I'm just trying to play devils' advocate as much as you are. In fact, if someone confronted me with some of the arguments that I have used I would have proposed alternatives like: "maybe the monologue is so childish, so cartoonish, that it's more appliable. Maybe misanthropy is less politiziced".
Where I'm trying to get is that a lot of people that are talking about censorship don't seem to know what actual censorship is.
[SARD EDIT: Busy censoring, don't mind me.]
If stores exercised their legitimate right to do whatever they pleased with the game, sell it or not, it wouldn't be a matter of censorship or not, especially in our day and age. How exactly would it impede the game's distribution if the developers were to find themselves alone in the distribution of the game? It's digital. They open channels for payment, give the e-mail accounts associated with the purchase the ability to download a DRM-free copy of the game and that's it. Is relegating something to obscurity censorship? Then maybe I should call censorship on game stores that decided they wouldn't bring more than a handful of copies of Muramasa, censorship in the name of popularity and consumption, because what colored this decission was that they chose in advance that people would not be interested in this game. Maybe we could say it's also censorship when they decide for us that they won't localize a game because they've already decided we wouldn't be interested.
Back to freedom of speech being proportional to people's economic power. I think I previously may have hinted out that this works in a way that if you can buy a media, a tv channel, a newspaper... you have more freedom of speech, and more reach than other people who can't. Okay, first, this may call for a less macro, more micro scale to look at it honestly. The owner or even the editorial of one of these doesn't do all the writing, right? They have journalists employed. What if one of these jornalists were to stumble upon important information that he or she feels has to be known by the readers, but this information, or the article that gets it through is critical of whatever the editorial upholds OR of an announcer? The editorial will most likely do one of these two or both: they buy the article so that it doesn't see the light of day anywhere and/or they fire this person and have the unsubmissiveness of this person forever condemn his or her employability.
I don't have the answer to this. I don't know what we should do with the game, I try to remain neutral, but I'm: 1) afraid that we may be opening a can of worms for anyone who wants to petition that future things like rapelay or rape simulators have the freedom of speech principle applied to them and 2) ultimately disappointed that it's all shock value.
I'm also disappointed that I see a lot of talented people (it may be more hurtful that they're talented) be so contaminated with toxic ideas like what
my intuition tells me (I'm not playing saint either) this game includes that they don't see reality, because we are saying "hey, to each their own, if you want to believe these ideas are good, the free market should provide food for those". I see these talented people complain that nowadays in games it's all "women outsmarting men, racism is bad, minorities can't be the villain, homosexuality being portrayed as something good...", a problem that doesn't exist. But hey, they can't be whiny little bitches, because only "hippies" can be. Is this the PC we are talking so much about?
Are fictions that try to be myths for a more accepting era, and real stories that try to be more honest, that are stagnating society? Do you think that haters and discriminators don't shape scripts if writers of tv shows, movies, comics, videogames... see that what's resonating with audiences is not the ironic representation of them, but that they honestly believe what the characters are saying? I point to Judge Dredd as the way to do this (the reason behind "Democracy" was that young readers weren't getting the irony, but wouldn't it have been easier to say "let's give the public what they demand") and the evolution of Cartman in South Park (or SP in general) and Brian in Family Guy as how not to do this.
Or is this PC that is making society stagnant not behaving like what people think Tourette's syndrome is. So if the idea crosses someones' mind to make (or not, just conceive) a school shooting simulator or a rape simulator, they aparently have the moral imperative to
realize this vision, because if not, they would be incurring in self-censorship and as we know, self-censorship is the worst kind. I'm not asking this game be banned, or any other, I'm raising the question "Is this what we do with freedom of speech? Is this all there is?".
But what do we make of people, gamers, who sign petitions of things like "don't bring GTAV to PC (even if I enjoyed it on consoles), that will teach PC gamers be such pirates" or "don't hire Anita Sarkeesian to take part in the making of Mirrors Edge 2"? It's at least immature. As are practices like SWATTING, this prank that "children 18+" have turned into an epidemic in USA.
We could even drift to the feminist issue
[OR WE COULD NOT]
And I'm not censoring,
[OH, I totally am!]
I don't have or want that power.
{doo dee doo dee doo..]
I'm disappointed and burnt out. That's all I am. And I am burnt our that I am the one who has to be PC when I try to talk some people out of toxic ideas like the glorification of school shootings out of fear that they may suffer a mental breakdown.