I'm appreciating the irony that Egan_BW's sigtext says "Why not? It's a sort of roleplaying game!"
Now that's just petty. So I'll be petty back and say that you misquoted it despite it being right in front of you.
I wasn't trying to be petty; I was making an off-topic remark that I did not intend to have any bearing on the conversation.
And it disturbs me regardless. What are you trying to achieve with that conversation? Look, in the world, there are people with different opinions than yours and it is okay.
People exploring themes like genocide or rape, I find tasteless. You can discuss that as much as you want, it is to me the epitome of tasteless and remains disturbing in my eyes. Explaining it further is probably a loss of time so I'll leave that to rest, cheers
Problem is, manipulating the charges of a few transistors on a RAM chip, actually
isn't equivalent to genocide or rape. If somebody gets a sadistic sense of satisfaction from watching entire (virtual, nonreal) races die on his computer screen, that would indeed be disturbing to pretty much everyone, myself included. If, however, they are simply roleplaying it, i.e. doing what the character they're playing as would do, I see absolutely nothing wrong with doing so. If you get queasy or disturbed, sure, I get it, but don't judge other people if they don't.