Survival through hunting?


junaid_hussain

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Everything you say is surely true, and even rape may be not only a byproduct, but functional to the survival of the human group - but I think all that is on a different timescale and scope than a game that has the survival of a single individual for 50 days as the top achievement.

The second part of my reply, "that [i.e. rape] would make the game unmarketable", stands anyway.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm not afraid of the depiction of the worst horrors in finctional works, including videogames (Defcon is a Global Thermonuclear War Simulator, just like in Wargames, where the casualties are counted in billions; there were slave traders in Fallout 3, and you could decide to fight them, leave them alone or even work for them). I just respect the fact that many feel different about TLD and the fact that the more mature themes a work treats, the more its market shrinks (due to age ratings).

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Yes, of course rape is unmarketable and I am afraid so is cannibalism. And both with good reason.

There was a scene in one of the concept videos, I don't know if that still stands, where you hear a rape scene through a cabin door. So I suspect we are going to see this kind of morale question, where you must decide if you want to help or not. Not so much if you perpetrate crimes yourself, that would be too controversial.

Then of course there will be the things that have become "acceptable" through our mass media, to kill or betray people. By the way I totally understand your argument that this is hypocrisy but this seems to be deeply ingrained in the human brain. Think of the way murder convicts segregate rapist because they find the act sickening. Even the Nazis did never tolerate outright sadism in the concentration camps, I am sure it was attempted because you have this kind of people, but it was interfered with.

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Hmm... I'm not sure that "Nazis did never tolerate outright sadism in the concentration camps". "Se questo è un uomo" ("If This Is A Man", also published as "Survival in Auschwitz" in the US) by Primo Levi is one of my favourite books, a first-hand account of being a prisoner in Auschwitz and a brilliant analysis of the human condition. The entire labor/extermination camp system was outright sadistic. And think about Amon Goeth, the "man" made famous by the "Schindler's List" movie. And I don't think that Josef Mengele was moved by a genuine scientific interest.

And rape in prisons (among prisoners) is sadly very common (I read a report saying that 20% of the inmates of US prisons reported being sexually abused by other inmates - and this kind of things are almost always underreported). I read a book ("Games Prisoners Play") about Polish prisons in the 80s by a young man who was a political prisoner. Rape was routinely perpetrated, and there was also a strict code of conduct, a set of rules that "respectable" prisoners had to commit to memory, about who could or couldn't be raped, and when, and how.

So there are people who discriminate those who raped outside the prison, but do rape their inmates as a regular basis. Human morality can be very contradictory.

Personally, I think that as long as we retain the ability to separate fiction from reality, we are OK.

Playing war can be fun.

Real war is not.

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Cannibalism is an outright no-no, not because of the moral implications, but because of the implications of health. Firstly, You have no idea why the deceased has died. They may have had some form of flesh eating bacteria, multiple pathogens that will kill a human and various other diseases taht would outright kill the consumer.

Secondly, after death there is a brief period where the body continues to function as it did alive. When oxygen runs out and resources get low within the corpse ( circulation and respiratory systems would be offline by this point, so no delivery of needed components to continue cell function) Cells begin autolysis and anaerobic respiration. This results in massive build up of lactic acid (toxic in high concentrations), formaldehyde and numerous other toxins.

approximately 1-2 days after death the gastric acid in the stomach will have breached it's containment and began seeping into the tissues. By this point, microbial activity in the gut that has been keeping the corpse warm all this time will start to slow down, as the previously symbiotic bacteria in the digestive tract, which began digesting their dead host, start to run out of materials. Once the primary heat source fails, cellular activity begins to shut down as energy levels drop to a minimum, and liquids (excluding blood which will have coagulated in the circulatory system a long time ago) will start to freeze, preventing volatile chemicals that are a byproduct of the cells breaking down their host (most of a toxic nature), from decomposing. Any creature that starts to eat this corpse will suffer acute toxic shock and severe gastro-intestinal failure, with toxin build up causing renal failure and death.

Ethics don't come even close to the biological ramifications.

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themole4 wrote:The entire labor/extermination camp system was outright sadistic.

Sadism is a sexual perversion, and was never tolerated in concentration camps.

themole4 wrote:And I don't think that Josef Mengele was moved by a genuine scientific interest.

But you are wrong. It was scientific research that conducted animal experiments on humans, and it is said to have advanced medicine by several decades. The fact that horrible crimes were perpetrated in the name of science doesn't mean that the Nazis employed sadists to indulge in their perversion.

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Fron Encyclopedia Britannica:

Josef Mengele, [...] Nazi doctor at Auschwitz extermination camp (1943–45) who selected prisoners for execution in the gas chambers and conducted medical experiments on inmates in pseudoscientific racial studies.

From Wikipedia:

In psychiatry, the terms sadism and masochism describe a personality type characterized by the individual deriving pleasure and gratification from either inflicting or receiving physical pain and/or humiliation, respectively. In some cases the pleasure and gratification may be sexual but in others sexual pleasure is not experienced,

Encyclopedia Britannica agrees with you on the strict definition of sadism:

sadism, psychosexual disorder in which sexual urges are gratified by the infliction of pain on another person. [...] The term sadism is occasionally used outside the sexual context, to describe individuals who are purposely cruel or who seem to derive pleasure from humiliating and dominating others in social situations.

But the Enciclopedia Treccani, one of the most authoritative Italian encyclopedias, states:

sadismo Disturbo della personalità caratterizzato da una modalità pervasiva di comportamento crudele, umiliante e aggressivo diretto verso gli altri.

sadism Personality disorder charcterized by a pervasive modality of cruel, humiliating and aggresive behaviour toward others.

And Oxford Dictionaries Online:

Sadism, noun. The tendency to derive pleasure, especially [but not only, my note] sexual gratification, from inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others
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