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latexr • today at 3:34 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

Fun is very much allowed. But people are also allowed to question if one person’s fun is another person’s pain.

Like, if a bunch of kids caught a stray cat, tied him up, and started shouting in his ears and laughing, would you stop them? And if they complained “no fun allowed”, would you think that was fair? What about if there was a video game in which you beat to a pulp deepfake representations of your friends and family? Do you not agree it would be reasonable for some people to find that in bad taste, including those who have suffered from domestic violence in real life?

You may say that this is just a game, but media affects people too. There are thousands of games where you can shoot at fictional infrastructure, is there really that much to gain from destroying representations of real buildings?


Replies

ThrowawayR2 • today at 4:48 PM

> "media affects people too"

The previous incarnations of that, like "videogames cause violence", "superhero comic books cause juvenile delinquency", "D&D causes satanism", "rock and roll caused a decline in youth morals", are nonsense that was discredited long ago.

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hexagonsuns • today at 4:41 PM

Your premise makes no sense. We’re talking about a top down tank game where the buildings don’t even resemble their real life counterparts here.

If you’re offended by this, maybe you should just not engage with it. Why does the onus fall on the creator?

Take a look at Battlefield. Should we take that down because it simulates war? Maybe we should remove guns from ever appearing in media because people have died from guns. Should we remove color from media because it may be insensitive to the colorblind? Why don’t we just remove all words everywhere because someone has had their feelings hurt by words. Where do we draw the line?

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ErroneousBosh • today at 6:02 PM

> Like, if a bunch of kids caught a stray cat, tied him up, and started shouting in his ears and laughing, would you stop them? And if they complained “no fun allowed”, would you think that was fair?

You are talking about directly harming another living creature who cannot fight back.

> What about if there was a video game in which you beat to a pulp deepfake representations of your friends and family?

You are talking about "harming" a collection of north and south facing flips on a disk, a few ones and zeros in a RAM chip. Hell, we used to actually make Quake characters with our real faces on back in the day so you really could blast your real-life friends and family to pieces.

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