They can read anything they can get out of their library, off the Internet or from a bookshop. We don’t place limits on what children can read. I’ve read novels with far more horrific descriptions – I just thought of a novel I read when I was about fourteen years old where a man tortures and murders an old man in front of his wife, and then rapes and murders the wife, scoops out her eyeballs and then urinates in her eyesockets. Keith Vaz wouldn’t be standing up screaming his head off about a book about rape or murder. Stories like this take an idiotic rape game from Japan and provide fodder for censorious buffoons like Keith Vaz (who was on the side of the mullahs over the Salman Rushdie affair), who has led campaigns against the ‘evils’ of video games in the past. But they wouldn’t pull out all sorts of canards about Think Of The Children or insist that books start having age ratings. People would get angry, they might even say the novelist was demented and wrong. My point is this: imagine if someone were to publish a novel about a man who brutally raped and killed women and enjoyed doing so. RapeLay is problematic because it shows rape as being stimulating and fun, but it would be just as problematic if it was a book or a movie. You’d condemn it if there wasn’t a damn good reason for it to be there, or if it had been shot in such a way to make people find the idea of rape stimulating and exciting rather than despicable, degrading and horrific.
One wouldn’t condemn a movie just because it has a rape scene in it. Well, how can they be? When anyone tries to do something serious, it gets ripped to shreds by small-minded moralists in the media and in politics.įor us to develop mature, complex games, we need to have the shrill moralising to end, and for people to think about games in the same way that they think about movies. Then the media say that games aren’t serious art. But then the idiotic vultures in the media picked it up and the whole thing got trashed. In fact, there was someone working on a Holocaust game that sounded like it was going to be an intelligent and educational approach to the Holocaust and even got support from the ADL. That’s not to say that RapeLay is a complex, serious game, but even if it were, the words “rape game” would condemn it before anyone had even tried it, just as “Holocaust game” would. We want mature games that deal with complex, difficult themes just as novels, movies or plays do. There are plenty of people who want to see video games graduate from the ghetto of social panics followed by rating schemes, timid kid-friendliness and outrage. Intelligent Middle Class Person can read a novel with a rape scene in and consider it intellectually, finding it disgusting but complex also. Video games are stereotyped as being for children and social outcasts in a way novels aren’t.
You can read the Telegraph news story here.ĭo books with rape scenes make light of something serious and despicable, make rape seem normal or decrease the empathy society has for rape victims? There’s a more detailed and thoughtful piece over at The Curvature. It could play some role in making that crime seem normal, and further decrease the level of empathy society has for real people who have been raped. It makes light of something serious and despicable. And just for the record, I don’t think it matters whether or not anyone can show that there’s a causal link between playing the game and raping someone. MP Keith Vaz is intending to raise the matter in parliament. I’m utterly baffled as to how such things could possibly pass for entertainment. But sellers had been supplying UK customers via Amazon’s marketplace site. The game is produced by a Japanese company, and was only intended for sale in Japan. The aim of the game is to stalk and rape a family of women (there is an opportunity to gangrape individuals), and then force them to have an abortion. I’m pleased to report that Amazon are now refusing to sell the videogame ‘Rapelay’.