That’s enough to make me sigh, but not give up. My own red line in games is the unthinking use of rape, whether as a “character building” incident for female protagonists (but, strangely, not for male ones) or as an “edgy” version of a sex scene. In the run-up to GTA V’s release, a disturbing forum posting went viral. “I want to have the opportunity to kidnap a woman, hostage her, put her in my basement and rape her every day, listen to her crying, watching her tears,” it read.
Now, I would flat out refuse to play a game where you could do that, regardless of whether it was forced on me by the storyline, or merely an option in sandbox play. So am I being a hypocrite running people over in my virtual car without a pang of remorse? I don’t think so. “In games the aim is, usually, to beat your opponent before they beat you,” says Simon Parkin, who writes for the New Yorker. “It’s a game of reactions, speed and quick planning based upon principles of fairness – or of the protagonist overwhelming the odds. This is in no way analogous to rape, which is all about an assertion of power in an unequal equation. If you’re threatened with rape, you don’t respond in kind.”
For the same reason, I am uncomfortable about GTA’s torture scene, where you extract information, along with a tooth, with a pair of pliers. Enjoying violence when it’s not a “fair fight” feels very different to being quicker on the draw than an armed enemy.
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