The artificial rape of simulated girls

[imomus]

A message popped up in my mailbox from someone called Rob. "I was curious if you had any thoughts on this rather disturbing Japanese videogame," he asked. I clicked through to Boing Boing and read an article entitled Amazon Sells Rape Simulation Game. It turned out to be based on a breathless, scarlet-faced Belfast Telegraph piece that went, approximately: "shocking rape simulator Rapelay... set in Japan... sickening game description on Amazon... an MP plans to raise the issue in Parliament..."



I immediately made plans to raise the matter in Click Opera, the closest I have to a personal parliament. My first three thoughts, for hansard and for the house:

1. Moral panics tend to happen in artforms when they're at their most culturally-relevant.

2. The whole point of computer simulation is to do things you couldn't do in real life, for various reasons. As I once sang in a song, "in life remain considerate, in art the devil incarnate... in games there should be no forbidden things".

3. I showed Hisae clips from the game. She found them hilarious and is now pestering me to get Rapelay at all costs.

The company that makes the "shocking" game is called -- just in case anyone is under the illusion that we're dealing with reality -- Illusion. The reason Hisae laughed so much was that the "raped" girls have such a prissy and camp way of expressing their dismay that you can't take the thing seriously. "Not with that uncircumcized thing!" one declares, in the tones of a lady asking a passerby not to let his poodle foul the footpath. The girls also have fairly ludicrous mammary dimensions.

Hisae's favourite game in the Illusion catalogue is Oppai Slider, a game focused on phallus-breast contact, or paizuri. Mine is Hako: Tiny Box Girl, in which the player keeps a tiny girl in a cardboard box, drowning her occasionally in tidal waves of sperm. Hako seems to be based on Makoto Aida's Edible Artificial Girls series, about which questions have not yet, to my knowledge, been asked in parliament. (Perhaps if we get a journalist to call up an MP? By the way, does the Honourable Member know that Aida has quite explicitly stated that these girls are "pain free"?)



Hisae told me that these games are called eroge, erotic games. The Wikipedia entry on eroge blames them on big Japanese computer-makers in the 80s: "NEC was behind its competitors in terms of hardware (with only 16 colors and no sound support) and needed a way to regain control of the market. Thus came the erotic game. Early eroge had simple stories, often involving rape." So there you go. If sales are slow, throw in a bit of simulated rape and you're away. The games have a curious tendency -- in this account, anyway -- to soften pretty quickly into "love simulation" and "sweetly sentimental stories of high school love".

For those who believe that they're likely to harden into real-world rape, one useful comment under the Boing Boing piece charted the ratio of government censorship to real world rape in three countries, showing a negative correlation between permissiveness and actual rape:

Australia: censorship of books, films, games and comics: 0.777999 rapes per 1,000 people.
USA: censorship varies between states, free speech codified in constitution: 0.301318 rapes per 1,000 people.
Japan: rape sims are, apparently, for sale: 0.017737 rapes per 1,000 people. (Source.)

The games are certainly odd. In Rapelay, for instance, you can tell from the girls' expressions how likely they are to get pregnant. Slightly flushed cheeks show they're on their period, open eyes show normal receptivity, and closed eyes show high fertility and a good chance to conceive.

I suppose the antithesis of these games featuring reluctant artificial girls is the American Ariane B dating simulator. A succession of still pictures, the game is also a procession of tedious efforts to procure Ariane's permission to proceed to the next stage. Mendokusai, as they say in Japan. You know, if you're a himote or unpopular young guy, the very last thing you want is a girl simulation program that makes things as difficult for you as they are in everyday life. If you want a challenge, however, there's always Battle Raper 2, in which you have to knock the clothes off your girl opponent item by item, before getting to choose the camera angles from which to watch her writhing (breathing sexily) naked on the marble floor. Ooof!



If we're discussing disturbing games full of violence against women, how about Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a game in which you command a paramilitary fundamentalist army in a post-apocalyptic New York, converting Jews, mainstream Christians, Muslims, Atheists, Buddhists, and anyone else you find to fundamentalist Christianity. All who resist are killed. The sick part is that the Pentagon chose this game to send, at the expense of taxpayers, to US troops serving in Iraq.

Comments

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

[lulahbelle.livejournal.com]

Now that is some gorgeous page raeping there, dooooood. Is it possible to realise that I fancy Prince this late in my life?

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Ever since I first started playing flash based games on the net I've seen dating/rape/undress/sex sim games all over. It's nothing new. I guess the thing now is that they make money on it, and when something is taboo the worst thing you can do about it is to commercialize it and make money out of it. I am not even surprised.

Oh, and sexism in games have been on the wall since Tomb Raider came out. Apparently Lara Croft's by-then pixelated, sharp-edged looks along with her habit of "moaning" while she dragged a big block of stone horrified and upset many. But they never considered that Lara Croft was one of the few female protagonists of the 90's gaming universe.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I remember someone getting into a huff over... the scene where you originally find out about Samus Aran. Yeah.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I'm led to believe Left Behind actually -- mildly -- punishes the player for killing civilians, as being detrimental to the whole conversion thingy the protagonists have going on, though I haven't seen the finished product. (The option is certainly there, but that's nothing new, and only made eye-brow raising in the public eye because of the much-advertised Christianity of the game project.)

[akabe.livejournal.com]

it is wrong to put makoto aida's drawings on the same level as these games, complex and ambivalent as it is aida's work is clearly on one level a critique of precisely this kind of thing. again you wouldn't be this critically slack about anything other that japan

[akabe.livejournal.com]

of course you could argue (and you have to some degree) that the games themselves are critical, political, deconstructive whatever , rather that just one-way rape fantasy but that still doesn't put them on an even close level.

[pulled-up.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

A woman couldn't write this post. That's all I have to say.

disturbing

[oldermusiclover.livejournal.com]

the main subject is disturbing though I feel simulation and outlets such as prostitution does lessen sexual violence. However the US sending a piece of religious bigotry to those mental vicious freaks that masquerade as human being known as the US military makes me want to vomit more than I can express

[(Anonymous)]

I don't believe for a moment that you would give this game a pass if it was produced by an American software house rather than a Japanese developer.

[(Anonymous)]

Some people are sick, live with it. Help them if you are so inclined. Self diagnosis is not a common symptom.

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

omg electricwitch, that is beautiful, hold your scroll button down and it looks like a movie.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

You wanna know how many pages of Renato gifs this forum has?? THAT'S RIGHT, 154, BITCH. I've got some of Bowie humping stuff too and of Jagger jacking off, but those will be appreciated too much so unless I get a request, Renato it is.

Ghost Riders of the Moon

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

In my mind I am so humping your leg right now.

..their tendency to fall apart. (http://books.google.com/books?id=wWJtFPQ5yM8C&pg=PA108&lpg=PA108&dq=ghost+riders+on+the+moon+john+ashbery&source=bl&ots=gmhgjACrYX&sig=Ctu_J7opgc1l92OPQvFFBZFkyNY&hl=en&ei=By2XSa6YF6SoNf7JwPgL&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=6&ct=result)

I think I am too tender-hearted to enjoy such violent fantasies. I once made an old girlfriend laugh so hard she p'eed her pants; that , I think, is as close as I ever want to get to rape. Though we did live in the Suzie Wong section of Hong Kong harbour, and violent oriental fantasies were on display at every kiosk on every corner, and every coming attraction at every movie. Kung Fu Amputations, girls in chains, arterial spray, real grisly stuff -- too much for young me, and I remember closing my eyes to it, hoping in vain it would all go away.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Simply put, ludologists reject traditional theories of art because they claim that the artistic and socially relevant qualities of a video game are primarily determined by the underlying set of rules, demands, and expectations imposed on the player. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_studies)

Where have the ludologists gone? They should've arrived in their batmobile long ago.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

This song is also a porno, Momus, which you should appreciate.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Okay, well I need to sleep. I'll probably rape you in the morning <3

[lulahbelle.livejournal.com]

You realise the note about hypocrisy is pointless because these are not the same groups of people responding to the rape and the war games are they? I mean it wasn't the people who complained about the rape game who funded the war one was it. How can someone's reaction be considered hypocritical if they have never heard of the other game or if that game when they are exposed to it offends them as well?

As dmlaenker asked you,

Is it possible to be opposed to the simulated violence against women in both those games?

WELL IS IT?

I mean the real hypocrisy seems to lie within you. How can you find it sick that the Pentagon supports one game, whilst you yourself support the rape ones and see them as just an amusing curiosity??

What about soldier's fantasies about killing people? Don't they deserve to be fulfilled? It's not real after all. I mean it might be later but within the context of the game it's not real, just like the rape games.

I mean they both include violence to characters after all?

Or is it that the first one is sexualised and so it makes it ok? Inherently less serious to you?

Oh and btw correlation does not = causation, that's the first rule of interpreting such data. Just because these things are negatively correlated does not mean one has led to the other in any positive sense. Maybe rates of reported rape go down with permissiveness just because rape victims are less likely to report due to the fact that being saturated with more images of mysogynistic violence leads victims to believe that what happens to them is normal or you know not serious.

Just a different and no less valid suggestion as to why these things co-occur than the one which you implied.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My point about the American game was simply that the kind of state authorities which condemn the Japanese game are endorsing the American one.

As for the games themselves, my point is that on the level of simulation nothing needs to be forbidden. Everything must be permitted, even -- especially -- things not permissible in real life. Governments do not agree, and legislate to control simulations of all kinds. Their stance is inconsistent. Mine isn't.

[brilem.livejournal.com]

...in life remain considerate, in art the devil incarnate...

Unless the devil gets turned on by "full spectrum dominance", which is likely, because it's incompatible with peace! (http://imomus.livejournal.com/431282.html)

wiki info

[oldermusiclover.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_forces

Operation Straight Up care packages

In 2007, the evangelical organization Operation Straight Up (OSU) prepared to distribute care packages called "Freedom Packets" to the U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq as a part of the U.S. Department of Defense's America Supports You program. The packages were slated to include copies of "Left Behind: Eternal Forces," but questionable claims of "kill or convert" violence against non-Christian characters and characters shouting "Praise the Lord!" when non-Christian characters are killed made in a blog entry on the The Nation's website[22] prompted ABC News to contact the Department of Defense.[23] Subsequently, OSU dropped its plans to include the game in the care packages.

[edit] Legal action

In October 2007, Left Behind Games sent letters to various bloggers demanding removal of certain material from their blogs.[24] The letters read in part:

Left Behind Games Inc. is demanding that you immediately remove any and all information contained on your site about the above stated game that is false and/or misleading, including any such statements or commentary and the responses thereto. This includes posted comments made by others in the context of reading the incorrect or misleading statements. If you do not comply immediately, the company will be forced to pursue additional legal action which will include claims for damages, costs of suit and attorney’s fees. This may subject you and your organization to significant legal and financial damages.

None of the letters specifically identified what information was false or misleading. However, some sites removed their entire blog and some removed specific sections after contacting LB Games.

it seems it wasnt shipped to the forces and any site that claims it was is being threatened with legal action. I guess at one point this was a hot topic -- in 2007.

Re: wiki info

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The story is still up on the Atheist Nation (http://www.atheistnation.net/news/?atheist/article,00090) website I linked to, so those legal letters don't seem to have been particularly effective.

[rwillmsen.livejournal.com]

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/japan_pledges_to_halt_production

"I showed Hisae clips from the game. She found them hilarious and is now pestering me to get Rapelay at all costs."

Why don't she buy it herself?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's pretty academic for both of us; we're Apple users, and these games only run on PC.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think, by the way, that the Jezebel blog has to be a lot better informed and a lot more careful about their coverage (http://jezebel.com/5152478/amazon-drops-rape-simulation-video-game) of the controversy around this game. They say:

"British MP Keith Vaz says he is planning to raise the issue in Parliament. "It is intolerable that anyone would purchase a game that simulates the criminal offence of rape," said Vaz. "To know that this widely available through a major online retailer is utterly shocking, I do not see how this can be allowed." Last year, when Vaz brought up rape simulation video games during a discussion on a bill about film ratings, he was criticized by other MPs who said such games didn't exist and gamers who commented online that he didn't know what he was talking about."

They not only fail to question whether simulating a crime is itself a crime (it obviously isn't, and would condemn a huge number of cultural artifacts to illegality if it were), it implies that Vaz is right to campaign in favour of censorship and that his opponents have been proved ignorant and wrong. Does Jezebel know that Nigel Keith Anthony Standish Vaz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Vaz) is known for political corruption as much as for his pro-censorship campaigns? Does Jezebel know that Vaz, in 1989, led a protest in Leicester against Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses? Rushdie had been condemned to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini a month before, but for Vaz the anti-Rushdie protest with its book-burning was "one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain".

Is this (Vaz, and through him the spirit of the Ayatollah) who Jezebel wants to get into bed with? Or have they simply not done their research, or properly worked out their stance on freedom of expression, censorship, and the difference between real life and simulation, crime and depictions of crime?

[deadbatteries.livejournal.com]

no more music posts and no more rape fantasy game posts and no more bloke fanfare posts. show us your closet space and what you ate for breakfast.

jewbroads

[(Anonymous)]

I showed my American jew girlfriend "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" and she thought it was hilarious and is now pestering me to get it.

Love,
Hendry

Re: jewbroads

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Touché!

[(Anonymous)]

It's kind of schizophrenic, that people would be condemned in the real world for things done in this fantasy world. So, my suggestion is, keep doing the rape simulators, but include in them that your rapist character can be reported and sent to jail.
Or, even more, the "Illusion" company can make a "ban rape games forever" simulator aimed at the people against these games.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The Rapelay game is actually quite moralistic in its ultimate message. There are only two endings for the game, both involving the rapist character dying. He can either be pushed under a train for failing to force one of the girls to have an abortion (if he's made her pregnant), or he can be stabbed to death by one of the daughters.

I saw some English-language reviewers telling their readers that the lesson of the game is that you can rape with impunity, but that very much isn't the case, even in the simulation-world of the game. The penalty for virtual rape, in that virtual world, is virtual death.

[trickseybird.livejournal.com]

In Rapelay, for instance, you can tell from the girls' expressions how likely they are to get pregnant.

In Rapelay, for instance, you can tell from the girls' expressions how likely they are to get pregnant.

In Rapelay, for instance, you can tell from the girls' expressions how likely they are to get pregnant.

In Rapelay, for instance, you can tell from the girls' expressions how likely they are to get pregnant.

In Rapelay, for instance, you can tell from the girls' expressions how likely they are to get pregnant.

In Rapelay, for instance, you can tell from the girls' expressions how likely they are to get pregnant.

In Rapelay, for instance, you can tell from the girls' expressions how likely they are to get pregnant.

In Rapelay, for instance, you can tell from the girls' expressions how likely they are to get pregnant.