5. Motion Control Sex Crimes
In a
piece in The New Yorker, published on the 17th September by Simon Parkin titled How Evil Should A Video Game Allow You To Be?, he made a number of points about the realism of video games and how they let you act out violence rather than just be a spectator as you would be when reading a book. He accused long term gamers of being guilty of a number of virtual crimes such as smoking indoors in Metal Gear Solid, mass shooting in an airport in Modern Warfare II and even full scale genocide in Sid Meiers Civilization. He went on to attack Grand Theft Auto V for its torture scene and how, in Grand Theft Auto IV, you could fly a helicopter into a skyscraper. It was clear that he hadnt actually played the game, because a correction at the bottom of the piece acknowledged that he had mistakenly written that you could fly planes into buildings. Parkin also used a post from an idiot on the GTA forums who wanted to know if it was possible to rape women in GTA V. The idiot wrote;
I want to have the opportunity to kidnap a woman, hostage her, put her in my basement and rape her everyday, listen to her crying, watching her tears.
Parkin said that if Rockstar were to give players this freedom, they had a duty to engineer the victims reactions in order to communicate something of the pain and damage inflicted. No mention that the person who wrote this probably shouldnt be allowed to tie his own shoelaces, let alone play a mature rated video game. But in Parkins eyes, this idiot represented the majority of the people who will play GTA V, and it was up to Rockstar to program the victims reactions. Nothing sinister about that at all. He concluded the article with a hypothetical game, where he envisioned a motion-controlled video game of Lolita, the famous novel by Vladimir Nabokov where a man starts having lustful thoughts about a teenager. He suggested that playing the game presumably via Wii U and Kinect, you would mimic its pelvic thrusts and parries as another virtual sex crime was committed. Insane.