In recent years, as I’ve chronicled the fractures in gaming media (including hypocrisies of online drama cycles and the fragility of consumer culture), there is one subject matter that has always remained a tricky one to explain: targeted moral pressure.
I don't need to be told that hypersexualized design matters to me, and just because someone is telling me that, doesn't make it not true.
That said, God in His wisdom gave us free will, including the freedom to choose sin. Jesus warns us that "everyone who sins is a slave to sin." (John 8:34b) We are free to choose slavery...and I feel bad for anyone who mistakes his own enslavement to desires and titillations as freedom.
If people use their various powers in government or commerce to forbid certain entertainment content, that doesn't change any enslaved hearts from wanting it. Maybe it is still better to remove the economic incentives for presenting teenage girls (minors) as visual objects for erotic stimulation, though. We've come a long way from calendar pin-up girls. Men can lose themselves in zero-effort sexual gratification schemes (and so can women, though they tend to read instead of visualize). I suspect that creating any official suppression of libertine, do-whatever-you-want permissiveness will rally opposition, but it will also succeed against some of the negative effects. Drugs are better illegal than legal. Even though addicts will "do it anyway," they won't do it as much or as openly, and this will lure fewer people into the darkest depths of it.
Exactly, junkies will do drugs anyway, but we don't have to normalize/glorify and make it easier for them. All this does is disrupt the life of healthy ppl. Degeneracy needs to be pushed and shunned. Let the degens do their stuff far away from us, in the dark.
Gaming is not a tool for you to use to browbeat people into a joyless form of Christianity that innately hates all art and will kneecap it whenever it does anything at all. You don't fail because of things like Stellar Blade, you fail because none of you actually like gaming and can't make decent games with Christian principles at all. You can barely make any media that isn't a Bible retelling, and when your artists try, no Christians buy or support it anyways because they just like art if it's famous by a convert.
Fix that first, trying to make the secular world have nothing is just going to turn people against your even more.
I'm not imposing standards, i'm telling you that if all you can do is remove or ban you will fail. Stellar blade got big in part because people want that kind of art. You have to offer art to counter art, not deplatform and have nothing to give
I’m finding this line really tricky in indie animation right now. For many years, the whole industry has been choked by a few giants with the monopoly who are more concerned with making money than with morality or adding to culture. Now, finally, we’re starting to see independent creators taking greater freedoms to create in their own voices and we’re seeing…. A lot of moral muck. I am really hoping that it’s all a part of the process … and that it’ll open the door for more Christ centred voices…but at the moment, looking round, it’s really hard to know who to root for.
Some good points but I think we need more details. Pr0n and many behaviors now taken for granted were illegal relatively recently within the past few decades or several decades. This is what we want. Obviously bad laws as well as good laws can be made, but we can't rule out laws as a result. Laws should back up moral behavior rather than undermining it even if it would be foolish to attempt to micromanage people with laws that cover every possible situation. Laws don't enforce themselves, but when something is legal more people will try it because they will assume it's OK to do. Incentives work.
I think the idea of this essay is that this kind of half-measure (using payment processors to enforce morals) may backfire more readily because the arguments are shakier and more subjective and there is more opportunity for unwanted interference?
I definitely support a proper hierarchy of values and subsidiarity. (Family first, then expanding outward. Incidentally, left-leaning individuals tend to have such values reversed.)
Fight the New Drug has good material on the ill effects of overstimulation due to pr0n etc. even from a secular/scientific standpoint.
Not sinning because the government forbids you access to the means of sin doesn't make you virtuous. Virtue can only be virtue if it can stand in opposition to sin. Lobbying for regulation on theological grounds seems in that regard senseless to me. The civil and legal union of the people that constitutes the state should be the arbiter of what is allowed and not, based on the overarching social contract. Theological arguments should not be considered here. This way lies Theocracy. If one behaves virtuous or sinful in a certain religous sense within the mundane legal framework is for every one to decide on their own. Just my 2 cents though.
I don't need to be told that hypersexualized design matters to me, and just because someone is telling me that, doesn't make it not true.
That said, God in His wisdom gave us free will, including the freedom to choose sin. Jesus warns us that "everyone who sins is a slave to sin." (John 8:34b) We are free to choose slavery...and I feel bad for anyone who mistakes his own enslavement to desires and titillations as freedom.
If people use their various powers in government or commerce to forbid certain entertainment content, that doesn't change any enslaved hearts from wanting it. Maybe it is still better to remove the economic incentives for presenting teenage girls (minors) as visual objects for erotic stimulation, though. We've come a long way from calendar pin-up girls. Men can lose themselves in zero-effort sexual gratification schemes (and so can women, though they tend to read instead of visualize). I suspect that creating any official suppression of libertine, do-whatever-you-want permissiveness will rally opposition, but it will also succeed against some of the negative effects. Drugs are better illegal than legal. Even though addicts will "do it anyway," they won't do it as much or as openly, and this will lure fewer people into the darkest depths of it.
Exactly, junkies will do drugs anyway, but we don't have to normalize/glorify and make it easier for them. All this does is disrupt the life of healthy ppl. Degeneracy needs to be pushed and shunned. Let the degens do their stuff far away from us, in the dark.
Gaming is not a tool for you to use to browbeat people into a joyless form of Christianity that innately hates all art and will kneecap it whenever it does anything at all. You don't fail because of things like Stellar Blade, you fail because none of you actually like gaming and can't make decent games with Christian principles at all. You can barely make any media that isn't a Bible retelling, and when your artists try, no Christians buy or support it anyways because they just like art if it's famous by a convert.
Fix that first, trying to make the secular world have nothing is just going to turn people against your even more.
Stop imposing your standards upon me. Unless you would like to argue that yours are superior to mine. Go ahead.
I'm not imposing standards, i'm telling you that if all you can do is remove or ban you will fail. Stellar blade got big in part because people want that kind of art. You have to offer art to counter art, not deplatform and have nothing to give
I’m finding this line really tricky in indie animation right now. For many years, the whole industry has been choked by a few giants with the monopoly who are more concerned with making money than with morality or adding to culture. Now, finally, we’re starting to see independent creators taking greater freedoms to create in their own voices and we’re seeing…. A lot of moral muck. I am really hoping that it’s all a part of the process … and that it’ll open the door for more Christ centred voices…but at the moment, looking round, it’s really hard to know who to root for.
Some good points but I think we need more details. Pr0n and many behaviors now taken for granted were illegal relatively recently within the past few decades or several decades. This is what we want. Obviously bad laws as well as good laws can be made, but we can't rule out laws as a result. Laws should back up moral behavior rather than undermining it even if it would be foolish to attempt to micromanage people with laws that cover every possible situation. Laws don't enforce themselves, but when something is legal more people will try it because they will assume it's OK to do. Incentives work.
I think the idea of this essay is that this kind of half-measure (using payment processors to enforce morals) may backfire more readily because the arguments are shakier and more subjective and there is more opportunity for unwanted interference?
I definitely support a proper hierarchy of values and subsidiarity. (Family first, then expanding outward. Incidentally, left-leaning individuals tend to have such values reversed.)
Fight the New Drug has good material on the ill effects of overstimulation due to pr0n etc. even from a secular/scientific standpoint.
Not sinning because the government forbids you access to the means of sin doesn't make you virtuous. Virtue can only be virtue if it can stand in opposition to sin. Lobbying for regulation on theological grounds seems in that regard senseless to me. The civil and legal union of the people that constitutes the state should be the arbiter of what is allowed and not, based on the overarching social contract. Theological arguments should not be considered here. This way lies Theocracy. If one behaves virtuous or sinful in a certain religous sense within the mundane legal framework is for every one to decide on their own. Just my 2 cents though.