what is it with DU's collective reluctance to criticize violent video games?

[DirkGently]

40. Discussions about the impact of art & entertainment

... always seem to devolve into absolutist positions about freedom of expression vs. a call for bans. On one side, it is pointed out that we are free to discuss and depict the unlikeable, the unsavory, and the unethical. We are permitted to pretend things we shouldn't actually do.

So we don't generally silence people for discussing or simulating things that are abhorrent. Sometimes those depictions and discussions are for the good. No criticism or satire can exist without acknowledging the things we despise. Prohibition of bad ideas has never proven to be the path to better ones.

The truth, as usual, probably lurks in the middle somewhere.

Misogyny or racism in a video game is open to criticism as misogyny or racism. It's bad art for starters, unless it really is some kind of intelligent comment on those subjects.

But then come the discussions as to whether we are creating the things we imagine, just by swimming in that cultural soup. Normalizing them. Suggesting that our worst impulses are something everyone would indulge if they could. We don't believe that, do we?

God knows, I am not bringing up p_rn, but those threads always seem crippled by this same issue. Who gets to decide which expressions are worthless, exploitive, or harmful? A lot of us pretended to shoot our friends or innocent Native Americans as kids, and grew up with not the slightest thought really doing those things would be okay.

One thing -- I have noticed we're now using "porn" to describe any depiction in art that appeals to an unsavory human impulse. "Torture porn" films spring to mind. We're talking about exploitation vs. observation in a slightly new way.

At what point are we being asked not to observe and comment on something loathsome, but to enjoy it, normalize it, or participate in it? I watched a film called "Hostel," supposedly based on truth bizarrely enough, and it lingered so long on depictions of humans abasing and mutilating others for sport that I felt unclean. It felt less like storytelling and more like an invitation to malicious fantasy. I wouldn't arrest the filmmakers, but I would suggest they did something wrong in creating "art" like that.

Complicating all of that is the question of children -- so often used disingenuously to try to limit adult freedoms on the basis of how something might impact a person not yet fully formed. But there are things that impact children differently. Without the context of experience and knowledge, how is a child going to receive "playing" at murder or abuse? Do we risk stimulating a response adults understand has no place in civilization?

Maybe the answer lies in discussion itself. *Is* GTA 5 using a tasteless appeal to immoral / amoral fantasy as a selling point? Is it not whatever else it claims to be -- escapism, irony, satire, mindless amusement? I don't know. I played games shooting space invaders as a child and games shooting Nazis and zombies as a young adult. None of them made me feel I was being encouraged to revel in cruelty or feed any kind of desire to do real harm in the real world. Playing at killing prostitutes or children sounds different to me, but I haven't actually seen these games. I've yet to see any fans suggest they like doing horrific things in a game because they'd like to actually do horrific things.

If it is bad art, it should at least be called out on that. Regardless of whether someone wants to argue whether a game can actually warp a child's perception or any of that, tastelessness or glorification of cruelty ought to be identified. Something can be legal, and a "game," and still reprehensibly awful.

People should talk about it, *without* getting backed into corners with prohibition on one side and no one having the right to question appeals to worst human impulses on the other.

Bad ideas need daylight to give way to better ones.