If you can think it, you should be able to show it or talk about it. The key ingrediant for making serial killers isn't permissiveness, it's repression. It's the *portrayal* of sex and violence that we're talking about, not the actual acts - and as such, when used in media they are strictly devices used to facilitate meaning and metaphor. Death doesn't always represent death, sometimes it's change, loss, acceptance. Sex can mean union, abandon, consumption - sex can even mean death, and vice versa. Just like the use of, say, mythological imagery, Marxist subtext, cultural icons or even simply the color blue... if we are to be critical of them, it should be in the context of whether they help or hinder the artist's expression. Separating them ad-hoc from their intended function and calling them 'immoral' or something, just seems like lazy thinking. There is plenty of violence in the Christian bible... sex too. It's there to add consequence to the choices of man - are we to fast forward through it?

Now, granted, things become a bit more complicated when we get to games. To use the terminology from a few years ago, every other artform is 'push' technology, whereas games are 'pull.' A filmmaker can take responsibility for what's being expressed by her work because she maintains complete control over its images. This 'control' is actually what 'art' is (or at least how we have always classically thought it to be). What happens, though, when that control is given over to the audience/player? Sex and violence can serve valid functions in art, but the *function* must come first. They're tricky to incorporate, not because they're immoral or whatever, but because people tend to react to them hysterically/emotionally, and therefore unpredictibly. When I see Nazi gibs coating the walls of Castle Wolfenstein, I see good triumphing over evil, but obviously Senator Joseph Lieberman experiences something completely different - And when games become sexually explicit, hoo boy, imagine the communicative chaos then! If you include the facility for sex in a game, what results when the player can use it for whatever function they want? At the very least, bad art.

The question isn't, should it or should it not happen, because it's inevitiable. The question is, will it be done eyes-open and responsibly, or not?

IMHO