Rape Games Banned-Not-Banned In Japan
RapeLay Cover
Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche My most recent Blowfish column.
concerns Japanese game about rape and the fact that while merely censured, it's being reported in the US adult press as "banned." Here's an excerpt:
Rape Games Banned-Not-Banned in Japan
Back in February, Amazon removed from its virtual shelves a Japanese video game called RapeLay. In RapeLay, according to an AVN story:
. . .the player stalks and rapes women. If one of the rape victims becomes pregnant, the player must force her to have a abortion. In one scenario, the player takes on the role of a criminal who rapes a mother and her two teenage daughters.
Yeah, I’m kinda shocked myself, and I’m not all that easy to shock, or at least it kind of seems like I shouldn’t be.
The Wikipedia page also mentions some other choice tidbits, like the fact that the point-of-view character summons a gust of wind to lift the female characters’ skirts on a subway platform - by saying a prayer. Oh, and the POV character for part of the game, Kimura, is a “chikan” - a subway groper, for which he is arrested at the beginning of the game, setting the stage for later revenge scenarios where he evens the score for his arrest with the family of his accusers. He can do this because Kimura’s father is an important and powerful politician. Yow!! God and the government’s on the rapist’s side!
What do you think? Should games like this be "allowed"? It's rather academic since the body talking about "banning" the game is extralegal and extrajudicial; it's an industry group, but the Japanese government is also getting involved, by making its wishes known to the industry. Doesn't the same thing kinda happen all the time here in the US? How about that Hot Coffee incident?
Is this censorship of oh-so-healthy alternative sexual expression, or merely the reasonable attempt to regulate the most objectionable forms of sexual material?