Torn being a crime themed game, a lot of the gameplay is obviously based on things that would be considered immoral by most people in real life, like beating people up and taking their money, stealing stuff, assassinating innocent political leaders etc. Because of this, the argument "It's a crime game" is often used by players to defend all and any aspects of gameplay decried by anyone as 'immoral' - this is such a frequently used phrase that searching 'crime game' in the forum search yields 9 pages of results...(http://i.gyazo.com/b94a607c73847842ce7a0d5494a45c0a.gif)
However, the majority of players claim they are reluctant to scam others, and many are also reluctant to 'buy mugging' and other 'dodgy' methods, so I'm curious how many people, or more accurately, what proportion of active players actually have 'morals' in the context of Torn, and what people actually consider immoral...
Which (if any) of the possibly 'dodgy' things in the poll below do you consider immoral and why?
Do you think morals are even still relevant in a game which is supposedly based on crime?
TL DR: Answer the poll (honestly please, it's anonymous :P), and discuss...
You can pick more than one option.
My personal opinion on this (if you care, which you may not, but you can read if you're bored I guess...):
I see it as an RPG game which just happens to have this 'theme' of crime to make it cooler or whatever. No, I wouldn't set random warehouses on fire in real life, but this isn't real life. Morals in real life don't really correspond to the things by the same name in torn but you can make comparisons and there are some things that I wouldn't feel comfortable doing, part of gameplay or not...
To be honest, I think if you were to 'change the theme of the game to something boring like, I don't know, school for instance, I think 'crimes' in Torn would correspond more to something like work- boring but you eventually can do harder stuff for more rewards. I think the rewards for crime are probably too meagre at the moment to have much of a real effect on most ordinary players incomes (unless you can already do PAs) (until Ched fixes it), but theoretically it would be closer to that than to crimes in real life.
What probably would correspond to real life crimes would probably be, say, scamming someone- and there are different levels of how immoral this could be, like killing babies vs stealing a packet of crisps from a shop in real life. I think most people would say scamming someone who really trusted you like a friend or faction member is worse than just sending mails advertising 'investments' and a lot of (thought not all) scammers are probably reasonably trustworthy to their friends, else they wouldn't have any...
Another aspect of the game commonly considered immoral to some degree is mugging when in connection with trading. Is it immoral to buy mug someone if, in all likelihood, someone else would've done it anyway? Or do you choose not to buy mug only because you don't think it's worth the bad rep, but you would if you could say, buy anonymously? Would that be wrong? What about bountying or otherwise keeping someone (possibly a random new player) in hospital just to get them to react for your amusement? Or taking advantage of their lack of experience- e.g getting them to slut for you at much lower rates than they could get by convincing them that 10k is a lot of money?
Maybe I'm reading into this a bit too much, but I'm genuinely curious what people actually think about this, especially if you were to ignore the reputation thing... Would you be as morally good a person if you could do everything anonymously? (Honestly, I probably wouldn't.)