How about a game of tactical thermonuclear war?

[andrewducker]

Over here is a discussion I got into predicated on this:

Which is worse - rape or murder?

Got your answer?

You probably answered "murder". Now, would you let your children play rape games? Would you play them yourself? If you answered "no" to either, your next question is: Why are the murder games okay?

Comments

[kashandara.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure you're right in your assumption that most people would say murder. I for one answered rape.

[andrewducker]

However, the societal concensus seems to be that murder is worse (punishments for it are far worse, for instance).

Rape leaves you mentally and physically bruised and battered. Murder leaves you without a life. Seeing as I don't believe in an afterlife, I view a bruised but alive person as better than no person at all.

[luxcanon.livejournal.com]

Perhaps.

Then again: everyone dies, so in the final analysis 'murder' seems to imply only those deaths which are brought about by another of the same species, and in particular, only that subset of those which meet with Official Disaproval.

On the other hand, not everyone gets raped, and I know of no Official rapes.

When hearing about a murder, the first question in my mind is usually, 'Why did it happen? Could it have been justified?"
but when I hear about a rape, I think "Kill the Bastard now, so it won't happen again."

[andrewducker]

Well, there have been deliberate policies of rape from everyone from the Romans to the Japanese, as well as the unofficialy official rapes that have occured pretty much every time a city has fallen in the history of recorded warfare.

But I think we have to differentiate between "worse for the victim" and "a worse act to commit" (the two varying, depending on your moral code). Certainly, rape is possibly worse to commit, as there is never a justification. But Murder is a worse thing to happen to you, I'd say, especially as not doing so would be a grave insult to all those people who have been raped and then have lived lives afterwards. To say to them "better that you had been murdered" would be a grave disservice.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I didn't answer murder. Rape is the worse crime, if you want a generalisation rather than picking specifics of this rape and that murder.

And children do play rape games.

Running after someone and kissing them when they're somewhat unwilling isn't all innocence and smiles.

People let children play murder games because if you don't, then heaven forbid, they might grow up thinking violence is wrong. And then where would we be?

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing that this is culturally mediated (then again I think that about most things). In the US and Britain, violence is a far more socially acceptable form of entertainment than any sort of positive or negative sexuality, and (at least in the US, I don't know about Britain, most people think of rape [IMHO incorrectly] as being more about sex than violence). It's not surprise that children pick up on this. Japan is quite different in its attitudes about sexuality (and in practice very different about the acceptance of violence) and I believe that there are rape games there.

Much of Scandinavia is opposite in public attitudes about sex and violence. I would expect murder games to be less common. However, I've never seen any statistics on this fact. My guess is that neither sorts of games are terribly common there.

[blackmanxy.livejournal.com]

It seems like most of the folks posting on that thread are operating on the assumption that killing and murder are the same thing. Since I reject that premise outright, I'm not really going to comment on most of the discussion.

Anyway, I'm not willing to make a blanket judgment on murder and rape because neither of those categories takes method or intent into account. My inclination is to say murder is worse. My inclination is also to believe that thinking rape is worse than murder is probably indicative of certain modern social values, but I have no intention of pursuing that line of thought (and no intention of arguing the point).

[imester.livejournal.com]

As a kid, I played both -- depending on how you couch it.

We certainly played catch-the-bad-guy, which involved a fair amount of shooting and the occasional grisly death scene, but usually resulted in capture and escape (because who wants to be out of the game?)

And everyone I knew who played with barbie dolls played the eternal sex game -- all barbies ever do is have sex, whether or not they really want to.

I don't know that we ever played a rape sequence where it was recognized as such, with fear and violence attached. But then, I don't think we ever played a murder with fear and consequences, either.

I think as a society (I'm in the US, YMMV), we recognize that violence is a potentially acceptable solution to some problems, while violent rape is never considered to be an acceptable solution (with coercive rape still largely under debate). So kids go on.

One of my friends evidently attended a school that practiced non-violence and cooperative activities. His stories make me wish there were more like it.

[takhisis.livejournal.com]

I agree with the previous reply that "killing" and "murder" are two entirely different things. I'd place an army simulator or something like Doom or Quake (where one is defending oneself against attack by nonhuman creatures) in a different category than a game where you were playing, say, an assassin with a sniper rifle. Postal, for example.

But as for why killing games sit better with us than the idea of a rape game (I'm sticking with the medium of video games for continuity's sake), is mostly because society has inured in us that sometimes it's necessary to kill. Nobody has to rape in self-defense. Nobody is going to be drafted and be ordered by the government to rape overseas. It falls in a very black-and-white moral category of "WRONG". We've been brought up to see killing as a more nebulous "bad" thing that we may or may not someday find ourselves forced to do, regardless of whether or not we are a "good person". This softens its blow as a theory, and in virtual mediums, in my opinion.

And then on the other side, there are actually rape games:
http://www.sixsixfive.com/229.html