First Person Shaggers

So, getting back to this computer game business - having established that if such games concerned players shagging women for points, rather than killing people, then there might be more of an outcry, the next question is, what would make such a scenario more acceptable? What if it was shown that people who played these 'third person shagger' games were less likely to commit sexual offences than those who didn't? Would that make such games acceptable,even if they allowed players to indulge in illegal and sexually violent acts against virtual women? Could the prospect of a safer society outweigh our moral objections to even the concept of sexual violence against women? Can we justify 'virtual rape' whilst still condemning real rape? Does this, in some way, imply that we are condoning real sexual assaults? Maybe if these games were only used as a form of therapy for sex offenders, would that be OK, if it reduced the chances of them re offending? After all, would that be so different from those programmes were drug addicts are prescribed quantities of heroin in order to manage their addictions?

OK, so we might be alright with these hypothetical games if they reduced sex offending and were used as therapy for rapists. But what if this treatment was extended to other sex offenders, peadophiles, for instance? Would it be acceptable for nonces to be allowed to molest virtual children in a virtual world, even if it reduced kiddie-fiddling in the real world and made our real children safer? Are there boundaries to our tolerance of virtual sex and violence? But of course, all this is hypothetical, just as the 'victims' of sexual violence in these non-existent games would be. Why get worked up about something that isn't real and hasn't happened? But the fact is that some people do get worked up about the virtual world when it comes to virtual violence. With good reason, perhaps. It isn't quite as easy as I first thought to separate completely what goes on in the virtual world and what happens in real life. As games graphics get ever more realistic, it's going to get even more difficult to distinguish between real and virtual. Before you know it, we'll have 'first person shaggers' with multi-player options. Before you know it, people will be busy performing the most unspeakable perversions on each other's avatars - imagine the moral dilemmas that will raise.