Writing on the New Yorker’s blog, Simon Parkin asks, “How evil should a video game allow you to be?” Excerpt:

Last month, a user on a Grand Theft Auto V forum asked whether players would be able to rape women in the game. In the post, which was widely shared on social media, he 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.” This is alarming but, in a game that prides itself on player-led freedom and opportunity within virtual, victimless but violent worlds, is it unreasonable? If this freedom is necessary to maintain the artifice of the world, the designer surely has a responsibility to engineer the victim’s reactions in order to communicate something of the pain and damage inflicted.

Fictional characters, whether they appear in novels, films, or video games, are never fully independent entities. They are conjured by words on a page, directions in a screenplay, or lines of programming code, existing only in imagination or on a screen. A creator has no moral obligation to his or her fictional characters, and in that sense anything is theoretically permissible in a video game. But a game creator does have a moral obligation to the player, who, having been asked to make choices, can be uniquely degraded by the experience. The game creator’s responsibility to the player is to, in Kurt Vonnegut’s phrase, not waste his or her time. But it is also, when it comes to solemn screen violence, to add meaning to its inclusion.

Questions about video-game violence will gain urgency. The video-game medium curves toward realism or, as the novelist Nicholson Baker put it in the magazine, a “visual glory hallelujah.” As the fidelity of our virtual worlds moves ever closer to that of our own, the moral duty of game makers arguably intensifies in kind. The guns in combat games are now brand-name weapons, the conflicts in them are often based on real wars, and each hair on a virtual soldier’s head has been numbered by some wearied 3-D modeller. The go-to argument that video games are analogous to innocuous playground games of cops-and-robbers grows weaker as verisimilitude increases. The 1982 Atari 2600 game Custer’s Revenge, in which players controlled a stick-man representation of General Custer tasked with raping a naked Native American woman tied to a pole, attracted plausible criticism. How much more repellent might the work be if rendered by contemporary technologies with their ever-more-realistic graphics?

Read the whole thing. Thoughts? I think this stuff is fairly evil, and I’ll tell you why. Back in 2002, when I was writing for National Review, I posted something on The Corner praising a former child victim of an abusive priest who, now grown, kneecapped the priest with a shot in the leg. I really did think: “Good, the SOB deserved it.” It didn’t take long for me to regret having posted such a thing, and for having entertained the feeling — not because I felt sorry for the priest, or even because I thought the abuser didn’t deserve it, but because that instinct must be resisted in any civilized person. Longtime readers of mine know that I lose it when I am confronted by the abuse of children, whether by bullies or deviants. If I allowed myself to play a hypothetical video game in which I was able to inhabit the role of an avenger who roams the virtual world shooting child molesters, child-beaters, people who bully middle-school children to suicide, and the like, I would release a daemonic instinct within myself, one that could easily take possession of me (I’m speaking metaphorically, understand). In real life, I work too hard to suppress that overwhelming urge to vengeance; it would be dangerous to let it loose, even in a virtual world.

I think people lie to themselves that such a game allows them to let off steam, and use the apparent moralism of such games — Hey, I’m blowing the heads off of Nazis! — to give themselves cover for taking pleasure in sadism. The other day I was driving to Baton Rouge with my son Matthew, and talking about The Iliad. We passed the house in which the man called Snafu (from The Pacific) lived. It was a house that later, after Snafu died, was inhabited by a man who became a serial killer, Derrick Todd Lee. I told Matthew that it’s interesting to think about the fact that Snafu came home from war in the South Pacific a hero, in part for having killed so many of the enemy (the utter savagery of that war, and of what fighting that war demanded of men like Snafu, is documented in E.B. Sledge’s memoir With The Old Breed, on which the TV show The Pacific was based). I say that not as a judgment on Snafu, but on how we think of the instinct to kill — that is, how in one context it is considered heroic, but in another it is satanic. It’s all about the end to which the instinct is directed. But the instinct remains. Don’t call up those demons unless you have no choice, and certainly not for pleasure.

Even if they never act on it in real life, engaging the emotions in hyperrealistic acts of evil — acting out rape and torture fantasies, for example — degrades the moral sense. I think it’s worthwhile to contemplate violence, evil, and its complexities, but there’s something about entering a video game in which you indulge these things at an extremely realistic level that strikes me as inhuman and even dangerous.