So yeah, for the last month or so in the news here in the US, there’s been a manufactured kerfuffle over RapeLay. I say “manufactured” because the game has been out for a few years with nary a peep from anyone, mainly because of how totally obscure it is. I only knew about it because I read the article on Something Awful about it, which is dated from January 2007. The big issue with RapeLay is that is a rape simulator. Video games like Grand Theft Auto get frequently called “murder simulators”, but that’s not really accurate. You can drive around and listen to the radio and do lots of non-murder-y things. RapeLay, however really is a rape simulator. The only thing to do is well, rape. It’s easy to see why that disturbs people, and the game really is sadistic and disturbing.

Sidestepping censorship/obscenity/practicality (how do you boycott sellers when nobody sells it?) issues, the simulation part is the crux of the matter. My first thought was first to remember the study after study that say that video games don’t make people violent; instead people are predisposed to act in video games as they would outside of them. It is not a Yakov Smirnov-ish case of “the games play you!” It’s easy spout off these studies. The most personally impacting example of this in my experience was when I was reading a Christian video game review site for lulz back in the day and saw that they had a review of Deus Ex. I clicked on the link expecting to see them trash one of the greatest games ever for basically irrelevant reasons, but was greatly surprised by what I read.

One of the reasons that I think Deus Ex is so great is because of how open-ended its sandbox plays. In a lot of RPGs, you think “this time I’ll play as a stealth class rather than a fighter class”, while in Deus Ex you end up playing as certain “classes” more out of necessity. You’ll notice a ventilation shaft during a subsequent playthrough that you didn’t before, and go through it. Or you’ll run out of ammo this time, and need to figure out another solution. The gameplay is very organic and immersive. As I said, you don’t really actively think “I will play the game in this specific way now”. What amazed me with the review is how because this guy is a good Christian, it doesn’t cross his mind to say, randomly shoot a sentry. What does cross his mind, however is to do things like give a candy bar to a homeless man. This was markedly different from how I would think. My mindset would be more like “Maybe if I give this guy a 40, he’ll tell me about when the guards go on break”. He simply would do that because that’s what he does in that kind of situation.

Going back to RapeLay, the gears in my head didn’t really start turning until I read this post, and especially the comments (with the blackly funny title “Was RapeLay ‘Asking For It’?”). In RapeLay, you’re basically forced to rape. If you don’t go around raping, there’s no game. Everything is “in-game”, so there’s a very active mental process going on here. I am going to do this because of the game’s mechanics. While video games invite much more identification than films or books (if asked about a movie, you’d say “Luke blew up the Death Star”, but if asked about a Star Wars video game, you’d say “I blew up the Death Star”), the whole setup requires you to think the way the game wants, rather than the other way around. If randomly shown a sandbox game, I’d think (and hope) that your first thought might be to walk around for a little or talk to some people, rather than to try to rape the first woman (or man!) that you see. Because RapeLay is so sadistic and so deviant, in order to think that way, you’d either have to be told to, providing distance rather than immersion, or just be really fucked in the head. That’s why I talked about Deus Ex for two paragraphs.

The big turning point in my thinking was when I read about Kana Little Sister in that post and its comments. Kana Little Sister is a regular story-driven eroge rather than a kind of simulator. And while we’re at it, unlike RapeLay, you can actually buy English language copies of Kana Little Sister from places like J-List, so this isn’t some incredibly obscure title that just got randomly seized upon. It’s also pedophilia incest porn, so while yes, the sadism in RapeLay is probably the most objectionable part, if we’re worried about people acting out or getting ideas from video games, it’s really kind of a wash to whether pedophilia and incest or rape is worse. Also, the “porn” part of “pedophilia incest porn” is critical. Lolita is also about pedophilia (and even makes us want to sympathize with the pedophile and perhaps even elevate him), but it’s also a work of art. Porn is supposed to be base and obscene.

The problem is that from the reviews that I’ve read about the game, Kana Little Sister is also incredibly emotionally affecting, which makes calling it “just” porn messy. Now we have a problem. The extremeness (as well as the fact that the actual game itself is pretty terribly made) of RapeLay makes it easy to be instantly disturbed by it, pulling you out of the immersion and producing a verfremdungseffekt, and therefore making it unlikely that the game would turn you into a rapist. But Kana Little Sister, while not being a simulation (and therefore making the “I raped her” way of thinking a little harder to take hold) ends up being immersive due to its narrative, characters, etc. But here arises another problem. We’re active in the games, but passive with the book. This distinction I think is critical, because it’s supposed to be that interactivity would hypothetically make games “worse” than say, a movie when it comes to acting out bad behavior.

Ultimately, what I would possibly be worried about would be a less extreme, more realistic RapeLay. Rather than the premise being “You are a monster who is going to torture and enslave these women because you hate women” (and while we’re at it, who outside of New York City even rides crowded trains in America?), what if you could go around raping women at a bar and justifying it to yourself because she had too much to drink? Or forcing her in a situation where she’s unable to resist, like how Joan was raped last season on Mad Men? That’s the sort of unacceptable justification that “rape culture” creates, not that of an assailant jumping out from the shadows.

I feel like I only expressed a small fraction of the thoughts that have poured into my head with this whole brouhaha, but basically I guess the extremity, which is supposed to be the worst part, would instead have the opposite effect. Or something.