The artificial rape of simulated girls
Feb. 14th, 2009 04:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusA 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.
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.
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Re: tender pervert
Date: 2009-02-15 02:25 am (UTC)There's also the timeline-type variation -- the same culture can be interested in different things at different times. There was lots of bukkake porn in the 90s, but so little now that some specialist sites have switched to lactation videos (http://imomus.livejournal.com/382090.html) after their supply, um, dried up.
By the way, Hisae wants it known that when we thought we were watching Rapelay and she said she wanted a copy, it was actually Artificial Girl in the clip we saw. After researching it more, she decided Rapelay's revenge theme (a molestor rapes a girl, her sister and her mother after she reports him) was a bit nasty. She's a big fan of Artificial Girl and Oppai Slider.
Re: tender pervert
Date: 2009-02-15 03:09 am (UTC)Unfortunately i don't know much about porn on the internet but i can assure you that (symbolically speaking) 50 foot 'godzila' porn does exist, the old pink-violence women's revenge (still a male fantasy) is still alive.
A dear friend of mine, a guy, makes a living writing hardcore porn for women - and all i can say is that it is different. etc
Re: tender pervert
Date: 2009-02-15 04:15 am (UTC)I'm not particularly excited by these games, somebody asked me what my take on them was and I responded. I think they're somewhat ingenious, and I like their unrelenting focus on sex, because I think video games have focused unrelentingly on killing for the most part.
As for responsibility, I take that very seriously, which is why I'm saying that simulations of rape, murder and so on are another word for art, and that if you banned simulations as if they were, in themselves, crimes you would have to ban Macbeth as a crime, or an incitement to crime. Shakespeare covered this pretty well in the comical interlude in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Here it is, with Ringo playing the lion:
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Re: tender pervert
Date: 2009-02-15 07:31 am (UTC)Re: tender pervert
Date: 2009-02-15 07:42 am (UTC)Now you know you were looking at the wrong game. Rather than finding it amusing, Hisae finds it nasty. If she knew more about it than just the theme, it might even make her angry. This game is not one of those "sweetly sentimental stories of high school love".
Your entry assumes that this game is not as offensive as its critics allege and relies on Hisae's testimony to that effect. You know that this is no longer true, so how about a proper follow up rather than your simplistic "White people are moral hypocrites" vs "Japan is a paradise of extremes"?