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Australian Target Stores Ban GTA V For Depictions of Violence Against Women
MojoKid writes "There's no such thing as an official Grand Theft Auto game until there's been a bit of controversy leading to its removal from at least one set of store shelves. It's a right of passage for the GTA series, if you will, and GTA V just earned its place among the franchise's previous titles by ruffling feathers in Australia, leading to its ousting from Target stores. At issue this time around is the "game's depictions of violence against women." Jim Cooper, general manager of corporate affairs for Target, explained that customers have voiced a "significant level of concern about the game's content." Separate reports say Target Australia received a petition with nearly 40,000 signatures demanding the game be removed. According to the petition, the game gives players plenty of "incentive is to commit sexual violence against women, then abuse or kill them to proceed or get 'health' points."
The above is a fantastic example of just how arbitrary our ethics are. It's not just the bible - things ten times worse than what any game or movie show happen in real life and we accept them as "collateral damage". The same as 50,000 years ago, our attitude depends a lot more on who does to whom than it does on what is being done.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It would not be a problem, would it?
What are we going to censor today? Please make a selection:
1) Video games.
2) Movies.
3) Opinions.
4) Drawings.
5) Retro (back censoring things that aren't politically correct today).
So what will it be tomorrow? It's like we target popular items for "insert won't anyone think of the chil...feminists" reasons here. Any idiot out there with at least half a brain knows that violence in unacceptable whether it's children, females, shemales, hemales, dogs, cats, horses (insert your preference here). If you censor ONE thing in ONE media, you have to go for the other medias as well.
We're SO close to arresting people for thought crimes!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Largely agree though I'm not sure about the "stupid" thing.
I haven't played V yet, but have played 3/VC/SA/4, and wouldn't describe any in the series as "stupid". They're biting depictions of US pop "crime culture" as seen from 3,000 miles away, and they belong on the shelves in any store that sells games but also sells TV box sets from The Sopranos to Miami Vice.
I'm not arguing it's perfect, that it's the funniest, that if all games were like the GTA series there wouldn't be a problem, but standalone, marketed and sold only to adults, there should be no problem with the game being sold. We see a backlash against it largely because of a combination of politicians raising its profile as some kind of embodiment of evil in video gaming, and because of the background issue of there being so many games that persist sharing GTA's social flaws, something that's becoming a prominant concern now inside and outside the industry.
Stupid? No. each game in the series I've seen does what it sets out to do, does it with wit and insight, and tries its very best to present a provoking look at an artificial world that's a little twisted to begin with.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"As to if it is acceptable... Well, I'd just question why it is there at all."
You could ask the same question of any scene in any book or movie involving sex or violence.
Why is it there? Because it's not meant to be acting as a beacon of how the world should be but instead is fictional commentary on how the world is.
Setting the world to rights isn't GTA's job anymore than it's the job of Hostel, or 50 shades of grey.
"Movies make an effort to censor themselves. War films don't show the real horrors of war because it would give the audience PTSD."
Absolute and categorically incorrect bullshit. Movies show stuff that video games can't even come close to showing, if you put anything like Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes, or the Human Centipede in a video game it's an instant ban for that game. Manhunt was far far tamer than all those films yet it was banned. War movies show far worse graphic violence and far greater impacts of war than any Call of Duty or Battlefield game ever has.
"They could, for example, make the prostitute disappear after the act off-camera so she can't be murdered"
Yes, and 50 shades of grey could be a book that says "A women has fantasies about being dominated, but the man respects her too much so refuses to. The End." but it's not, because some forms of entertainment like to explore the reality of the world, or our fears, our thoughts and so forth in a bit more depth than that.
The fact is there are parts of the world, even in Western countries like the US where the sort of shit as in GTA happens. Why should video games be held up as some medium cannot explore the reality of the world in which we live in like movies and books can? Why hold them to different standards and suggest video games may only be used for the purpose of advertising the ethics and morals of an ideal world rather than as an exploration of the real world?
Nothing in GTA says "You should go and do this for real".
This isn't the same controversy. If you haven't been paying attention (and can't blame you if you haven't) there's a new wave of Jack Thompsons. It's not a think-of-the-children thing, it's accusations of racism and misogyny. Basically, same shit, different idiots from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Instead of wacky conservatives, now its loony pseudo-feminists ranting about how video games (which they totally play, but don't) are this that and the other thing, gamers are bad (seriously), pay attention to me, ect. Only when I called Jack Thompson a dumb asshole, no one cared, but now pointing out the poor arguments and outright lies of these new assholes gets you accused of being misogynist. To b honest I'd rather deal with ol' Jack was though; these new people are downright toxic, and causing all sorts of drama everywhere they go, and more seriously, making light of actual social issues. Lots of people are really getting the wrong idea of what feminism really means thanks to these boneheads who define feminism as 'that thing I can use as a cudgel for my own selfish agenda.'
Anyway, yes, GTA and apparently video games in general for that matter are still controversial, and really, while the justifications have changed, the real root reason is still the same: pompous, self righteous, holier than thou busybodies who really need to find another claim to fame and leave the rest of us the fuck alone.
What you've described is sex (for which you gain health) followed by violence. I'm familiar with both of those things, they've been in previous GTA games, but the point is that they're unrelated. For the sake of the video the player has chosen to do one right after the other, but they could have just walked away after the sex or committed the violence without the sex.
Your suggestion that sex should render the NPC invulnerable is... odd. Before the sex she's an NPC just like any other, after the sex she's an NPC just like any other.
All right, lets look at this another way: in Halo players have the ability to crouch, this serves a functional purpose. There's a rather juvenile tradition in Halo of killing another player in a multiplayer match and then standing over their corpse and crouching. The existence of the corpse and the ability to crouch are entirely separate from one another, each there for a good reason, but when the player decides to combine them in this way they do so with the intent to suggest a humiliating sexual act. There are ways that Bungie could prevent this one particular act if they chose to do so - they could eliminate corpses, they could make the areas around corpses impossible to crouch in, they could remove the ability to crouch entirely - but the act exists because the players wanted it and created it themselves. So in other words: 1) The fact that people use the game as a medium for their expression, and that expression in undesirable, does not mean that there's anything wrong with the game. 2) Any attempt to censor this sort of thing is likely to get worked around. 3) Free expression isn't always nice, it doesn't always make you feel good about humanity, but it is always valuable.
So how does that relate to a single player game like GTA? Ultimately what I'm saying here is that the player makes the game what they want it to be.
Physical violence is generally a consequence of psychological violence. Based on my experience, woman use psychological violence a lot more than men to get what they want.
But that's the kind of thing we're not allowed to say in our modern society. We should only criticize men, never women. The same way that violence against women is not tolerable, but there's nothing wrong with violence against men.
Studies that only count physical violence, and people who base their views of domestic violence on them, are a deep part of the problem.
The most painful scars are on the inside. Folks like you who only count physical violence as domestic abuse enable abusers by helping them convince themselves and those they abuse that as long they never physically hit then they arent committing abuse.
So fuck you very much.
(no gender references included because both sides of the fence agree on this)
The Bible certainly does not say you'll be rewarded for killing sinners. Sin is a tragedy and its consequence (death) is also a tragedy. God doesn't want anyone to die and gives every person an opportunity to be forgiven (John 3:16 - https://lumina.bible.org/bible/John+3:16)
The New Testament does not contradict the Old Testament. Most of the time when the New Testament discusses something in the Old Testament it shows that the same matter is even more important than than even the Old Testament indicated. For example, the Old Testament says "Do not murder" but the New Testament says that even hating someone is just as bad. This and other examples are given in Matthew 5 starting with verse 17 (https://lumina.bible.org/bible/Matthew+5:17). Fortunately, because we are unable to meet these standards on our own, God graciously teaches us and helps us to live toward those standards until we can do so perfectly.
The decision-making someone goes through in a game grows and reinforces neural pathways that we naturally use for decision making later. I'm not saying that everyone that plays games with violence against women is going to act out those things in real life, but they are adding experiences to their mind that make them more and more familiar with those scenarios. That familiarity will have an affect how they interpret and react to these atrocities when they happen on the news and in real life. If the game is positively reinforcing these actions then the player's mind begins creating and reinforcing neural pathways that will suggest a positive outcome when these things are done. This is potentially dangerous not only for the person playing the game, but especially for the generation after that sees these things being enjoyed virtually by the people they look up to and don't yet make a distinction between virtual and reality.
At the end of the day, though, the player choosing to virtually rape women is still making that choice. The person being raped in fantasy may not be a real person who will have to live with the soul-shattering consequences of being raped, but the damage to the player choosing those scenarios still takes place.
In a previous post on this thread it was pointed out that even worse atrocities than are depicted in GTA are in the Bible. This is true. The atrocities that happen in this world and even the judgments required for bringing justice to them are difficult for me to stomach. If God didn't send His son who willingly accepted the punishment for all of the sins humans have ever committed then there would be no hope. Anyone who wants to live the way God wants them to can because Jesus has covered the punishment for our mistakes.. if he hadn't, then we would have no hope. We just have to accept that Jesus died in our place and submit ourselves to God's way.. a learning process that God wants to help us with.