1. Torture
There could be no other number one than this. Torture in real life is as unforgivable as anything else on or off the list, isn’t it? It strips a person of all ability to defend themselves. It’s willpower against harsher conditions than anyone should ever have to face. It’s valid, because it is, unlike most anything else on the list, a legitimately difficult subject to tackle. What can justify torture in a game?
The same can be asked of real life. The fact is, people have and do torture others in real life. It isn’t just sociopaths, torture experts have been people who do that during the day, then go home to their spouse and children at night. It’s easily possible to justify those people as being purely monsters because they perform the work of monsters, but what if they aren’t?
Take, for example, a war game. A person interrogates someone for information, due to propaganda, due to dehumanizing the enemy, and due to desperation for protecting one’s own. A game can expose the grisly nature of war on a much more gruesome level than giving numbers, or gunning down faceless AI. It can give a face, a personality to the enemy. The player can see a strong-willed person with conviction, and be forced to break them down.
It can carry a message against war itself, or against the way mankind chooses to wage it. If a developer is capable of respecting games as an artistically-capable medium, they can show that the system of war forces good people to do horrible things, and that it forces them to do it to good people.
If you respect that games are a medium that are maturing and evolving, then the idea of a controversial idea should be exciting, not frightening. Throttling games with anything on this list is only telling of one’s own insecurities and ignorances. It is a medium that, developer and audience-willing, can provide a unique platform for new experience and new perspective.
Video games can be a path to enlightenment if we’re willing to follow.
