TexaNigerian said:
The premise here is flawed from a historical perspective. Look back at, say, Australian history and you'll see rape used to purge the Aboriginal 'stain' from the land. Rape is also constantly deployed as a weapon of war. a 'Hero' is merely the champion of a people or one who fights to further their interests. There is nothing in most definitions of 'Hero' to suggest that a 'Hero' has to be 'good' from another culture's point of view.
As for the whole 'everything in a game ultimately relates to heroism' idea, there is an increasing number of games in which the player can do all manner of ghastly things for no particular reason, not to save the day. Killing a drunk mother of a runaway by slicing her throat as she sleeps then eating her corpse does not further the cause of restoring the Capital Wasteland (In Fall Out 3)or sacrificing the mother of one's many children to the Shadows (In Fable 2) doesn't beat Lucien. For that matter, nothing the protagonists of Saint's Row 2 do is heroic except on accident.
In terms of sheer awfulness, does Rape>Casual Cannibalism/Ballistic Castration of passers-by/nuking a city full of men,women and children off of the map?
I'll say this much.
In general I agree that rape should not be a taboo subject in video games or other media for that matter. Heck, as it is now it's a pretty mainstream interest for both genders, as erotic fantasies about being "taken" by an attractive member of your sexual orientation are extremely normal. Such is the subject of a lot of those women's romance novels and such.
Then you've got concepts like "Gor" which are popular enough to have spawned their own real-life bondage subculture.
Rape is also a good took for shock value, and is used in horror novels and such for this reason. The idea being to turn someone on but make them feel guilty/dirty for it.
All of these things could be explored in games a lot more than they currently are. Anyone who confuses such fantasy with reality has issues beyond gaming.
Besides, when you look at all the "Paranormal Romance" novels, all the books women read with pictures of Fabio (or someone of his ilk) getting ready to ravish the heroine on the cover, or just regular old published smut, you'll find that none of this stuff is exactly unusual, and it's silly to shy away from putting such mature content in a mature rated game because it's not politically correct.
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As far as the idea of rape as a weapon of war, well historically speaking you make some valid points, but I'm not sure if that's something you can specifically emulate in a game. After all you want the protaganist to be someone who can at least be empathized with by the people playing the game, not just some "other" hypothetical culture.
I could for example see making a game where you take on the role of a fantasy hero like Tarl Cabot or Jason Marshall, or a Vampire/Vampiress bondage master/mistress and engage in relationships based on those types of fantasy which start with force. Heck, I can even see a Conanesque "I'm a barbarian, I keep conquered women as my sex slaves" and building a good old fashioned harem as part of a game. But raping a perople out of existance doesn't quite seem like something most players would be able to get into.
If your going to do a game about erotic-horror you should just plain out make things wrong. Sort of like how I mentioned before if I had the budget I'd like to create a sandbox crime game based around the idea of the protaganist being a psycho-killer/seriel rapist/seriel torturer with the RPG-type development of powers based on the supernatural bad guys of
horror movies. Part of the game being to set it up as a sort of reverse crime procedural
with the character having to cover their tracks from committing crimes, and using systems like the old VICAPS program I read about in my old Criminal Justice classes to plot out the response of the police/FBI/whatever in response to the crimes.
In the case of my idea there would of course be an overall plot, and the character would in absolute terms be something of an anti-hero "driven to enjoy these horrible things".
I thought of the idea over a period of time watching various psycho-killer movies and such and talking to other sicko horror movie fans about "ahh well, if that was me I would have done this to the victim, and I never would have been caught because instead I would have planned to do this, this, and this". It would be interesting to create a game that would let arm-chair horror movie bad guys test their hypothetical skillz. Could YOU whack more people than "Dexter" without getting caught? A lot more entertaining than (yawn) selling drugs and pimping hos yet again. As someone interested in Criminal Justice (despite how things turned out for me) it fascinates me as a potential exercise, along with my general love of "sick" movies.
The point of that rant is simply that I think rape CAN be introduced into games, and probably should be. I guess we agree there. But there is no need for warped justifications. I mean if your doing "erotic" rape, simply portray it as what it is, the genere defines itself. You don't see a 50 page self-justifying preamble by Fabio and the author whose book he appeared on the cover of disclaiming the content of the story in which he abducts women as a fictional pirate, "ravishes" them and then turns them into his wenches. If you want to portray rape as being evil and shocking, likewise don't try and justify it. If your going the shock horror type root, don't bother to say that it's okay by some cultural standard, the perverted Nazi Snuff-Doktor is doing all that stuff because he's sick and it gets him off. It's EEEEEVIL that is the point, nobody makes any bones about it.
In general neither Tarl Cabot or your typical horror psycho feel much of a need to justify themselves.
>>>----Therumancer--->
