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So the TLDR: you're fine with pedophilia and children being victimized as long as it's fiction, but you draw the line at cartoon adult man gore, soooo disturbing. Those are really the priorities you want to have? Taking away the innocence of a child is inherently torture. Its normal to have morbid thoughts, even fake fantasies about violence. But violence against children is a level of insanity and inhumanity that many hardcore sadists don't even fuck with. Why do you think people in prison kill and maim pedos? Pedophilia is a serious mental illness- any consumption of CSA content, FICTION or not is encouraging and desensitizing to the pain that child victims go through. Research does not support that consumption of those images will lessen the possibility for real CSA to occur, it's never enough for pedos. I don't think this game even comes close to comparing it to cp, which is gross.
okay. in super short super simplified terms. what you're trying to convey through all of this is, "Hey so the author of this game holds the view that the media you consume is a deeper reflection of who you are as a person, by extension making you an immoral person for enjoying media that can be considered problematic. Isn't that kinda noteworthy/concerning/strange? Considering what this game is about?" ? am i getting this right? :')
OH MYY GODDDDDDDDDDD </3 im so sorry about whatever the fuck those other responders were saying. literacy is so dead. you're 100% valid for this and i think it's a very necessary and important thing to bring up. thank you for this. i hope you arent discouraged from doing this sort of thing again where you feel it's needed (because wow those replies are ROUGH), it was genuinely eye-opening for me to read QwQ i hope this doesnt seem weird or anything to say HAHA i just thought it was super interesting that someone would take the time out of their day to type such a lengthy comment about something like this, but i can absolutely see why you did it and i think you're cool as hell for that. :')
I would agree with the most of what you've said, however, I feel the need to point out that torture porn is made with exactly this in mind, and dare I say, only that in mind, so routes like using only first four objects wouldn't even exist in here, if that was all this game was supposed to be about. That, and the game would rely on pure shock value if it were just that, giving us scissors right after the feather, for example.
We were given too many warnings (needle, his anxious comments, then the pain he expressed with hammer...) and enough rewards (raise in dollars for each click, making it easy to finish even without getting that tired), we could have pushed the morbid curiosity aside knowing it could hurt someone, but a lot of people simply couldn't. Is it really on author that they gave us the choice, when it was us that took it, when we didn't have to, when we had a perfectly good way to, maybe with more hassle, get what we need without hurting someone?
Why did we push Harvey still? Because he's fictional? But why do we dehumanize someone so easily, even if they share so many similar characteristics? Dehumanisation is the first measure you take to protect your psyche from the dissonance of hurting someone of your kind. So I'm pretty sure this game's meaning is to show our choices reflect us, the player. It means to make you ponder: he's not real, so I'm not a terrible person, right? It's just fiction, and if he wasn't real, I wouldn't have done that... But that takes us back to the setting. We are told we are desperate. We need the money for our operation. That gives us a sense of urgency, yes, but should urgency be used to justify going as far as seriously hurting someone?
I personally finished the game with the needle first. Tried to get back to the feather. Couldn't. Well just like Harvey tried to play it off as, acupuncture was the most I gave him. In my book, a person that tries to just spread good in the world shouldn't be punished for it, or taken advantage of.
And when it comes to your stance on fiction vs reality, I'll share my mindset as well: I think fiction reflects reality, and when fiction touches you deeply enough, it can impact you as a human being, forever altering your reality (after all, because of cognition, we all have our little separate realities. You can't say a blind person's way of perceiving the world is the same as someone with sight sense, no?)
Btw, have you ever heard of "Can your pet?" Somehow, because I read your comment, i remembered this experience... Giving this for me to play was the worst prank my friend could have ever played on me, especially since I was a kid then. At least here we had an outline that scissors are, well, scissors :/