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

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

There was a big dust-up about this on the feminist blog Jezebel yesterday-ish.

The problem I have with critics of these types of simulated experiences is how they attempt, via unassailable outrage, to shut down any and all discussion of the erotics of fantasies dealing with consent. The comments section was spewing off in every direction, but the one rule that seemed to prevail was that there was no questioning the absolute abhorrence of this game. This was based, as usual, on the foregone conclusion that life imitates art, so obviously RapeLay was going to be training a new generation of rapists. One commenter who tried to criticize the overbearing outrage--that, in a world with GTA and Fallout 3 and plenty of other ultra-violent video games, and also real life, ongoing wars between nations and cultures, we should single out for such virulent criticism an eroge game targeted to an adult niche population in Japan, which probably hasn't sold more than 50,000 copies--was basically shouted down, and people called on the moderator to instantly ban this person, even though there was nothing harrassing or vile in his/her statements.

I saw an article recently about a scientific study in which men and women had their levels of arousal measured (by blood flow to the naughty bits) when shown rape fantasy pornography. They found that both men and women became physically aroused while watching these scenarios, despite verbal statements to the contrary when questioned.

The point seems to be that, when people become aroused by fantasies of rape, or fantasies dealing with the wide range of possible consent scenarios, they are not expressing a desire to rape somebody (or to be raped), but rather are engaging in a suspension of disbelief, like at the movies ... taking somebody without consent (even though consent is built into the very process of the mental fantasy moving forward), or being taken without consent (even though the fantasy requires that you be willing to continue fantasizing).

In other words, in RapeLay, the computer, I presume, does not "fight back" even as the characters on the screen express dismay or dissatisfaction at the unfolding events. What would such fighting back even look like? Would the program be coded to give itself a percentage chance of crashing, like a D&D dice roll? The idea that this is "rape" is just present enough to allow the user to suspend disbelief, to forget that they're willing it to occur, and that the computer program is willing to make it happen, via actually a rather generic and typical set of visual tools.

I guess what I dislike most about the lion's share of discourse surrounding the issue is how the anti- people tend to use really vague, undefended claims as crutches. They argue that this "legitimizes" or "advocates" or "trains" or "reinforces," without ever examining what it means to fantasize about these things, that it may not be, and certainly is not usually, born of an actual desire to live out the real life scenario.

[ferricide.livejournal.com]

50k? way less:

http://zepy.momotato.com/2007/03/01/eroge-sales-rankings-year-2006/

it's not even in the top 20 eroge from 2006 (the year it came out in japan, according to wikipedia) and #20 sold 21,725.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

I think it's great that somebody takes the time to list eroge sales rankings.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Here's an interesting critique of that rape article you mentioned. Not to say there isn't a point that women find images of rape exiciting- even I can vouch for that- but it has to be divorced from biopsych and evopsych, because I cannot stand that DUMB-ASS WOMEN DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY FIND SEXUALLY AROUSING reporting angle.

http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/search?q=intricacies+of+the+erotic

It's also the case that a lot of women may find rape fantasies arousing and are afraid of saying so because they are scared that if they ever do get raped and start a courtcase, everyone's going to dig up their lj entries and go SEE THE BITCH WANTED IT. Which is something that is never addressed in these surveys either, aside from the things echidne mentions.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

But the point is that these are separate things. If a woman, for example, has fantasies of being raped, the thing that differentiates the fantasy from the reality is that it requires a suspension of disbelief in order for her to disregard that the fantasy requires her consent (or else the fantasy ends). In reality, obviously, the requirement of rape would be that she doesn't consent at all, or that consent breaks down at any part of the process.

I think one of the revelations of the study, which focused on men and women by the way, is to draw a distinction between fantasy/desire and real-life. It actually reinforces the point that, just because a woman's body may become aroused at "hints of sex" does not mean that she has consented to or actually wants it. But I think one of the problems of the study is that Chivers uses verbal descriptions of rape, and the resulting arousal from them, in order to simulate what she believes would happen in a real rape situation. I think that hearing a description of rape is already so far in the realm of noticeable simulation that a person could reasonably suspend disbelief, and that this suspension might trigger a fantasy, which then triggers the arousal. This assumption, on Chivers' part, that the simulation = reality, that it tells us something about how a woman's body would react during a real rape, is what's truly problematic about the study.

But I think it still tells us something useful about the disconnect between fantasy/reality. The whole thing about how the females in the study became sexually aroused while watching bonobos mating is a further demonstration of this: you can become aroused by something like that, but how many women could we say actually wish to have sex with a bonobo in real life?

Anyway, I don't think we should tamper with how we discuss fantasies and desires simply because some idiots will decide, wrongly and absurdly and indefensibly, as they already do and are so doing as we write back and forth in Momus's comments field, that this all means "SEE THE BITCH WANTED IT." I mean, asshole rapists around the world already use that excuse whether we discuss the nature of fantasy/desire or not. It's not as though we're opening some unique can of worms here.