On most personal aspects of my life I wish to remain anonymous, but there is one thing I just can't bear to keep a lid on, and it's been made completely obvious by my choice in user name and avatar(*). I'm a gamer. As such, one of the more interesting issues to me personally is how people view videogames as a social issue.
In this thread I would like to focus mainly on two issues--not entirely distinct, but not one and the same, either.
1 - How one views the content in videogames, particularly when it contains such things as violence, sexual content, supernatural content or other things that may be against one's beliefs;
2 - How one views the issues of game ratings, parental control, censorship, and so forth.
And a third angle that really needn't be said, but will be listed anyway:
3 - How one views the above two topics in the context of one's religious beliefs or lack thereof.
My own views are quite simplistic, given that I've never seriously researched the matter. On the subject of content, I don't give a flying fart--people can play whatever they want, and people can make whatever they want, because the buyer is always the one to decide. Parents buy for their children, so if they choose to let their youngster play Saint's Row (M-rated game in the general mold of Grand Theft Auto), that's their folly and not the developer's.
As far as the issues of ratings, censorship, and such like go, I'm more or less okay with it as is. I grant that it's important, especially with the swiftly growing realism in games, but going so far as to censor games would be an obvious double-standard unless you censored all visual media, and a vast majority of the gaming community are legal adults anyway. If people who are so used to movie ratings can't get it through their thick skulls that games have ratings, too, I seriously question their competence.
Where my lack of religious belief stands, there's nothing there to affect my view of videogames.
As a personal note, my taste in videogames includes a host of M-rated titles, but I find an overabundance of unnecessary "bad" stuff repellant. This is not because I disapprove of it. It's simply because I'm a bit of a culture snob who'd rather people like the game for the gameplay, story, and production values than because of how much blood, nudity, cussing, or what have you it contains. That said, I do not consider anything within, say, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to be unnecessary, as given the context of that game, everything fits naturally. (It's a game about the criminal side of society, f'r Pete's sake.) I would also like to register that I do not particularly enjoy GTA. My taste is more toward such games as Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, or Final Fantasy. Things that are a little more detached from the real world than GTA is.
I included the above so that you understand where my bias is, of course.
(* User name: "Trent" from the semi-anonymous string-pulling tipster from S.D. Perry's novelization series of the Resident Evil videogames. Avatar: "Albert Wesker," major villain from the Resident Evil videogame series, starring most prominently in Resident Evil 1, Resident Evil - Code: Veronica, and Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles.)
