Moving on...
And You Thought Grand Theft Auto Was Bad (2009)
by Leigh Alexander
The article begins by talking about "Video Game Scolds" - people that associate violent or sexual content in video games with harming the children and thus such materials should be censored or banned. I've been on the other side of that argument - for comic books, video games, and whatever else - too many times to give it any credence. This article...well, more of a review...is about a Japanese rape simulator called
RapeLay, which while already banned on eBay and Amazon the author gleefully pirates to play and give us a micro-review. This is basically an equivalent attitude to the FATAL review, where the reviewer is acting put-upon and depressed at the humanity that has led to the creation of this terrible product, blah blah blah.
The game begins with a man standing on a subway platform, stalking a girl in a blue dress. On the platform, you can click "prayer" to summon a wind that lifts her skirt. She blushes.
It basically starts off as a visual novel, and the joke is that while deeply disturbing to play a rapist all the girls you the player go after get into it and get off on being raped.
However, here is where things change: Leigh Alexander
actually did the research, citing books and studies on Japanese train-gropers and the rest of the society that gave birth to
RapeLay. Not all the facts are correct (if there's a "hack" that can un-mosaic a censored hentai comic or anime I've never heard of it; to my knowledge the works are uncensored by hand using photoshop), but it still shows a fair bit more effort than others so far. Though not too much, because this is a Slate article and not an out-and-out academic essay.
Aside from some discussions about how
RapeLay comes from a societal background where sexual molestation on trains is a major and ongoing problem, I think the most important distinction that Alexander makes is that
RapeLay is more comparable to a pornographic novel than
Super Mario Bros. Whereas the previous articles all covered rape in roleplay, it was people roleplaying as a group, interacting with each other -
RapeLay is definitely a single-player game. That doesn't make it better or worse, but it does change the dynamic significantly, at least to my mind.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technolog ... s_bad.html
Why I'm Not Speaking At Penny Arcade Expo East (2011)
by Courtney Stanton
Remember the dickwolves? I remember the dickwolves.
...many Penny Arcade fans jumped to their defense, canonizing the "dickwolf" as a symbol of the right to tell rape jokes.
Stanton responded to the Dickwolf bruhaha by putting out the "Dickwolf Survivor's Guild" T-shirt, with profits donated to the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.
This shirt is actually much better than the original joke. She later took it down.
The PA East team invited her to speak at the expo, but Stanton declined. In her own words:
...it went viral in the video game community, landed on Reddit, Metafilter, and 4chan, and I spent the next month or so being threatened daily with rape, death, being raped to death, and other such imaginative variations on the topic.
That's all before we get to the actual essay!
The essay itself is just an intelligent if rather snarky explanation that Stanton didn't want to attend the PAX event for professional and personal reasons, and aside from the dickwolf thing has little to do with rape. Really, in the context of this book I guess the whole point of including it is to talk about the whole dickwolf thing in context - something that would have been much easier if they'd just managed to get the permissions for the PA strips and t-shirt images for this book, but that's probably asking too much.
There is a link to the post, but it appears to have disappeared from it's proper place in the grand scheme that is the internet. Here it is for anybody that obsesses over these things:
http://superopinionated.com/2011/01/24/ ... east-2011/
Does Tomb Raider's Lara Croft Really Have To Be The Survivor Of A Rape Attempt (2012)
by Mary Hamilton
Square Enix did not respond to a request for comment.
This essay is about a scene in the
Tomb Raider reboot where someone attempts to sexually assault Lara Croft and she blows his head off with a shotgun. Hamilton's main complaint - and it is a valid complaint! - is that trying to rape Lara Croft is lazy writing. There's little set up for it, and no reason to make her a victim in this specific regard, and it doesn't really add anything to her character. Resident sausagefuhrer Ron Rosenberg, executive producer on the game, gave an
interview to Kotaku about it and Hamilton basically rips into it.
I wish this were a more in-depth piece, because one of the things I was hoping somebody in this book would try to address is: When is rape okay in gaming?
Obviously, it depends largely on the context - generally speaking, rape is more acceptable in adult games than non-adult games, but beyond that when is it an acceptable story element? Certainly there are any number of novels and short stories and movies that use rape, and sometimes it's lazy short-hand and sometimes it's sex fantasy and sometimes it's gritty realism and other times it's black humor. It might be helpful to give some good examples, but this isn't that kind of book.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... pe-attempt
Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated in Gears of War That I'll Never Say Again (2012)
by Patricia Hernandez
I raped you.
Basic trash talk, but spoken over the network by a rape survivor it set off an introspective diatribe.
Playing games can bring the Hyde out in many of us.
A valid point, Hernandez! Part of roleplaying is being free to play a different character, let loose from the typical restrictions of everyday life.
A large part of this essay is a rape survivor dealing with, well, rape culture. And it's not raging against the machine or sex fantasies, it's a person that feels degraded and worthless from the experience.
Trash talk makes it obvious that the implicit understanding of the language of dominion isn't just sexualized. It's gendered.
And the key realization is like something from
Languages of Pao: our culture's sexual power politics is in many cases built into the language and behavior, so that it's hard for people to even see it, much less escape from it.
It's a different, and interesting take on the issue - though really more to do with rape and society as a whole than rape in gaming.
http://kotaku.com/5914348/three-words-i ... -say-again
Aside from a couple "About the Editors" and a brief glossary, that is it, that is the book. As noted, this was far less than I hoped it would be...far far less than it could have been. I don't particularly feel I know any better about rape in gaming after reading all that than I did before, which makes me sad - because I think it is an issue that should be addressed, at least at some point.
To me at least, you have to accept that sex is a part of most settings. Oh, maybe not Tetris unless you've got a fetish for geometry, but for roleplaying games it's definitely an element in every game. The question is how to handle it. Personally, I would not be comfortable sitting at a game reading out my erotic fanfiction or interacting at that level with players - but I'll say that the NPC's mother was raped by Demogorgon and that's why he's a half-fiend. Maybe not to a group of 12-year olds, though. I also would never rape a player character - oh, I'll
joke about it, and have. Part of the whole
Crypts of Chaos thing was where the players thought that any one who drank the water would be raped by a giant. That didn't mean I had an actual naked giant there pointing a deadly boner at people. Was that too far? I dunno. Certainly FATAL takes it too far, at least for me. I
could run a game of FATAL, but I can't think of any scenario where I actually would - the idea of running a game set in the RapeVerse is squicktastic to me, and I don't like the idea of running rapefics. Even dabbling at
Corruption of Champions there's a lot of elements to it that are just doubleplusungood to me.
But that's just me! There are other people out there that can handle a little rape in their games, and a few that might actually enjoy roleplaying rape fantasies. They're welcome to it, and I don't begrudge them that, and I wouldn't want to limit their right to that.
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