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

[Neela]

I just wanted to add some perspective to the whole argument that video games cause kids to become violent. It just isnt true. This is a argument that the media and politicians like to throw around because it appeals to a much older generation to explain the age old "I just don't know what is wrong with kids these days" statement. In truth if you go to the dept. of justice web site and pour over the actual statistics, violent crime actually dropped significantly at the start of the 90's for crimes per 1000 people. In fact this is even more significant because the number of reported crimes is a much higher percentage than it ever was in human history. Further breaking down the criminal backgrounds of those that do commit violent acts shows that most of these people come from extremely poor conditions and those that experience violent "real life" childhoods like abuse, not those that typically grew up with xboxs and computers. The media uses extremely isolated cases such as Columbine to try to describe the picture of crime as a whole. The point really is that I have been playing computer/video games now for almost 26 years (yes I am showing my age..I actually played pong) and have no desire to commit violent acts or have any history of anger issues. It takes far more than playing games to make someone act violently. Something is wrong with them deeper than that. I get really upset when I hear or see news stories especially concerning politicians who point a finger at video games or movies. If you want to take statistics out of context you may as well blame it on ice cream. There is a long standing history of factual statistics that shows that the graph of ice cream sales per month correlates with the number of violent crimes per month. So it must be the ice cream that causes it right? These are both dependent variables on something else that is not even mentioned. In this case air temperature. Higher temperature does correlate with violent crime and ice cream sales. So the argument that video games make violent people is completely false, but more correctly that some people that are violent in nature may also like to play video games.