Playing the "Rape Card" against video games, even when it doesn't make sense...

[Aludiana of the Dusk]

I'm not really the Fox News type, so when I saw this article: Psychiatrist Fails to Support Bulletstorm Rape Accusations I was a little surprised, because I just saw my husband play through the Bulletstorm Demo, and I didn't make any correlation between the game and rape.

So I did a google search, and turned up another article on Kotaku's website about the incident; as well as the Wired.com interview mentioned in the article from Game Informer's blogs.

A couple things in the Kotaku article caught my eye:

Reporters typically trim quotes for space, flow or emphasis; Dr. Lieberman’s full quote about sexual violence and games to Fox News was: “Video games have increasingly, and more brazenly, connected sex and violence in images, actions and words. This has the psychological impact of doubling the excitement, stimulation and incitement to copycat acts. The increase in rapes can be attributed, in large part, to the playing out of such scenes in video games.”

Maybe the whole quote was taken out of context or, maybe just the part Fox News used. If it is the latter, it doesn't make Dr. Liberman look any better. And if it's the former, I'd like to know the context of the quote. I'm also curious about where this increase in rapes is occurring; as I believe that nationally, in the US statistics show a decline. Granted that is a decline in reported cases, which could just mean that on the whole women who are raped are reporting the incidents less, but that itself doesn't mean that rape crimes are increasing.

And so, games do cause rape?

“I would have to dig into the things I have in hard copy or search the Internet,” she said, “But rape [pause] there have been sexual crimes and the video games have become more sexual …”

Kotaku was putting Lieberman on the spot. We called her and she answered. So even though she’d been getting criticized by gamers over e-mail for a couple of days, she didn’t have her notes handy. She did, however, wind her way into an articulation of her concern about the changing nature of video games. “They’ve become more sexual,” she said. “And, according to Freud, our impulses… we’re born with natural drives toward aggression and sex. The aggression drive is normally socialized, when we grow up, to become ambition. The sexual drive, as we grow up, is connected to love, if we grow up in a healthy way.

“The irony is here are people trying to say video games don’t cause people to be violent, but the ones I’ve read are very violent. They’re out of control.”

I can see why she'd cite Freud, his work fits her theory. But Freud's work has been widely discredited given the majority of his base of clients (wealthy women) and the time period (Europe's Victorian Era) which had a very sexually repressed culture; obviously this would skew his research somewhat, particularly as it applies to development over the course of a lifetime.

I'm also curious about the video games she's "read." Especially since one usually doesn't read video games. Is she reading about them, reading the descriptions on the game packaging or reading the actual scripts for the games. Depending on what she's reading, a video game is going to sound worse than it is, or have certain features played up more than others.

Also the Wired.com article actually talks to someone who's done research in the field of violent video games

“I don’t know where [Lieberman] would get any evidence for this opinion,” said Iowa State University professor Douglas A. Gentile, who studies the relationship between media and violence. “There’s really very little to substantiate her claims in research literature.”

Gentile has been researching violence in media since 1999. He has written books and studies about the psychological effects of videogames. When asked by Wired.com in a phone interview, he said very few mainstream games contain any real sexual content. Explicit old games like Leisure Suit Larry and Custer’s Revenge, Gentile pointed out, are hard to find on store shelves nowadays.

I can't think of one game that you can buy off the shelf with a combination of violent blood-spattering gore, and explicit sex, though I can think of a few that can be modded to do so; but modding is done usually by the gaming community; not video game companies.

Something else caught my eye; Liberman's response Wired's research into rape statistics

Despite Lieberman’s allegation that there has been an increase in rape, the number of forcible rape cases in the United States has decreased since the early ’90s, according to FBI statistics. Additionally, anti–sexual-assault organization The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network says rape cases have decreased by 60 percent since 1993.

When shown these figures, Lieberman said the “statistics do not reflect all the rapes, since many go unreported and others relate to child abductions.” When asked for statistics showing an increase of rape in recent years, Lieberman said she did not have time to pull them up.

I can understand that statistics wouldn't reflect all the rapes, because not every rape is reported. What I don't get is what child abductions has to do with it. Yeah, it doesn't relate to what she wants rape statistics for, but to hear he say that, initially it almost seems like if an abducted child is raped it isn't really an instance of rape, but one of child abduction, which seems really absurd to me.

[Shjade]

I like the part where Liebermann had time to write up a report on the subject but didn't have time to bring up the statistics supposedly used to make the report's points.

Bulletstorm encourages shooting groins, but that's a rather different category of sexual assault than rape, I think.

[Aludiana of the Dusk]

I like the part where Liebermann had time to write up a report on the subject but didn't have time to bring up the statistics supposedly used to make the report's points.

Bulletstorm encourages shooting groins, but that's a rather different category of sexual assault than rape, I think.

Yes, I noticed a few exploding crotches while I watched my hubby play the demo. The PC also pinned down the girl to protect her from harm. I think that is almost the opposite of rape.

[Sabby]

Actually, the whole rape connection comes from the games scoring system. Theres names for 'trick shots'. Kicking someone onto spikes is a Voodoo Doll, kicking two people onto spikes is a Voodoo Doll x2, so double your points. But a lot of the names have a sexual thing to them. Like wrapping a grenade chain around someones head is a Grenade Gag, and I think blowing up a bunch of people at once is a Gang Bang.

So they think that combining sexual thoughts with violent acts they are removing the taboo of rape.

[DarklingAlice]

Ohhhh the grenade gag comes from wrapping it around peoples' heads? When I played it earlier today I assumed it meant gag as in 'trick' or 'joke'. Will have to take a second look. At any rate, mouth gags in and of themselves aren't sexual.

(By the way was very annoyed that I didn't get extra points for leashing someone across a gap, firing a grenade bolo at them to halt their momentum in midair so that they fell down the bottomless hole, and then hit the grenade trigger to blow them up as they were already falling to their doom. If this game can't handle my sadistic creativity in the demo...)

[Aludiana of the Dusk]

Actually, the whole rape connection comes from the games scoring system. Theres names for 'trick shots'. Kicking someone onto spikes is a Voodoo Doll, kicking two people onto spikes is a Voodoo Doll x2, so double your points. But a lot of the names have a sexual thing to them. Like wrapping a grenade chain around someones head is a Grenade Gag, and I think blowing up a bunch of people at once is a Gang Bang.

So they think that combining sexual thoughts with violent acts they are removing the taboo of rape.

I can see how that is troublesome to think about. Actually, it does kind of bug me a little bit. But I don't think it's suddenly going to make rape seem socially acceptable to anyone who plays the game that doesn't already hold that opinion.

[Oniya]

* Oniya gives Darkling Alice extra points  O_O

[Shjade]

The PC also pinned down the girl to protect her from harm. I think that is almost the opposite of rape.

Depends on what you're protecting her from, I suppose.

"Don't worry, little girl, I'll save you from your virginity!"

"Oh, thank you, mist-wait what"

[Jude]

The level of violence, sex, and language in video games certainly is getting more intense, but it hasn't even surpassed film yet in many ways.  For the longest time video game scripts were PG-13 at the worst, coupled with really unrealistic depictions of graphic gore.  Only in the last 10 years have developers started using "fuck and shit" regularly, and I've even seen a game or two with exposed breasts in it (The Saboteur comes to mind).  Even in games that do feature sexual content, it's never prominent and the sequences where intercourse occurs are short, conservative, and tasteful compared to their film counterparts (and they're typically not interactive, the few that are are interactive in a very mindless QTE sort of way, like in God of War).  Video games simply are not promoting sex more than film already does, it's not even close.

Anyone with access to the internet can find videos that extremely sexual and/or violent with a little imagination and a few mouse clicks.  As we all know the internet is for porn and there are entire websites devoted to showing images of corpses mutilated in a variety of fashions (from shotgun-suicides to car accidents).  It's difficult to avoid this stuff even if you don't want to see it thanks to malicious redirection of links, spam email, and "friends" with a sick sense of humor (learned this from personal experience).

I've played just about every big game that's ever been released on a major console since 1992 (I think it was then) when I got my Super Nintendo (plus a whole lot of smaller ones), but I have never seen even a hint of rape or sexual violence before.  Very few developers even dare to acknowledge the fact that humans are sexual creatures, none of them have the inclination to explore the darker side of that in a product which (in the end) has to be marketable to a large enough audience that it can be commercially successful.  Games are art, but due to their complexity and development costs, business has an inextricable hold on the process too.

EDIT:  My original post was really rough, I just finished cleaning it up.  Sorry for any confusion.

[Shjade]

I've played just about every big game that's ever been released on a major console since 1992 (I think it was then) when I got my Super Nintendo (plus a whole lot of smaller ones), but I have never seen even a hint of rape or sexual violence before.

I can think of one where one of the four possible endings results in [noembed]the main character being imprisoned and raped for breeding.[/noembed] It skips over the actual rape scene, but I'd say it qualifies as "a hint" when your character is in a mesh box in one scene and psychotically laughing about her pregnancy in the next.

That's a total of one game (Haunting Ground) I can think of in the mainstream where it's a major plot point. Not exactly a deluge of sexual content, but worth noting.

[Jude]

I've heard there's hints of rape in Fear 2 now that I think about it (though I believe it's a man who gets raped by a psychotic creepy humanoidish female thing).

[Shjade]

There are hints in plenty of games, really. Haunting Ground was just the only full-on unavoidably present example that came to mind.

Fear Effect 2 has some [noembed]highly suggestive character positioning pretty early on[/noembed] that the game's director has purposely left up to "player interpretation." The, uh, suggestive groaning doesn't help. >.>;

Silent Hill 2 certainly goes through the motions, albeit between a supernaturally-spawned element of the protagonist's unconscious mind and a mannequin.

Various Resident Evil games have relevant imagery and implications with how certain characters are "infected" or acquire parasites or similar.

There are nods to rape and sexual violence in a fair number of games, some more obvious than others - some you won't see unless you're actively looking for them, most likely. They're still not as common or overt as movies that cover similar subject matter, by and large.

Edit: links altered! Thanks Oniya :3

[Kurzyk]

FinalFantasy 7 had that scene where Cloud rescues Aeris before she's forced to breed with a dog. Few more seconds and that would have been interesting. Of course if you don't rescue her she just runs around the cage screaming help, while being chased by the dog. But that's beastial rape as part of a science experiment.

[Jude]

I've played most of the Resident Evil games and haven't seen the slightest hint of rape... That's one of the things about art in general though, if you analyze something looking for it, you can probably find it.  That doesn't mean it's actually intended to be seen.  I really think that the ESRB would've had a lot more of a problem with the products you mentioned if rape was obviously part of it.  I don't know, maybe I just missed the references.

Anyone else get rape out of Resident Evil?

... and I also don't remember the Aeris-dog thing, but now that you mention it Don Corneo, well... He's full of rape D:

[Kurzyk]

Its the scene where you meet Red the dog and Hojo the shinra scientist is trying to crossbreed them.

[Oniya]

Sidenote: I'm linking to Youtube searches with the intended video at the top of the search list rather than directly to videos 'cause it annoys me when the video pops up in the thread post when all I'm trying to do is link it.

[ noembed ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJOLcreXA7I[ /noembed ]

[noembed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJOLcreXA7I[/noembed]

[Shjade]

[ noembed ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJOLcreXA7I[ /noembed ]

[noembed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJOLcreXA7I[/noembed]

[noembed]I thank you with random and hugs.[/noembed]

@Jude: I was mostly thinking of scenes like, say, the little girl in RE2 having a phallic red slimy squirming thing forced down her throat, the implications of the cultists carrying Ashley off into the dark in RE4 (much more ambiguous than the former example), some of the positions the characters end up in if zombies take them down, etc. - "hints," not as overt as the Haunting/Fear Effect examples.

Nanaki's intro with Aeris slipped my mind, probably because the next scene has him basically saying Naaah, I wasn't gonna do that. The implication was still there, though, true. And Don Corneo...I can't even touch that one. So much camp with so much bad intentions.

[Aludiana of the Dusk]

... and I also don't remember the Aeris-dog thing, but now that you mention it Don Corneo, well... He's full of rape D:

I remember Hojo hinting that he was trying to breed Aeris and the dog. And when you have to go rescue Tifa and Aeris in the first encounter with Don Cornero; I think one of them is in a basement that looks a bit like a BDSM dungeon. (Of course having only played Final Fantasy 7 for the first time when I was 20, I made the connection; my husband didn't think much of it when he played the game just after its release at the age of 11.)

[Jude]

I must be of pure mind, because I never really pick up on rape references D: