june gloom on 11/6/2009 at 20:57
Yeees, except slavery is illegal. Simulated rape is not.
I for one am pleased that the industry banned it (and Rapelay's developer actually stopped selling it long beforehand, citing concerns about the game's impact on the industry.) By rejecting a deeply offensive form of expression the industry has made ad splendid display of self-policing that's going to be fairly vital if video games are going to be accepted as an art form.
What I would not have been pleased about is if the Japanese government (or American government, etc.) had banned it. There's a big difference between self-censorship and government censorship that should be obvious to anyone.
To go back to the slavery thing, slavery is not a form of expression. A rape game is. Slavery is a crime against another person, whereas a rape game is merely the depiction of a crime against another person. Rape games may have offensive content but god damn if I'm going to let anyone say it shouldn't be protected speech.
DDL on 11/6/2009 at 21:22
Where do you stand on..well, hate speech?
Say, a game all about convincing the population of a small town to boot out the nice indian family purely because they were indian? Would you still support that?
Also, while I suspect it may not come across that way, this is a geniune question. To a certain extent, for example, hate speech is banned here in the UK (well, 'intent to incite racial hatred'), which to be honest, I support (quite whether that makes me more or less liberal I'm not sure).
jay pettitt on 11/6/2009 at 21:47
Games ain't art or expression for gawd's sake. Games are junk food. Legislate at will.
june gloom on 11/6/2009 at 21:49
In the United States hate speech is protected unless it qualifies as defamation or incitement to riot.
Brandenburg v. Ohio illustrates this point. Basically in 1969 Brandenburg, a Klan leader, contacted a local (Cincinnati) TV reporter and invites him to the Klan meet. Parts of the rally were filmed, including one particular speech calling for "revengeance" (lol) on blacks and Jews. Brandenburg was charged and convicted with advocating violence. He took it to the Supreme Court, who overturned his conviction on the grounds that the speech did not qualify as likely to incite imminent lawless action- a key phrase. It basically means that speech is not protected by the First Amendment if it is likely to cause violation of the law more quickly than an officer of the law reasonably can be summoned.
I find ordinary hate speech repugnant. That doesn't mean it isn't free speech.
Also, jay can you please back up your argument? How are video games as a medium not art or expression? That's like saying film isn't art or expression because of Michael Bay films, completely ignoring, for example, Citizen Kane.
dj_ivocha on 11/6/2009 at 21:51
I have to agree with dethtoll - you want your favorite violent games to be legal but at the same time don't want the guy next door's favorite rape games to be, while as far as the law is concerned, murder is a worse crime than rape. So either both genres should be banned, or none.
DDL on 11/6/2009 at 21:59
Fairly big potential difference between "virtual killing" and "murder", though. Virtual rape and...rape? Not so much difference.
After all, killing as a soldier in a time of war isn't even a crime.
june gloom on 11/6/2009 at 22:00
So, playing a rape game results in someone actually being raped? Is that what you're saying? And by the way, not even soldiers are exempt from the law, depending on who they kill.
DDL on 11/6/2009 at 22:08
What I'm saying is that KILLING != MURDER.
And a lot of games feature various other forms of killing, rather than murder.
On the other hand, RAPE == RAPE, any way you cut it.
Sure, it's virtual, but one is illegal if made "not virtual", and the other, not necessarily so.
Ostriig on 11/6/2009 at 22:14
Quote Posted by CCCToad
What we SHOULD be arguing about is why the government (of any country) thinks they have the right to tell people which entertainment products they can and can't use. As an individualist, I believe that (since playing these games doesn't directly harm others), the government should NOT have the ability to tell people which games they can't play.
Quote Posted by dethtoll
There's a big difference between self-censorship and government censorship that should be obvious to anyone.
I think this is a pretty salient point here. An artistic industry that is self-aware and sets socially sensible
guidelines for itself is a positive thing, in my opinion, whereas government-imposed legal censorship upon said industry can have very dubious ramifications in both short and long term.
Another highly relevant point that gets brought up is the issue of authorship, and how killing a fictional character "yourself" (games) is so very different to witnessing one fictional character kill another (movies, books) - I disagree with this, at least in terms of lasting effects. While there surely is a difference, as I believe it's been pointed out, any sane individual should nonetheless, at any time when the experience stops, be able to differentiate between it and reality. "Suspension of disbelief" - all narrative mediums generally attempt to immerse the participant in their world, regardless of the level of interaction offered, but any person in the right mind is able to snap out of it once they put the book or the controller down. And maybe make a critical analysis of what the experience consisted of. And as a side comment, you will notice quite a lot of designers complain about how difficult it is for videogames to achieve a good level of immersion compares to more traditional media, both in spite of and
because of interaction possibilities, among other things.
Quote Posted by DDL
Where do you stand on..well, hate speech?
Say, a game all about convincing the population of a small town to boot out the nice indian family purely because they were indian? Would you still support that?
Hm... let me chime in on this one - How would you treat a movie where the protagonist does exactly what that game would have a player do, and at no point are their actions implicitly or explicitly condemned? Neither praised nor condemned, since you did not specify such a qualifier for the game either. Furthermore, how do you feel the censorship boards would treat said movie?
Also, how would you feel about that same game you described with the added bonus of an ending telling you that you're a complete ass for doing it?
What I'm trying to say here is that I expect
equivalent leeway for games as I do for literature and film treating
equivalent situations.
june gloom on 11/6/2009 at 22:39
Quote Posted by DDL
What I'm saying is that KILLING != MURDER.
And a lot of games feature various other forms of killing, rather than murder.
On the other hand, RAPE == RAPE, any way you cut it.
Sure, it's virtual, but one is illegal if made "not virtual", and the other, not necessarily so.
Yeees,
but- and this is the entire point of the argument- it's
virtual and therefore nobody is actually harmed. It's like the difference between (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotacon) shotacon (that's a wiki link btw) and child porn.
Fuck I hate debates like this. I hate having to come out and defend shit I find personally offensive or objectionable because it counts as free speech. And yet I do it because "free speech" does not mean "only speech that I don't find objectionable."
