stigant wrote:
Although you could argue that a minority of people do get obsessed by computer game violence, this is most probably the exception, and most people can distinguish between obviously imaginary and real-life violence, so your comparison is highly flawed. Anyway, DROD's major focus is not the killing; it's hardly realistic and not the point of the game at all, so I would think that its effect on encouraging violence in people is going to be minimal compared to games containing more realistic violence.
While the joke in question is arguably closer to reality than DROD, one could certainly make this same point (ie reasonable people are capable of drawing a distinction between the joke and reality) about the joke.
I agree with you, but this highlights the point that the margin of unreasonability should therefore be higher, given that it is arguably
more applicable to a real life situation (i.e. is a dungeon infested with monsters more realistic than that joke's situation?). Also, what makes it distinct from DROD is that the situation involves an interaction between two people that is undesirable, while DROD involves a situation (in theory undesirable) between a person and some monsters. The difference here is that finding that aspect of DROD amusing is finding
monster killing amusing (monsters don't exist), while finding that joke amusing implies finding that general
interaction funny (people do exist, however).
Perhaps I've helped to push this a bit too far off-topic, but at least the problem was only minor and hadn't sparked off any flame wars or anything similar.
So, just to change the mood a bit and get us back into a joking frame of mind, here's one awful Anatomy joke that my friend made up.
Person 1: "
This skeleton's missing a humerus."
Person 2: "
That's not funny."
____________________________
Resident Medic/Mycologist