that one has you as an explicit monster, though, to the extent that the character you play in the first game is the big bad of the second. I really liked that game, specifically because of the way the narrative gradually reveals just how evil the protagonist actually is, even before he got transformed into a biological apocalypse, and how the game does not hold any sympathy for him at all.
In terms of absolute evil, though, it’s hard to beat Stellaris, which has at least two different achievements for committing genocide at a galactic scale.
I guess the point of the “gamer’s dilemma,” and therefore of this thread, is whether there is a difference between those different sorts of thrills or desires to be vicariously “evil,” and if so, why.
That’s a pretty interesting idea, and I can appreciate it in the abstract–but at the moment where the game required me to run over innocent people with a tank, I said “To hell with this” and did something else that wouldn’t make me feel shitty.
Fair point, and in reading a description, it looks like the people you’re killing are armed guards, so I’m not sure why it sat so poorly with me. I mostly just remember thinking, “this kind of slaughter isn’t fun,” and quitting after 20 minutes or so of play. I’ve played plenty of violent games, from Half Life to Mark of the Ninja to Civilization, where I kill plenty of people–I’m not sure what made this game’s violence offputting.
As a bit of trivia, that was the name of a short-lived musical project headed by the influential producer and musician, Steve Albini. And, yes, named after the comic.
As to the OP, I played many rather questionable games all the way back in the C64 days that it’s probably best for me not to mention. I never thought much of it. It’s just a game. Sorry, I’m just that simplistic about these things.
Comic LO, for example.
I’d never heard of this one, but it had nine live-action movies based on it.