Yeah, this would be the first time I’ve heard someone use the word “rush” to mean “orgasm.”
Yeah, I think of a “rush” as what one might get from cocaine or meth. Not that I’ve tried them, but I’ve heard stories.
I suppose I view videogame violence similar to the way I might view IRL paintball or laser tag or playing cops & robbers. You’re simulating a tactical experience with all the excitement and strategy without the negative consequences.
I’m not sure there is a Sim-Rape equivalent.
I do think there is a bit of a continuum where even videogame violence starts to get a bit “cringey” and uncomfortable.
For example, the game This War of Mine attempts to provide a realistic wartime experience from the perspective of civilians caught in the middle of it. Do I really want to know how the townspeople feel about my mechanized Battlefield squad trying to win a Team Deathmatch in their city?
I’ve noticed that there are very few first-person shooters out there that include children at all. For example, there are no children in Grand Theft Auto. But if there were, I wonder if it would it be considered morally okay to shoot them in the game, since it is just, as someone said, “cartoonish fun” or would players refrain from shooting them because they are children. In other words, is murder more acceptable than sex when it comes to children depicted in video games, or would that be considered equally abhorrent? I’d like to believe the latter is true, but I’m not so sure.
In the original Fallout games released in 1997 and 1998, your character could gain the Child Killer reputation for, well, killing children. From what I can recall, there weren’t any missions where killing children was something that gained you anything, but if you were feeling ornery you could just shoot one of the little tykes as they ran around town. What was more likely to happen was that you might throw a grenade or shoot at someone but accidentally hit a kid instead. The producers had to remove children from the game entirely before they released it in Europe. (Fallout 1-2 weren’t first person shooters.)
I can’t think of many first person shooters with children. Bioshock has been mentioned, and although you can’t really shoot the Little Sisters, you can sure violently take their essence from them in scenes where they cry and struggle as you hurt them. Fallout 3 has children, and you can even place a slave collar on them and sell them, but I don’t think you can shoot them. (Whether Fallout 3 is an FPS or not is debatable I think.)
If I recall, there are some children in Red Dead Redemption 2. One is a character, and others are roaming around in one of the bigger cities. I don’t know if you can shoot them though. I never had any desire to try.
There wasn’t a quest or story requirement to kill kids, but in at least one settlement, the kids would pickpocket you, and the only way to get your stuff back was to pickpocket them back, or shoot them and loot the corpses.
There’s still children in the FPS Fallout games, although not that many. In F3, you start off as a kid during the tutorial sequence, and there’s also Little Lamplight, which is a community of orphans that exile their members once they get too old. You can’t kill them, though, because of EU censorship laws.
Cyberpunk also has kids, who (IIRC) also can’t be killed, and are also very clearly resized adult character models, which ends up making them look creepy AF.
You also got hit with a 30% dialogue penalty (with everyone, good or evil) and got random bounty hunter encounters with it so at least it was implied that killing children was a worse thing than the usual wasteland violence.
Likewise with Bioshock – yeah, you could harvest the Little Sisters as a story choice but you got the shitty ending as your reward. This feels a bit different to me than inconsequential “gonna run down the street shooting everyone for the lulz” GTA style violence.
The Knights of the Old Republic MMORPG was somewhat similiar. The girls were just resized models of the slimmest adult woman choice, so you had what was supposed to be an eleven year old girl with the body of an adult woman and a child’s face. Creepy AF indeed.
Yeah, it’s a bit different because GTA was a sandbox game where you were encouraged to do whatever you wanted. More than twenty years ago when I was still playing GTA III, I’d happily go around the city car jacking, mowing down pedestrians, and attacking the police until they started sending the national guard after me just for the giggles. Sandbox games are designed for players to just fart around doing whatever they feel like rather than having to work on some specific quest at all times. So, yeah, it’s a bit different, but is it morally distinct? I don’t think so.