Well the sleazy loli rape is a lot like driving over bystanders with a car
Gods, no it isn't.
Yeaaaaah I missed that part. No, hell no, can't agree with that equivalence at all. Simulated violence doesn't actually equate to committing the act of violence. Getting your rocks off on loli rubbing simulators... doesn't actually equate to the real act of sexual violence either, but I am inclined to believe that it certainly encourages the actual act more than simulated violence does. Especially given how little we actually know about the development of fetishes, etc.
I think it's a pretty large stretch to suggest playing hentai games (let alone the watered-down versions that have crept into RPGs) encourages someone to go out and commit rape. Sexual violence statistics are pretty horrible to start with so we'll probably never get a study which can support or refute this, but I think it's illogical to suggest that simulated violence has no effect on the rates of real violence while simultaneously turning around and saying that's not true for sexual assault. That seems inconsistent! I don't really see a good reason to hold this view except that the last 20 or so years of gaming have really normalised civilian violence in video games (plus growing up in the sphere of US cultural weirdness where violence is okay to glorify and sex is icky).
(Although in the specific case of GTA, it's moot: it has rape too!)
Yeah, pretty much this. To be honest I think there is WAY more specifically directed moral policing that's going on than people would like to admit, we've come to accept a standard of violence in video games and media that somehow just flies under the radar but you get into sexuality, especially subjects like underage sex/rape/etc. and it's all super icky and creepy and oh god make those go away. The double standard that NEB is mentioning is very real and people don't really stop to think about it.
Games do not simulate the real world, are we going to start being holier than thou on people for their porn fetishes if they keep it private and obviously distinguish between that and reality? Remember when we all laughed off 'video games make kids violent and shoot up stuff' in our childhoods? It really isn't that different here, you are putting a stronger emphasis on a subject that a lot of people are just inherently more uncomfortable talking about and regard as more taboo than wanton murder of innocents which is just accepted as wholesale.
In short kneejerking 'zomg these games with underdressed lolis will encourage the pedos' is pretty much as eyeroll-worthy a notion as complaining that GTA fans will run over hookers with cars.
More or less agree with this.
It's worth noting that Jim Sterling had a whole episode dedicated around how virtual acts are nothing remotely the same as real things. The way he highlighted this was pretty notable too:
You can show as much digital blood as you want, and all you need is a simple "MA" in the corner and no one bats an eye. You can show someone in CoD gunning down large mobs and no one bats an eye. In this particular episode, he showed off that clip of a senator who committed suicide via bullet in the mouth in public. At the start of the video, he was forced to put a warning on the video BECAUSE it showed an actual clip of someone killing themselves. The video wasn't as violent in the sense of how many people die, how graphic it was, etc. but because it was a REAL PERSON actually killing themselves, the video is actually legitimately disturbing and all the worse. We can't simply go "oh, they're just actors" or "those guys aren't real", we just watched a man legit kill himself in public, it actually happened.
It's not quite the same as "something in games encourages the act in real life!" but it does highlight how as humans, we are very capable of subconsciously filtering out the real from the fake, which is exactly why these arguments of encouraging don't work, and as noted, in some sense, they're a "safe" outlet for these things. I mean, if someone is extremely angry, it can be cathartic to go into a game and just murder thousands of people to relieve your stress. It may not be healthy, but it sure as hell is far more socially acceptable than taking it out on another person, or even simply another object and causing vandalism, because those thousands you killed aren't there, and you know somewhere in the back of your mind no one is actually really being hurt.
"But some kids played Mortal Kombat and tried a fatality in real life and killed someone!"
Ok, sure, I'll grant that it caused that instance, and maybe a handful of others. How about the millions of people who played a game with no instances caused? Is it possible maybe the action wasn't caused by Mortal Kombat, but rather, the person in question being mentally unstable, or even just plain stupid? Whose to say the person wouldn't have been inspired by some other material not Video Game related to do something similarly stupid? We know what happened, but there's probably a lot more than meets the eye, but nope, easy for that outlet.
I know I focused on violence, but really, sexual things are not different; the key is that virtual stuff =/= real world stuff. I'm not saying it's GOOD to go 'lol rapist and run over hookers' in a game but I can recognize that this doesn't make the person anything close to the same as someone who does that in real life.
