But there is, however, one thing about the aesthetic reaction to fictional representations that is real, namely: the aesthetic reactions themselves. No agent is harmed, no wrong is done, it’s all just a matter of subjective enjoyment. To the extent that each of those representations involves fictional entities and events (and for the purposes of this discussion we are assuming that they only involve such entities and events), they don’t seem to have any intrinsic moral relevance.

video games, movies, books, jokes) is an intrinsically amoral thing. You might be inclined to think that your aesthetic enjoyment of something (e.g. The Virtual Theoretical Approach and the Challenge of Video Games I will base my discussion primarily on her 2010 article “ The Incorrigible Social Meaning of Video Game Imagery”, though I have also read two of her other articles.ġ. In what follows, I’m going to try my best to outline and engage with her main arguments. The “it’s only a game”-response, doesn’t always work. In other words, she argues that there is something intrinsically wrong with enjoying such representations. She argues that we should have a modestly moralistic attitude toward such representations. She has a written a number of interesting articles over the years about the ethics of virtual and fictional representations. To answer that question, I am going to enlist the help of Stephanie Partridge. Prima facie, the answer would seem to be “no”, since no one is actually harmed or wronged in the virtual act. The more interesting question is whether there is something intrinsically wrong with playing (and perhaps enjoying) such video games. This is like the typical “violent video games cause real violence”-claim, and I suspect it would be equally hard to prove in practice. that they give rise to behaviour that is morally problematic and so should limited or prohibited for that reason. One could, of course, argue that they are extrinsically wrong, i.e. The question I want to explore in this post is the morality of such representations. For example, in 2006 the Japanese company Illusion released the game RapeLay, in which the player stalks and rapes a mother and her two daughters. Since then, video games with similarly problematic content, but far more realistic imagery, have been released. The game, unsurprisingly, generated a great deal of controversy and criticism at the time of its release. The notorious 1982 video game Custer’s Revenge requires the player to direct their crudely pixellated character (General Custer) to avoid attacks so that he can rape a Native American woman who is tied to a stake.

Video game rapelay game play