Should rape and murder be legal in the virtual world?

Games are just as fictional as movies.
You want to ban rape and murder in games?
Then you must also ban movies that depict violence and rape.
You will hear Hollywood complaining before you can finish counting to 3.

@ragingloli – I specifically said that I thought that virtual is virtual – I am not advocating banning anything.

But it’s a debatable issue, I think.

Before games there were violent movies depicting all sorts of awful stuff. Before movies there were radio programs, before (and still affecting all of us) there were books depicting awful stuff, and hey, read any Homer lately?

Because the games seem to be more interactive they seem more “real”, but remember that visual media seem more real than print, etc. As much as I, personally, may dislike bunches of the virtual choices out there I don’t want the Thought Police up in my (or your) business.
Crimes committed in the real world because of ideas garnered from a fictional one is not a new concept.

You can buy a doll in the real world and stab it, shoot it, or stick your dick in it, without having to fear being arrested.
Because there is no victim.
In the same way, there are no victims in games, books, or movies, because they are all fictional constructs.
Of course, once true artificial intelligence is developed, there would be actual victims (the AI).

It does seem like a safe outlet for such destructive and hurtful behavior; a way to keep it out of the “real” world. But, by the same token, it could be seen as condoning such actions and conditioning people to inure themselves to them. I would guess that which way it goes depends on the individuals level of restraint and emotional control over themselves.

It also brings up the question of why people would want to do such things (present company excepted @ragingloli) to other people either in the real world or the virtual one, but that is a different question for another time.

I’d happily sever each of Dr.J’s tentacles & watch the fucker choke on em while I took off his goofy specs & crushed them neath my booted foot.

I think a lot of this depends on if there are people behind each avatar. Like This

Fantasy is not reality however….why would anyone want to perpetrate virtual rape and murder?
I guess is you were a budding sociopath it would right up your depraved alley. I would come unhinged if one of my kids wanted to play a game that involved rape and murder for sport/points. Gah!

@Coloma
Battlefield 4, one of the premier murder simulators, sold over 12 million copies
And that is only one of hundreds, if not thousands of such games.

Teabag a nazi zombie…fuck yeah!!

@anniereborn That could make such things cyberbullying. I certainly wouldn’t consider it so heinous a crime as actual rape or murder, but it does merit response and action of some sort. Part of me is tickled at the prospect of some sort of virtual feud raging on in an endless cycle of pixelated violence so I probably shouldn’t have a say.

@ragingloli I think I need to start using that term. Murder simulator. It’s so perfect.

Another example is “Sins of a Solar Empire”, a real-time strategy game set in space.
In this game, in order to conquer a planet, you first have to exterminate the entire population.
You are essentially committing genocide on an interplanetary scale.

@ragingloli Well..I’m out of the video game loop but “murder simulator” is rather funny.
Okay…I might go for a customized game where you could insert the people in your life you’d like to murder, like your crappy boss. I would call it Voodoo. Objective, you make a Voodoo doll of your target and then get to choose from 100’s of torture methods. haha

Virtual rape* and murder = budding psychopath. Virtual torture = good times.

(*I have yet to see a game that tasks the player with committing rape.)

I don’t really care about games, but I’m an avi in Second Life and I’ve been a victim of grief-ing where someone gives you a type of virus and you can’t control your avatar. It’s horrible.

@cazzie So am I, but I have never had that happen.

It’s an interesting question, and one I’ve asked here in another form: Are we morally culpable for the things we do in dreams? After all, we’re generally not aware that we’re dreaming, and even when we are lucid, the other characters in dreams feel just as real to us as any other person does. I am aware of at least one First Nations culture in which it is customary to apologize to someone one has wronged in a dream.

With the Oculus Rift and other VR next-gen consoles coming onto the market, the experience of gaming is going to take another leap towards authenticity. As it stands, I recall reading an interview with a US military training officer who said video games do half their work for them by breaking people’s conditioning against pointing a gun at a human being and pulling the trigger.

Remember Marshall McLuhan’s contention that the medium is in essence an extension of our sensory organs, that we inherently and implicitly trust the medium the same way we trust our own eyes as an externalized part of our brain. As video games become ever more realistic, we will begin to put greater and greater trust in what we experience, desensitizing us to simulated gaming experiences.

I think the laws regarding the virtual world are perfect in America. They’re exactly where they need to be. You can do almost anything you want. But you cannot threaten, harass, stalk, or post revenge pictures against other real people.

We have it exactly right as it is.

It’s the virtual world. We’re limited enough in real life so people need outlets. And it’s not like there’s a huge market for rape simulator games.

Illegal? No, why would it or should it be? Isn’t that the point of many 1st shooter games? You get to lock and load and load and go waste people by the dozens, sometimes you even get to steal cars and do other things. All this can be done without the risk of going to jail for being a mass murderer. If those games serve a basic wanton worldly craving, then as the article says, ”Surely, he says, it is better to provide people with virtual outlets for forbidden desires than to have those desires acted on with real children?” Everyone, if they are real with themselves, have had or have dark cravings they would not share with a soul. Sometimes those craving are directed to others we think or worse than us (the folly of man), such as molesters, terrorist (or those we want to think of as such), mass murderers, bombers, and sometimes even just being illegal (if I go with what some people have told me). The thought of doing some great harm to them, with a great amount of suffering, only those whom society feels mostly universal towards would anyone even dare to say what they would do, but if one feels in the minority do conduct themselves in that way, they keeping the back recesses of their closet.

@Blackberry You’ve never been to Japan.

@Darth_Algar There’s a game called Hotline Miami 2 where you rape a woman. Granted, it’s a scene, you don’t control it, but it’s still the protagonist doing this.
Also this game has throwback graphics from the 8 and 16 bit ages but still, it’s clearly rape.

@Symbeline

And the scene in the storyline isn’t an actual rape, but rather the protagonist (who is some kind of slasher/horror film actor) filming a scene for a movie.

I think it’s a good question to keep in mind. But as things stand now, as gross as I think carrying out certain acts (even as a character in a game are), it shouldn’t be illegal.

The only time I’d really start questioning the legality of what should and shouldn’t be legal in games is when we start approaching virtual reality territory, where our avatars are literal extensions of ourselves. Until then, like others have pointed out, it’s no different than what happens already in books and movies.

Er… “The only time I’d really start questioning the legality of what should and shouldn’t be legal in games…” was a horrid sentence, but hopefully people get what I meant. :-P

Virtual rape (where it even exists in a game, which is quite rare) and murder (which is much more common, except many games make death only a minor inconvenience with little or no consequence or effect) are punished by virtual police and/or virtual vigilantes or virtual acts of revenge.

In the actual world, people agreeing to play a game with virtual violence, agree to treat the violence as limited to the world, and part of the game. So in almost all cases, people would not think to punish people for violent events that are part of the game. Except some people are crazy.

There are some games where there is a real-world contract NOT to do certain types of in-game violence, even when the world makes it possible. (For example, Minecraft on a server with “no grief” rules but that still leaves ways to do damage.) In these cases, the owners of the server generally enforce the breaking of the rules by in-game (virtual) punishments, or real/game-world bans from playing on that server (or sometimes other servers, via Minecraft account blacklists and reputation systems). If the game has an economy or account fees, this can result in effective fines for breaking the game rules, limited to losing amounts already invested in the game.

What would Second Life “Gor” universe role playing be if a Tuchux couldn’t bash a pretty barbarian chick over the head and have his way with her?

@Uasal Thing with that is…it’s (supposedly) mutual consent.

I don’t visit those role playing SIMS in Second Life. There are rules there for a reason. SIMS can be regulated to be PG or Adult only. I think those rules are very much needed because some people can be real assholes in a ‘free for all’ open and public virtual world and being involved in Second Life has really opened my eyes to the whole psychology behind it.

@anniereborn

I suppose it really is mutual consent in Second Life. The person must be willing to subject themselves to this. Otherwise they could always teleport away or simply log off.

Exactly, @Darth_Algar. Abuse and bullying happen when one party cannot escape.