But even then, let's say Fox claims Dwarf Fortress allows you to simulate rape in an intense level of details and that hundreds of pedophiles play it. Well, people who know what Dwarf Fortress is laugh. Pedophiles check it out, find out it was a lie, and don't come again. A number of people wanting to see what it is about just stay because the game is awesome. A handful of guillible people are deeply offended and no one cares.
Sure. That's an intense enough of a lie to get backlash. I wonder if they didn't lie? "DF, a strategy game produced by a man who goes by the name of 'Toady', allows you to brutally rape and murder children and animals, before carving their bones into ornaments and decorating your room."
It sure *sounds* bad, and worse, it'd be true! We'd be reduced to the defense of "That's taking it out of context", which is a lot weaker sounding than "You, sir, are a liar."
And there's stuff in-between, with more or less fabrication. Well orchestrated, it's possible a fair amount of repulsion could be produced towards DF, even if it wasn't strong enough to produce actual protests. So DF would get this aura of nastiness ("oh, it's that game that lets you do *anything*, blegh") and because of this (a lot?) fewer people try it out. And this is sad.
plus nothing would be illegal about it.
Oh pshaw. In civilized countries, yes, but I live in Canada. Our child porn laws are so overbroad that it is ridiculously close to being illegal-- one could construe the sentence, "DF is cool, I wish you could do every one of those things in real life" as child pornography if rape of a minor was possible in DF, though you would surely get laughed out of court. But, it's dangerously close. Given the Canadian disregard for the exact letter of the law, it could be prosecuted, too.
I mean, a kid can read books or watch movies, no one gets charged when this happens.
The difference is that these are video games. Surely video games shouldn't touch adult concepts? They're for kids! Ha ha ha-- except that's seriously how it works. :/
Has something like this happened already, with so unknown an indie game, or so harmless a simulation ? (both on the ground for a few frames)
Nothing has actually done this before to my knowledge. Pretty much every game with rape as a gameplay element has done it for the purposes of creating pornographic video games. If you want some small, unknown title that got a ton of backlash for including rape, I guess Rapelay is as close as you can get. Wasn't even released in the US, but that didn't stop Americans from protesting and demanding the halting of distribution. For what its worth, it worked-- the developers removed all references to the game and ceased distribution, though it lives on in the internet.
On the other hand, you have, say, Mass Effect, which had a sort of implied sex scene and was called a "rape simulator" and so on. And then right in between you have the Hot Coffee minigame in GTA:SA, which of course didn't hurt GTA's sales in general in the long term, but at the time it caused quite a bit of damage. It was rerated AO, they had to recall or rerate existing copies, deal with a class action lawsuit, create a new disc, republish, and all this with politicians raising threats about further control of the gaming industry, further litigation, and an overall suppression of artistic freedom in the industry (if, at least, you want to also be able to sell at all).
To balance it out, ME and GTA:SA were AAA games with a large fanbase, DF is not. And Rapelay was extremely unknown, but brutal and graphic in its depiction not only of sex, but of rape. I obviously can't predict exactly what will happen if DF got this, so I am rightfully shamed for making predictions. I wouldn't like to see it go deep in the bad end, though.
tl;dr
Imagine fortress mode where no dwarf goes berserk, or suicidally-depressed /insane because it would be "too controversial" to have the mentally unstable kill themselves or others.
Yawn.
I don't remember anybody advocating removing any content that anybody dislikes, but regardless, I agree.
Scaring off new players isn't really an argument, since the forums are full of enthusiastic descriptions of new ways to kill peaceful traders and kittens anyway. Any attention is good attention, GTA for example certainly isn't worse off for all the fuzz.
re: GTA, see above. It could have been better off, certainly. Rockstar deeply regrets adding the sex minigame to their codebase. Actually, just in general see above, I don't want to be redundant, and I'm sorry I replied to that other dude first, despite you beating him to the punch.