Quote:
Originally Posted by Jan-Poo
You might be right on this point but as a matter of fact rape is a crime as much (or actually less) as homicide is. You can kill innocent people in GTA and many other games, if we start from banning rape then you'll have to ban all the rest.
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Well, please consider the context of the quote. The analogy in question wasn't to homicide (if it were, I would likely have conceded the point to a degree), it was to adopted-sibling relationships (which I don't consider analogous at all). If we were talking about murder, I wouldn't have said the same thing.
Still, I would comment that, in America in particular (disclaimer: I am not American), sex-related crime actually seems to hit a slightly stronger chord of moral outrage than murder, especially if the victims are younger. And emotional outrage isn't based on straight logic like "if you ban this, you must by extension ban everything logically similar"; it's based on a gut feeling that "that's just not right". If you took a poll and asked people: "Which of the following games would be worse: a game where you can kill people, or a game where you can rape people?", what do you think people would answer? In the "Western world", acceptance of general violence/murder in video games is much higher than acceptance of sexuality (or especially sexual violence). (N.B. It may not be the same way in Japan, though I'd be interested to find out what said survey would reveal.)
Anyway, the bottom line is that games that appear to promote sexual violence may end up be more heavily self-regulated than games that promote other more consensual adult content, even though some would argue that this form of violence isn't especially worthy of distinction. But that basically reflects the way certain vocal portions of the population feel. And I have to say that, on a purely personal level, I can play a GTA-like game with no problem at all, but any rape scene in any medium makes me feel extremely ill. That's not to say that objectively it's any more right/wrong/whatever, but perhaps that's just my societal imprinting.
My main point is simply "I can see why some people feel so strongly about this particular issue." But I don't think that's an excuse for forced censorship either.