So I play this silly Dragon Cave game online, where you collect and breed dragons. And in the forum for the site, people come up with all kinds of topics to discuss. The latest one, that really blew my mind, was about whether or not it bothers you to inbreed your dragons, and whether you’ll keep a dragon that someone else bred if it’s inbred. What stunned me was how many people were completely and militantly against it.

There isn’t any kind of “genetic coding” in the game, for crying out loud. The only coding of any kind in the breeding is that the offspring will always be the color of one of its parents, and “rare” types won’t breed together. Everything else (gender, for instance) is totally random, except in the 2 colors of dragons that are always female (pink & purple, in case anyone wondered).

And these are imaginary pixel pets! Not real animals. Not people. Just drawings, for crying out loud. But more than one person in that forum thread seemed offended and disgusted that people would even dream of inbreeding their dragons. One person went so far as to say that morals have to be absolute, and that you should never do anything online or in a game that you wouldn’t do in real life, and that if they had their way it would be impossible to inbreed the dragons on that site. WTF?!

The whole POINT of imagination, near as I can tell, is to try out things you would never do in real life, and to enjoy a bit of escapism. I mean, I’ve killed about a bazillion things in Diablo II and other computer games, but in real life I’ve never deliberately killed anything higher on the food chain than a hamster (which was dying from poison, so I put it out of its misery as fast & humanely as possible).

The kind of people who would ban inbreeding imaginary dragons are the kind of people who creep me out. Because they’re the kind of people who would legislate thought as well as action, and that’s Just Not Okay.