Video games and taboos

I find it interesting that some devs will sacrifice contextual fidelity and gameplay opportunities in exchange of not messing with "touchy" subjects. Sometimes it makes sense since some subjects doesn't really makes sense to everyone, for example, specific fetishes or detailed torture, it would just not sell I think.

So what's your opinion of using or implementing taboos in game, user? Do you think it's cool? it's a sign of bad taste? too edgy? Depends? Share your thoughts.

To boost up discussion, I'll start commenting some of them in specific.

Childkilling
I think the problem with children is the same as the "what do they eat" thing, you just can't imagine some communities without the little ones, if you are striving to and if your game gives you the possibility of killing anyone, the consequence is painfully obvious.

I've recently read that Todd wanted to add children in Oblivion to enhance the "realism", but quickly gave up realizing the implications of such implementation. This is interesting considering that after this he surrendered to his weird itch of children as feature in the future 3D Fallouts, just to make them invincible. I think the original Fallouts solved this quite well with the reputation thing, but I can't really go deep into it since I didn't play the original fallouts yet.

One particular about childkilling that is interesting is that is so taboo, that don't even villains do it, with the only exception of collateral damage, which is deduced implicitly.

Fuck, forgot pic.

Slavery
This particular one really pisses me off in Rimworld specifically, you can break someone's legs, make them prisoners, extract their organs, kill 'em, maybe even have some sadistic fun with 'em, but putting them to work without consent? Nah. I mean you can SELL them as slaves, but not use 'em yourself. I mean you can literally be a sick fuck in this simulation, why draw the line in such a weird place?

Slavery could be a particular useful mechanic in lots of games, I rationalize that rarity of its implementation is because most of the game protags are heroes in the traditional moral sense, knights saving princesses are not really fond of breaking someone else's will to submission and using to achieve his own purposes, morally ambiguous protags and antiheroes are still rare or are played in a childful way (emo with a heart of gold thing).

Porn
This one is delicate since it's done in some games, it' just not mainstream, coincidentally I quite understand why would you choose to chastise your game, and it's not puritanism. Games work better when mechanics are interchangeable and have certain escalation, taking this into account it's hard to "mechanize" sex, since not only there's no mystery in it, you also can't "merge" it easily with other good and common mechanics. In my own experience, porn games are quite boring, if you dismiss the whole lust part. Even the common knowledge says that successful eroges are successful for everything that is not the porn: Wonderful plot and unexpected good gameplay.

You could say, for example, that romance could have great depth in roleplaying and strategy games (and it really does in some then), but romance isn't really related to sex in terms of systems, if you make a marriage system, seeing the "childmaking" is just a extra flavor, not a necessity.

Torture
Don't know what to say about this one, it's the second most popular (porn being the first) and generally the player character is the one subject to the procedure, not the performer. And one of the few exceptions was subject of criticisms from everywhere. I'm not counting flash games by the way.

Going into a detailed torture seems like a sick fun to me, as I said in the OP, it'll never be very popular, and unless your public are snuff film viewers I doubt the you'll find a good audience for this spectacle. As for general torture, it works similar as slavery, it could be very useful in lots of games, but it's not very idealistic for the knights in shining armor.

Why the fuck did you not just make one fucking post

(checked)
It wouldn't fit.

Problems with AO rating for consoles and Steam/GOG being garbage/not used for Adult games.

Devs don't make these to avoid controversy.

Or women, women fucking love this shit. You'd be amazed at how much guro is actually drawn for and/or by women.

This isnt done because jiggaboos wouldnt buy it

The Sims can be like this if you mod it, but it usually results in an uber rich family of genetically perfect clones, so that might not be the tone you're going for.

Niggers exclusively play fighting games, sportsball, and console shooters.

Fact.
I can mention only few of these.

And I bet they would still be good without the pr0n part.

Slavery is color-blind.

Let me kill the fucking kids.

The obvious one is rape. Given how many games revolve around war, rape should be a lot more prevalent in video games, when you're going for realism at least. The irony is that the few games that do mention rape, let alone portray it, are usually stylized anime games and not the gritty, realistic, ones.

Why do my horses never have vaginas? They do in real life but they're so routinely chopped off by artists that you only notice it when one doesn't.

Freeware is the only solution.
For this reason it will always be the most pure.

Crusader Kings 2 but it doesn't have any rape, but it has all the other stuff.

OP you seem like a fucked up kinda guy, but you're right. The most taboo thing in games and media I think though is Rape.

The most taboo thing is being pro-white

This

The problem with taboo content is that taboo content can be what separates one game from others, and being separated from its kin by taboo content has a generally bad rap due to shit like FATAL, "the raping and shitting D&D clone", which not only includes such things as the infamous anal circumference chart, but also simply isn't fun to play.
Not to say you can't have good games that stand out through taboo content, like Postal, but those are the exceptions, rather than the rule.

They also don't want an A rated game.

Sperging like in Wolfenstein 2 about how porn saves society, how weed saves society, how drugs, alcohol, and gambling is good on a one-sided tirade.

Normalfags are not that dumb. They may not know in the inner workings and details we know, but thank God for built-in bullshit intolerance. See how Wolf2 sink? Same goes with it except it will be an even bigger shitstorm and the only ones giving a fuck about defending it would be only shit-for-brains leftists or gamejournos.

oh ye of little faith

My favorite taboo idea for a game is about girls who become full body cyborgs, but legally are not forced to adjust their body to match their age.
It is full of a lot of moral quandaries about laws against the idea of enabling dysphoria e.g. no changing your ethnicity, sex, age or becoming some weird type of actualized furry monster.
But laws are different in different countries.
This and other things like androids leads to a strange porn industry.
Cyborgs aren't allowed to become cops because of the social stigma, but chem warriors are and one is an incredibly strong re-generator.
At it's core it is just a version of Unteralterbach with only a cyborg, android and chem warrior.

Another idea I've had for a really really taboo game turned out to be way to close to a Japanese 360 game that I never knew about called Operation Darkness.

My idea was called Noble Wolf: The 3rd Realm.
It would play like a puzzle version of XCOM.
You'd be a Warewolf that commands an army and fights Vampires just because it intentionally sounds so dull and played out.
The Vampires are puppeting nations with textbook vampire mind control and you seek to wipe out the vampire scourge.
It would be fairly steampunk themed because that is fairly nerd baity.

Whatever
Adolf means "Noble Wolf", Reich taken literally means "Realm", the vampires are all horrible hooknosed bald nosferatu.

Slavaboos and every Russian in Russia sperged hard at that game.

That reminds me of kenshi. You can sell knocked out enemies to the slavers for a little profit and buy them, but they just run away after a little bit thanking you for getting them out of there. The dev mentioned that he didn't want to be the guy whose game you could enslave people in.
I can see why but I also think its kinda wasted potential.

The Quintessential Expansion Mod apparently enables Slavery, but the dev says it's glitchy.
Also, apparently Kenshi has a modding community, and a fairly dedicated one at that.

Couldn't someone just release such a game only for PC and without a ESRB rating? Then if the game did well and the console makers wanted it on their platform then either they would have to exert pressure on the ESRB to not rate it AO or change their own internal policies about allowing AO titles on their consoles.

Please try to contain yourself.

Just make a good game. If including a taboo subject makes your game better, do it, but how often is that the case really? Games that sell on shallow shock value tend to be shitty games. Killer 7 is a great game, that touched on some pretty dark shit. Make more Killer 7s, less Hatreds.

Even better. If you manage to power through hard mode you get rewarded with something completely unexpected.

Rance is
RAPE
not just (((porn)))

A whole game about rape actually. Which is logical because it's about military conquest.
And he does have a slave girl in every game too.

Well it's a genuine pre-cuck era japanese-made game. Enjoy it with candles and red wine.

As an aside, there are some games (Destroy All Humans comes to mind) where this is avoided simply by making it so children DO NOT EXIST. I can't decide whether making children nonexistent or making them immortal kills suspension of disbelief more. However, I'm leaning to the former, especially in the case of Fallout and TES and any other RPG, where unkillable-NPCs are rather commonplace and expected, and indeed logical.

Iirc. While playing as Russian they make you burn German didntdonuttings from SS with molotov.
Not sure if it counts as bad. I guess Americans still doing worse things with muslims in that war for israel.
But I believe it was an attempt to push 'dem evil Ruskies' narrative.

It's easier to make games around weird fetishes than regular sex, which is why shit like Vore Tournament exists.

Because where would porn ever fit in. Usually porn's purpose is to be jerked to, not for story or world building.
Games don't generally include watching videos on the internet either.

ABSOLUTELY JEWISH

Don't see your point, most protagonists or characters in vidya are white or portrayed as white. This is beginning to be the equivalent of women bitching that there are "no strong female" characters in vidya even though there are quite a few examples of such.

There is a huge difference between a game with white characters and an game with an explicitly pro white message. At best you can find games that implictly are pro white values like harvest moon/rune factory.

games that explicitly push political agendas are cringy as fuck most of the time anyway

Rape is the big one that would absolutely destroy any kind of setting that puts women in the roles of men. Even pretending that women are as strong as men, eventually the monster or the evil army or whatever is going to overpower you, and it's simply unrealistic to think they would just kill or imprison everyone indiscriminately (so they can escape later of course) instead of immediately slaughtering the men, taking the women as sex slaves/rape wives/breeding sows and ending the story right there.

It's hard for me to accept because as a weeaboo faggot I enjoy seeing cute girl soldiers and knights and wizards going on adventures, but I know it's unrealistic and in reality these poor girls were captured and impregnated before the end of the first chapter. I don't even have a rape fetish, as a good guy at heart rape is like the ultimate cuckolding to me, I just know this is the way the world works and what happens if you can't protect your women.

I think (I know, actually, since Goblin Slayer is all about it) that rape could be a part of good settings and game mechanics. Both the characters and the player/reader would actually care about defeats when you know what a cruel future awaits the women and children. It would restore masculinity to men and femininity to women. But for a variety of reasons, it would never be accepted. Obviously it would never be allowed in CY+2 for being dangerously sexist, but also, either you allow female party members and piss everyone off when the rape happens because nobody but cucks wants to think about that, or you disallow women and lose most of your audience because everyone likes cute girl characters these days. So everyone, whether they make manly games, girly games, or feminist games that shoehorn women into what should be manly games, ignores the problem entirely, and I can't say I blame them for it.

The absence of rape actually bothers the fuck out of me, especially in fantasy settings like Warcraft. The fact that there's no elaboration or development from a very natural aspect of animals and human nature takes me out of it completely.

I think the only time I've ever seen rape alluded to outside of porn/H-games has been Final Fantasy.

But why do you want it? I don't think I've ever seen a piece of media that handles rape well, and even if it did handle it well would just make everyone feel like shit anyways. What is the end goal of including it?

Fair enough.

Me too.

What exactly is "handling it well" by your standard?

I honestly don't really know. I don't even know how I'd handle it in real life. I guess it always comes across as either too strong or too light, the character either brushes it off or it become the focal point of the story. Do you have any good examples? I don't mean this in an accusatory way, I'm genuinely curious.

This is much less of an issue than every other problem of Fallout 3/4, it can easily be justified by the fact that children are fragile and the Wasteland will kill them easily, their parents don't let them play in an irradiated shithole filled with sharp objects and bullets flying everywhere. Meanwhile, the lack of a food system, water system, and any form of civilization at all in Fallout 3 is retarded and completely inexcusable. Aside from that, this obviously only takes away from the realism due to being unable to kill them which is worse than not having them at all in an RPG where you can supposedly choose your moral choices, made 200x worse by the fucking town ran by children that you cannot even attempt to threaten into helping you during the main storyline.

Also, in the early stages of HL2 there were going to be children in factories and a corpse of one in Ravenholm but they dropped it for whatever reason. If children were encountered out of factories then they might have been killable since allies were originally killable but playtester retards kept accidentally killing them so they removed the last illusion of free choice and fun you have in the game from HL1.

They shouldn't do any of those you mentioned because majority of bideo gaem writers have brains eroded by cocaine and haven't read anything but gay fanfiction of harry potter and their understanding of the world stems from twitter and cnn
MGS was close to allowing player to kill lil nignogs, but pussied out.
last good depiction was in Fallout 2 in vault city.
Now it's

Acts of goodwill coming back to bite you in the ass or having consequences that cost more lives than it actually saved.

Protagonists being accused of treason and summarily executed after saving their country/family/world etc. only because it went against the wishes of the powers to be.

Gore has also become a huge no-no nowadays and I'm talking about Dead Space tier gore (and better) when it comes to the protagonists dying.

MGSV does the whole child soldier thing and you can kill them but it ends up in "game over"

I don't even think I want it, it's just something sitting in the back of my head bothering me.

It's kind of difficult to find good examples of it not just in games, but movies and literature as well. That's not because there aren't any, but because so many people are terrified of portraying it in a story for fear of feminist backlash, but yes I do have an example.

In Fallout NV there's a sniper by the name of Corporal Betsy who was attacked and raped by the leader of a raider gang she was sent to kill. It's not something she brings up and bemoans when you first talking to her, but by talking to her CO you learn of what happened and that it has been negatively effecting her behavior in a way that's unacceptable for a member of the army.
She puts on a tough girl facade when you try to talk to her about it but you're eventually able to convince her of the seriousness of her untreated psychological trauma and she seeks help from a doctor.

It's not treated as something worse than death like some many shitty portrayals of rape. The only issue I take with this example is how the fuck did the manage to get away?

It depends entirely on how much it affected the character, and the development of said character and the story. It's a heavy topic, but it also depends purely on circumstance.

The only way to really convey rape well is to accept that it's a thing that happens. You can't avoid it, whitewash it, shoehorn it or dwell on it. Like everything else such as combat, sex, struggle or death, it has to be conveyed in a natural way where the circumstance causes it to happen. Nothing should ever be taboo in expression, and rape is one of those things.

o im laffin

NCR is stretched extremely thin and they are busy with too much shit to go find some random nigger with a flamethrower who raped her

No user, I mean how did she go from getting spitroasted by fiends to being a-okay and back with her squad?
Why would they let her go? How'd she escape?

That's a pretty good one.
I can't imagine why they wouldn't, that would require someone to play the game and also get to know a specific NPC.

But why does it bother you?

I dunno man, in the modern era, most people will probably never be raped nor will anyone they know. It just doesn't seem necessary to portray it.
That's a fair point.

oh wait nevermind, I misread your post

Let me dream user, I enjoyed those heart sinking moments when Isaac got offed in the most horrible ways possible. Another good example are how some of the girl's from Muv Luv Alternative die, that shit was surprising to say the least and tragic to say the least.

considering the fact that in the medieval times a guy courting a girl in some occasions could be considered rape by our standards and also forced marriage, i would say that rape is implemented in crusader kings II, it's just not explicit that is rape.
if you have a child with your wife and your wife has a very low opinion of you you could theorize that your character raped her

For you

I was talking about the NPC. The "the" in that sentence was supposed to be "she"

Another thing I'd like to add is that I think using the rape of a protagonists significant other as a motivation for revenge is perfectly acceptable and an example of a good use of rape in story.
It's not as harsh as "they killed your gf" but still gives the protagonist more than ample motivation to do what they do.

If that were true, then rapes wouldn't be a thing today. But they are. Rape is just as inevitable to human nature as murder and fucking, since it's a power dynamic.

Since guns and politics are so closely linked in Europe, but especially the USA, the concept of rampage killings puckers many assholes. Terrorism naturally does that as well, but just look at the immediate backlash Hatred received. None of it was about the game, but the mere concept of playing as a rampage killer. To most, it seems comparable to playing as a serial rapist or professional torturer in a video game. One might say "that's because they're bad people," but then you have plenty of games about playing as a gang members, robbing banks, killing people for money and committing all other sorts of crimes. For some reason, playing as a contract killer isn't in bad taste but a rampage killer is, to the point where I, for one, struggle to imagine a game where you meticulously plan and carry out rampages or terrorist attacks ever being made for commercial release. I can, however, imagine the level of faux outrage it would cause.
This is something that's often just played for laughs and rarely taken to its logical conclusion.

This only applies to western civilization

You can kill children in Dragon's Dogma.

Rape is so unheard of in the West women import horny animals which are vaguely human-shaped to show them what it's like.

the only thing in vidya that should be taboo is clasifying visual novels and walking sims as games when they have no gameplay at all.
sure, hacks like telltale may be able to find a loophole by shoehorning barelly just enough gameplay elements to justify labeling their shitty VNs as games, but at least we wouldn't have to worry about (((SJournoWs))) trying to push "bottom of the barrel" "zero effort or talent" shit like Gone Homo or Sunset like the second coming of vidya christ

also a game about detailed torture would probably sell as much as Mortal Kombat, GTA and Hatred

What kind of logic is that? People still get struck by lightning, it's just so uncommon most people do not have experience with it.

And where are most games made?

Try moving out of Malmö.

It really bothers me how chickenshit devs are when it comes to depicting the death of children.

You don't have to let the player go full on child murderer, but refusing to portray the death of children in even a story context is stupid as fuck and cowardly to boot.

Take Bethesda and Fallout for example. In Fallout 3 while you can't kill children you can still find evidence of children having died, namely in an elementary school which has a cell containing a dozen child sized skeletons.

But in Fallout 4 they apparently lost what few balls they had and wouldn't even go that far.

Shit if you don't get the cucked Fallout 2 version you straight up see a kid and his family get ventilated by Frank in the first hour of the game.
The fucking Diablo 1 and 2 opening cuntscenes scared the fuck out of me but also made me want to man up and play the game.

user, weird defects as that only happen when distantly related specimens mingle. It's called the Insmouth look.

you can fix that problem in mgs5 with a mod. i was in the habit of firing the chopper minigun while i flew away from a mission until i did an africa mission and accidentally hit a kid off in the distance and failed. people take these strange stances where they want you to face moral choices and then fuck it all up by going "oh not that one though"

pic related

Shotgun Range

Has little to do with the thread, fuck off.

I'm alright with the lack of chilluns in HL2 because it adds to the setting. It's more depressing to have the current generation of man be the last one, with no youth to look after or teach, just a washed-up, tired populace.

You gotta make a whole lotta shit before you get any gems. The same is true of video games as a whole. Games that mix the two well very clearly can happen, just gotta wait for em to be made and sift through all the shit to find em. It also worth considering that eroge as a whole is still very much in its infancy with new and interesting ideas coming out all the time. Things have really picked up within the past 5-10 years.

Most devs give shotguns "melee range". because it is the easiest and most lazy way to implement a shotgun into a game with balance. They often spray in a cone and have 5-10 ft range. "realistic" range is rarely featured in games thus a taboo. Stop being such a retarded autistic faggot.

What really baffles me is how much video games avoid the topic of racism; and I'm not talking "Ohhhh I hate dem orks >:(" Racism but like, genuine racism portrayal in even villains. Like lynchings and shit like that. Even if it's a character's backstory of being run out of a town or whatever it's never really touched upon or viewed as taken seriously.

With the political climate being the way it is it's baffling

What, are you suggesting we actually tar and feather race mixers and hang niggers from trees? Nah, that would hurt too many feelings, let's just throw padded leather spheres at them. ;^)
Expect increasing references to le cheato hitlor and those evil whitey in the future, but no actual racism because that would upset the intended audience.

Well what I mean is that's a good example right there, but in the actual game, they toned it down so hard I forgot racism was even a thing until the Freedom Fighters showed up

Not even just rape, the fact that in most (western) rpgs women are treated exactly like men. A woman never gets hit on, looked down on, groped, or asked out. Hell, it doesn't even come up in conversation.

This also applies to the Sims for me. I hate how every Sim is treated exactly like every other sim. I would love for a more realistic life simulator to come out. I want to play as a fat NEET to make shit super hard.

Have you not heard of a little game called Wolfenstein 2?

From what I understand, racism when it came to fucking Nazis even, was cartoonish as fuck. It was never just they're racist and literally either hate a race or see them as lesser, it's they're also child abusers, or rapists, or animal beaters, etc etc etc. You add too many flaws onto somebody, and I no longer take it seriously. I'm talking some kind of racism like Susannah from the Dark Tower or similar; you can still make them a bad person and a racist; without going full on G.I. Joe about it.

tl;dr Racism should be a social character flaw, not just something you tack on to make a bad person worse

There's literally nothing wrong with acknowledging that dindus aren't your equal and kikes are lying, sleazy crooks. >>>Holla Forums

Thread-saving bump for an interesting topic.

I work for a subcontractor run by the (((Chinese))) for AT&T. They got rid of the fucking drug tests because the only people who could pass them either already worked for the company, or people who had quit or had been fired for bullshit reason and would never come back even to roast marshmallows over the burning building. Women in HR, low hiring standards, social justice horseshit in all of the company policies and documentation. It's maddening. Never work for a telecom.

It's okay.

Why do you think Nosferatu looks the way he does? Blood lebel and degeneracy. The noble aristocratic lord of darkness is pure fiction, while the former is a cautionary "parody".

You best be reading the origin story of the slayer, too.

Dude, stop you using the term "blood libel". Libel is a legal term that implies it's a lie. Just say they eat people or some shit.

Bioshock Infinite had #voxpopuli's leader attempt to kill a white child because she wanted to end the problem "at the root". Of course this was retconned in DLC and she dindu nothing because the Luetece's told her to do it or some shit. This officially proves SJWs don't play games because at least one of them should be foaming at the fucking mouth about them being shown as they are.

...

Thanks user, I wasn't aware there was one.

I"m impressed this thread is still alive.

We have some attempts, pic related.

I don't know what happens where you anons live, but here I'm at ,one of the agendas that's being subtly pushed is that crazy people should live among the rest because "they are people too" or whatever crazy buzzword that they use to justify bringing to chaos.

So maybe we'll get more "mental illness is a serious thing" in a close future, but in "apologetic" guise.

Lately, it's been:
Nuance
Factions and character are pretty black and white in too many games released lately. Jap games and Slav games are the only ones that do not have designated purely good factions, characters, and path for player to take.
Faction has slaves = automatically evil. Faction accept in anyone = automatically good. There is little ambiguity and requirement for player to actually think about actions in the game. Everyone can be anything they want, there are no limits, restrictions, or consequences.

Non-PC Games
There is a severe lack of games that push the envelop of what's acceptable. It's mostly dull and hamfisted political statements and toothless "satire" directed at widely approved targets. Why can't there be a game that does something interesting with society's holly cows (for the lack of better term), like celebrities, intrusive marketing, social media, extended adolescence, media witchunts, politicizing everything, echo-chambers, and excessive violence towards people you disagree with. All of these could be incorporated as both story elements and game-play mechanics.

It is in terms of a fighting force, military's tend to beat that shit out of you since it only fosters morale problems, nothing's worse for a military outfit than a soldier who's picky about who he fights alongside of. They will of course turn around and have you focus any hate or prejudices against the newest government approved enemy.

This of course only applies to rpg games and such that have you fight alongside others. Doesn't really apply if the player is going solo, at that point I wouldn't know how to apply a "racist" character trait and portray it accurately. Maybe through alternate endings and choices one can make.