The Unbeliever, Oblivion's moral issues Options

[DoomedOne]

So a tiny thing brought up in the main forums are the ideas of moral values.

In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson the main character chooses not to accept this dream world as reality and therefore finds it okay to rape a young girl.

In the main forum this topic was slashed and flamed in all three threads it made an appearance because people did not understand the idea. It's simple, if you accept a world as fake, whether you realize you're dreaming, or you're in a video game, do the moral laws you would usually uphold yourself to still stand? Would you suddenly find it okay to exercise the most evil, atrocious side of your personality and find it pleasurable, to your character, at least, to murder and mutilate?

This question has a bigger purpose, but first I'd like some people's opinions on where they stand when it comes to morality and video games. If they created a video game where the suffering of your victims looked parallel to if you were performing the act in real life, would you still be able to go through with it?

This post has been edited by DoomedOne: Sep 8 2005, 12:37 AM

[DoomedOne]

I read it, and the other thread I read included this same book I mentioned and link to that thread.

You. Were. Flamed.

No, it really is frightening when you hear people talk about the real world and real lives with such a lack of respect or empathy. I'm not sure if it's violent video games as much as people just have this me-generation thing going on. I was listening to some older friends talk (around 30 or 40) about how they ought to just turn Iraq and Afghanistan into a parking lot, and I was too shcoked to speak, then the other guy says, "Yeah that's something the younger generation doesn't understand."

One thing that's interesting is the evolution of society though, because like in the 60s there was apparently this huge number of people that locked their doors at night and hid under a pillow waiting for the era to come to an end, and here today we have those people running our government. So I'm thinking, "Wait a second, these are all baby-boomers making these greedy decisions."

As far as videogames, I think it depends on a lot of things, like, the fact that your brother plays a lot of violent video games is not problem, but there probably is link between the huge doses of violence he gets and his violent attitude towards society. Most people don't make that link. The roleplaying phenomenon does not really apply for most role-playing gamers, and most gamers also learned the seperate realities, so they don't take what they get from a gory game and apply it to real life. Some people just don't though.

The question of the Unbeliever though, more applies to real life with a Video-game tie in. I doubt there exists very many human beings at all that could stand to live with a bunch of people from anywhere in the world for one week, and then blow them up, rip them apart, murder their daughters, sisters and wives, etcetera. However, no one spends a week with these people to learn they're human, to learn exactly what it is they're destroying, let alone politicians who get their training either in law school or business school, both of which teach professional ethics over morality. These Politicians that start wars are the unbelievers. They have chosen not to accept the world, the families and cultures they destroy as real.