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Ethics and Bullshit Morals in Games

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Let’s not beat around the fucking bush here. When we play something that even remotely reeks of violence, we want to push those boundaries. ‘Can I kill him? Can I blow his head off? Can I dismember people?’ Pretty normal questions for the average gamer who just started playing a first person shooter or some other type of action game. It’s human curiosity to find out what kinds of reaction you can get by employing force and it’s simply natural to enjoy the suffering of someone else; it means that your life doesn’t suck as much as that person’s. Game developers use these facts to sell adrenaline rushing games, filled with overly masculine characters and hot polygon poontang that’ll give fourteen year olds tiny stiffies, and it works like a charm.

But then they decide certain issues cross the line, wherever that fucker may be. Take Fable 2 and Fallout 3, you can’t kill children within those games. You can slaughter and teabag a child’s parents right in front of its sad little eyes and laugh in its face (which I believe is the official definition of ‘traumatizing’), but you can’t put a bullet through its head. As if children are elevated above all other living things. I mean, you decided to murder another living being within that game, so it shouldn’t make any difference whether this person is twenty, six or seventeen. Sure, killing a kid seems cowardly to me, but if I want to be that fucking coward, then that’s my decision. I should have that possibility, especially in role playing games! Developers claim to give me freedom and tell me that I can do whatever I want, but that’s a blatant lie.

Another boundary is sex. Blasting limbs off with a shotgun? A-o-fucking-kay.  Female nipples? Hmm, ESRB won’t like it, but they just might let it pass. Full nudity? No way in Hell. Seriously, what the fuck does it matter? Sex is treated with fear and anxiety in the US, and this goes double for the latest type of entertainment: games. More developers should have the balls to display some nudity or show a sex scene, if it’s applicable to the story.

Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy is an awesome game (though it’s one big quick time event) which had a couple of really cool ‘adult scenes’. There was this romantic moment where you could play a bit of guitar for your ex-girlfriend and if you did it right, you got to bang the hottie. Interactively! It was a really intense moment that was portrayed by terrific storytelling and it was supported by great music, awesome stuff. Of course those scenes were cut in the US version because the publisher was shitting its pants. Mass Effect also had an excellent romance scene that was well written and choreographed. Mass Hysteria on Fuxx News ensued.

To take this one step further, I read on some feminist blog (fucking hate that word, by the way) that there’s a Japanese game that revolves around raping women called RapeLay. It’s an interactive ‘sex simulation’ with the main objective of raping a mom and her two daughters and eventually ‘breaking them’ as to make them do things, all voice acted and everything. And of course all those dried up cunts were ranting all over the shitty blog. But where’s the goddamn harm?

Think about it. Those women doing the voices got paid, the developers get their money by selling a game, and fetishists get off by playing their well deserved piece of entertainment that they bought. I’m not going to say I thoroughly enjoy games involving rape… I mean, I’m not going to deny it, but I’m not going to admit it either. But it’s just something the developer wanted to create and it’s a way of letting the player experience something. Do I want that experience? My choice. Does it harm someone? No. Then why fucking bother? Is raping intrinsically more evil than killing? If I had a daughter, I’d rather have her raped and survive the ordeal than to have her killed altogether, but that may be me. And the ‘degrading to women’-argument is fucking backwards. I only think less of women who find things ‘degrading to women’, or is that just me?

I’ll wrap this one up. All I wanted to say is that developers shouldn’t enforce their bullshit morals unto us and that there should be no limit to artistic expression. Good labeling to warn the buyer of the content is essential, but never should someone’s imagination and creativity be limited by someone else’s fear or displeasure. I don’t care much for The Pussycat Dolls, but that doesn’t mean they should be gagged, raped, sliced up and fed to wild orcas? … Okay, bad example

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