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No. 14641
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Personally; I think the average person would take one look at this idea and just laugh at it, then call me an idiot for even considering the idea there might be something wrong with it. Sure it's true the characters aren't real, you're not really hurting anyone, it's just simulated pain and suffering you're inflicting on characters that don't really think or feel the way we do, or at all really. It does make me wonder what that says about the player if they can enjoy doing something like that. It might not be real, but the idea is there in your own head, the idea you're hurting or killing 'something' and you're enjoying doing so.
If it's fine because it's not real, then why the push for so much realism in games?
If it doesn't matter, then where does one draw the line? You start with pawns on a chess board that are only a very basic representation of soldiers. They can't move or communicate anything. To kill them is simply to knock over what's little more than an inanimate object.
Then from there you go to videogames, games in which characters might have simulated pain and emotions, who might even beg you for their lives, characters who might act out suffering when you hurt them. These characters can be brought back with loading a save file or might respawn anyway, so we tell ourselves it's fine. What if the characters have more advanced ai and have some basic understanding of what you're doing to them? What if they generate their own dialog in which they ask you to stop hurting them? Would you continue to do so anyway?
What if we leave the digital world? No one would bat an eye at killing bacteria or other such organisms. What about insects? We've all squashed a spider or roach, and few would say it's wrong. What makes it okay? Their lack of intelligence as we know it? Their inability to communicate with us? or our inability to understand their pain that we likely just assume they don't even feel. How could anything so small and mindless possibly suffer after all? right? Even so, many of us might look at a person who enjoys pulling legs and wings off insects as having something wrong with them right?
Then we move up to rodents. Mice and rats, we kill them all the time without thinking about it, treating them like pests. We know they feel pain, they make their noises to signify it, they'll squirm and struggle to avoid it. I once freed a squirrel from some plastic string, and while in my hands I could tell it was in a lot of pain, and felt sorry for it as it crawled away afterwards.
You know, there's this common myth about goldfish that their memory only lasts for 30 seconds. This is a lie people tell to justify the horrible living conditions they put their fishes into. Even if they aren't dying a slow painful death in toxic water that looks fine to us, they're still trapped in a tiny prison, sometimes with barely enough space to move.
What about small animals like cats and dogs? I think most people would agree it's wrong to hurt them, not that owners have much responsibility for their negligence should they allow their pet to suffer and die. But have you ever stopped to think about why it's okay to kill mice and even larger "pests" like opossums, racoons and so on, but not okay to kill small animals people often keep as pets? Where do we draw the line there? Is it because those pests are destructive to our homes, because maybe they're not as friendly as your cat? They're both alive, they both feel real pain, so we can rule that out as a factor or we'd have to include everything down the chain to insects.
So then with that in mind, couldn't the same reasoning be applied to artificial characters? Say you meet a kind and cute friendly young girl that asks you for help in finding her lost dog. She's not real, and you know it. So is it okay to pull out a gun shoot her in the face, or maybe get out a blade and hack off some of her limbs? Would it make you a bad person to ignore her screams of pain as you move on with your quest, because you tell yourself it's not real? It's just a game bruh!
Bare in mind, this is coming from someone who actually felt sorry for the pawns the first time I played chess, and lost because I wasn't willing to sacrifice or kill them. So take it how you will.
Post edited on 27th Jan 2023, 11:07pm
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