Sex and violence in online games
This post came from MUD-Dev, where we were discussing violence in online games.
Seriously, though, practically any form of entertainment is about sex and violence, if you want to look at basic building blocks. It’s just they are contextualized into love, yearning, jealousy, pride, coming of age, patriotism, whatever.
If you took out all the sex and all the violence, you wouldn’t have very many movies, books, or TV shows.
While we’re bemoaning the lack of maturity in the field, we need not to miss the forest for the trees. It’s not too much sex and violence that is the problem. It’s that it’s shallow sex and violence. This is why we decry casual PKing, why we snicker at puerile tinysex logs. And why we get excited to hear of the possibility for meaningful PvP or get defensive about the “reality” of online relationships.
If we want to go on a crusade to fix something, how about we fix the fact that your average cartoon does a better job at portraying the human condition than our games do?
Most sex in muds is nicely contextualized. Most violence isn’t.