I must say that although we clearly agree on little, I appreciate that you have responded civilly, unlike OP.
I am glad we agree that entertainment has influence. The question now is what influence does it have. The main evidence that I have presented so far is logical: that if a person uses SA as entertainment, they must accept that it is entertaining, which means that they must, on some level, view it as acceptable. People are not entertained things that they view as totally unacceptable. And people tend to do things that they believe to be acceptable. You would agree with that, right?
"What you brought was essentially wishful thinking. You assert that playing x is bad because whatever your chain of logic was. There is another chain of logic that playing x would suppress any urges to try out x in real life, which would make games about x a good thing, would it not. You did not disprove that."
First of all, I find that chain of logic to be faulty. How would playing a game suppress such urges? Speaking of things that have been disproven, the idea of "blowing off steam" to suppress desires has been accepted as false and damaging.
Secondly, I demonstrated that feeding addictive behaviors leads that desire to increase, causing people to need more in order to satisfy. And I did it using a pattern that everyone can recognize in addiction, including drug addiction, porn addiction, etc. Can you point out a fault in that chain of logic? I pointed out the problem in the chain you suggested.
"But it does not and might even work the complete opposite way: someone seeing/playing/reading a thing in fiction realizes that they could never ever do that thing in real life."
This is where the realism of the game comes in and becomes important. In a game like Warhammer, where everything is so obviously fictional and impossible, this principle might apply. But there is nothing "impossible" about sexually assaulting someone. It can be done. This is an important distinction.
For your example about Japan: I admit that I know little about SA games from Japan because I don't play such things. But this is why I don't think statistics can really tell us the full story. Why did you decide to round to x10? Seems pretty arbitrary to me. There are a whole host of other factors like I mentioned before (apart from "cultural bias") that could hide the impact of their SA games. Underreporting, harsher penalties for sexual criminals, possible differences in legal definitions and counting systems just to name a few. Your example makes so many assumptions that I find it functionally useless.
"Now, I am not convinced that it does work this way, but data and my own decades long experience in video games hint at it, and I want a lot better evidence than your assertions to contemplate restricting adult entertainment that consists of made up things and pixels. I have no right to restrict another person's choice of entertainment. Even if I am appaled or disgusted by it. Even if it depicts fictional things that are illegal in real life."
Not much to say here. I just don't agree. I think its fine for this platform to choose to restrict access to SA material. No rights are violated.
"There is a break in logic here. You start at the point where you already have someone contemplating actual crime. You beg the question. You also equate being entertained to fantasizing about the thing. And that is why I accused you of accusing me of fantasiszing about mass murder! You assert a psychological mechanism and you assert a motivation. There is no reason to believe these things would only work for adult games."
There is no begging the question because the person we are talking about is playing the game about raping their stepmother for entertainment. And I never claimed they work exclusively in adult games. But I do claim that is one place where they work. Also, remember that I said that all FPS games to mass murderer is not a comparison I would use.
I'm sorry you are sick of the "blame-the-games" rhetoric, but as I said, the games you play have an effect on your life whether you are sick of it or not. The mechanism I mentioned, which is that what you do for entertainment affects how you view the world, and that how your view the world affects how you act, is just obviously true.
"... but it is not other people. You just assert that those people fantasize about doing things for real. You do not know what their motivation is. I assure you, a game without any gameplay will get boring quickly and the novelty factor of seeing realistic graphics wears off quickly. You need things like story and gameplay. What fades less quickly is the annoyance if you see signs of censorship in the game you are playing. Someone trying to impose their agenda on your entertainment. Kinda like the beeps in some audio tracks. "
You talk about the "novelty factor" wearing off. This means it becomes normal. In a game like this, where SA is the topic, that means the novelty factor around SA wears off, and it becomes normal. This is bad.
Finally, with regards to your frequent requests for data: Show me some data that proves that playing games featuring SA has no correlation with viewing sexual assault as acceptable. We could go back and forth sending each other links to studies supporting our opinions for a very long time, and never get anywhere.
Certainly, SA is not the exclusive fault of video games. But, if a game contributes to the novelty factor of SA wearing off, it is a game that I would not host on any site I own.