http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69878,00.html

There’s been a lot of shouting recently about how violent video games can actually stimulate kids to violence in the real world. There’s also, for many years, been the old ‘porn-leads-to-rape’ arguement.

At the end of the day, there are those people out there, who find it difficult to separate reality from fiction. Fiction ‘per se’ has been a mainstream source of entertainment for as long as man as lived and there will always be those who can’t tell fiction from fact. These people are usually either juvenilles or adults with juvenille minds (for whatever reason). It stands to reason that, as technology improves, ways will be found to make ficticious events and images more ‘real’. Look at the holodeck technology in ‘Star Trek’. Any individual could act out their wildest and sickest fantasies and not be censured for it as ‘it’s not real’. It won’t be long before real live actors do not feature in films, it will all be ‘avatars’. The purists will, no doubt, raise hell, but it WILL happen, just as this kind of entertainment WILL happen.

Like the early Victorian ‘etchings’, through Health & Efficiency in the 50’s and 60’s, to Playboy, Colour Climax and the current wash of both soft and hardcore porn, it’s a way of people getting their jollies without resorting to actually doing the imagery they portray themselves. It’s no more real than Mills and Boon or Star Trek or Coronation Street, but it fills a niche. Yes, we’ll have to slap age ratings on it, but what the hell.

Remember, the only screw-ups are those people who think that their view of the world is the ONLY one!

Soap box over!

Nip machinima porn in the bud before Machinima’s good name is polluted.

I’ve heard some people opine (and I’m probably restating this badly) that drawn / animated porn provides a layer of abstraction versus real porn; that the characters in the former become symbolic and as such, they become open to interpretation in ways which real porn stars can’t. Thus, “imaginary” porn is stimulating not so much for what you see, but for what it represents - the thoughts and images in provokes in your mind.

Take written erotica: it’s clearly meant to be arousing, yet they’re just words; the only images are the ones conjured by your imagination. On the opposite extreme, you have “real” porn: images of actual humans engaged in sexual acts, with little left to the imagination. Drawn or animated porn, then, falls somewhere in between: you’re presented with concrete images, but you know they aren’t real, so your subconscious can play with those images in ways they can’t with real people.

Again: just a theory I’ve heard kicked around. But which comes back around to: why would people get so hung up about sex in games? These aren’t real people, just a bunch of polygons being manipulated to simulate something - so why are some people aroused while others are offended?