levite

I actually think this pretty much sums it up.

I am not particularly a fan of the GTA-style/mow-'em-down 1st Person Shooter games, but I think that the violence, while bad enough, is nonetheless comparatively impersonal and comic-book-y. I wouldn't let my 10-year-old play it (if I had a 10-year-old), but I would probably shrug and sigh if my (hypothetical) 16-year-old was playing it. I tend to believe that, unless played to excess, and/or played too young, violent video games sublimate violent impulses more than they produce them.

But a rape simulator is just sick. It's nothing but a practice session for creating stalking rapists and child molesters. Sexual violence is just not the same as non-sexual violence. It is personal, psychologically destructive, violating, in ways that-- although to some degree all those things are true for non-sexual violence-- non-sexual violence cannot compare.

If I caught my hypothetical 10-year-old playing GTA, I'd give him a mild chewing out and ground them. If I caught him playing a rape simulator, I would give them a very serious talking-to about sexual violence, and arrange for them to meet a rape crisis counselor and a rape victim, to educate him about what sexual violence means.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)