The Rape Double Standard

This post will contain spoilers about Far Cry 3

I've written about rape once before and weighed up the pros and cons of delving into the issue in video games but didn't really write about any double standards when it comes to the subject. There was one small one involving RapeLay but I didn't think enough games featured the rape of men, nor had there been enough articles written about them, to come to a satisfactory conclusion. Now, however, as hard as it is to believe, I've recently learned that there's a significant double standard against men when it comes to rape in video games.

Specifically, because of Far Cry 3:

For those of you who don't know the story of Far Cry, the short version is that a bunch of American tourists travel to an island to celebrate and are captured by pirates. The player character, Jason Brody, escapes and sets out to rescue his friends and take revenge on the people who captured him. It may sound clichéd but it tries to mix things up by making Jason unwilling to kill, having just been a normal kid before setting foot on the island.

One of Jason's friends, Keith, is held captive by an Australian criminal by the name of Buck. Rather than explain what happens when Jason comes to his rescue, it's better to just watch it. Basically, without outright saying it, Buck has been raping Keith while he's been held prisoner. It's very blatant, they just don't say the word "rape" for some reason. The rape content itself is only around four minutes long, so I recommend watching it to see what the problem is.

I'll give my thoughts on the rape itself later in the blog but it's worth stating how I came across this first. I don't own Far Cry 3. What I know about the story is cobbled together from lots of reading, the video above, the start of a Let's Play and a video of the two endings on Youtube. That's about it. I started looking into the male-on-male rape scene a few days ago, when a friend sent me a message about it. Almost immediately, I wondered why I hadn't heard about it sooner, thanks in no small part to the one game last year that did get a lot of attention for a (non-existent) rape scene: Tomb Raider. I'm sure I don't have to give a link to the original story after all this time but here it is anyway, for the people that missed it at the time. In the process of looking up articles to research this blog, I came across two more games that featured male victims of rape. F.E.A.R 2 featured it significantly at the end of the game and Mafia 2 had a man attempt to rape the male player character while in prison.

Since Tomb Raider received so much coverage for its "non-rape" scene last year, that's the game I found myself comparing Far Cry 3 to the most. They're both AAA titles, after all, but while one received a ton of press coverage, the other went ignored. I did some searching for any comparisons between the two games but outside of being mentioned in this forum post, I couldn't find anyone else who connected the dots between the two.

This is the basis for the rape double standard in games. The reactions of the gaming media. While Tomb Raider was faced with a very public backlash, Far Cry 3 wasn't. F.E.A.R 2 and Mafia 2 slipped under the radar too. Why? Why was Far Cry 3's rape not faced with the same backlash as Tomb Raider's non-rape? Is it because Keith isn't Lara Croft or simply because he's not female? WhatCulture comes up with a very good reason too; it was because the Tomb Raider developers actually singled out rape in their E3 preview, while other games featuring rape have kept quiet about it. That's a interesting possibility and I'm willing to give gaming journalists the benefit of the doubt by picking that one. Rape isn't exactly a topic that should be talked about when you want to promote your game.

When looking for articles about the supposed Tomb Raider rape scene, I didn't find as many as I thought I would. Even articles about rape in video games in general were hard to find. Maybe it was easier to find them closer to the time of the controversy. I also had to rule out using "Tomb Raider features rape" articles, since it obviously doesn't. They'd be arguing from outdated information and some of their objections would no longer apply. The WhatCulture article is one of the few that I found that didn't depend on knee-jerk reactions and pandering to a feminist viewpoint -- put it this way; I'm not going to humour the arguments of any article that mentioned "patriarchy" or that rape in video games "contributed to rape culture". Only sensible, legitimate reasons for including or not including rape will be taken under consideration -- but even the WC article seems to move the goalposts on why Tomb Raider is supposed to be controversial.

From what I can recall of articles I saw earlier in the year, these were the reasons people raised to object to the "rape" in Tomb Raider:

• Rape should not be in games, full-stop.

I can completely respect this attitude. If you think rape has no place in video games, that's a position I'm fine with and can accept.

• Lara Croft is a character who should never be threatened with rape.

At a push, I can accept this too. I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the threat being used by villains in games; provided the act itself doesn't occur, what's the problem? Bad people do bad things and in games, practically all of them commit murder. The threat alone shouldn't be an issue. Having said that, since Lara has never had to deal with this in Tomb Raider before and I can certainly sympathise with those who object to a "gritty" reboot, it's fine if people don't want Lara to even be subjected to the threat.

• Female characters are the only ones ever threatened with rape, not male ones.

This is one of the places where I find myself disagreeing with the objections. Not least because of the Mafia 2 example; the protagonist isn't raped but the threat of rape is the reason he fights back against his attackers. So even with that one example, the objection proves to be untrue.

One of the objections that ties into this point was something that Crystal Dynamics executive producer Ron Rosenberg said while speaking to Kotaku:

"They're more like 'I want to protect her.' There's this sort of dynamic of 'I'm going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her."

Apparently, people disliked the idea of protecting Lara Croft rather than being Lara Croft. This is something I don't understand; you have the desire to protect every character when you play a game because if you don't, you die. The point of most games is to protect your character, to keep them alive until the game is completed. Yet the WhatCulture article, not without its flaws, states, "The whole idea of wanting to protect Lara is absurd. She’s able to handle her self, or we wouldn’t have a very compelling action game." To Corey Milne, who wrote that article, I'd like to suggest he plays one of the previous Tomb Raider games, guides Lara to a dangerous area, then puts the controller down on the floor and sees just how well Lara handles herself without the player there to protect her.

The desire to protect characters in games is nothing new. Take a look at that Mafia 2 video linked to above. Can anyone say that they don't want to protect the main character from being raped? Perhaps a better question would be does your desire to beat up the people threatening you outweigh your desire to protect the main character from being raped? Hopefully, your answer to that is "no" and you want to protect the main character more than you want to beat up the bad guys. Given the choice between safely walking away from unharmed rapists or beating them to a pulp but being raped anyway, I know which one I'd pick. Rape doesn't even have to be involved; imagine if it was a shooting game where you could kill that last enemy but not without him killing you. Staying alive is the sensible, logical choice, isn't it? So it doesn't make sense for anyone to be upset about wanting to protect Lara.

In Far Cry 3's case, rape is the motivator for wanting to rescue Keith from Buck. The rape in F.E.A.R 2 is an odd one; it happens while the player character is unconscious and hallucinating, but we catch glimpses and flashes of what's happening while the player faces the final boss. So in a sense, it's the worst of the bunch because the rape actually takes place to the player character in a first-person shooter and we even see bits and pieces of it. In another sense, it's actually not so bad. The rape isn't graphic and without anyone using it as a threat, it doesn't come across as blatant in the same way that the rape scenes in Far Cry 3 and Mafia 2 do. It's used for narrative purposes more than in those games. That's not to say it's not disturbing -- the villainess, Alma, places the character's hand on her womb after he regains consciousness, suggesting she got pregnant by her rape of him -- but it's a horror game and you could say that's the intention.

One final thing to bear in mind is that not everyone objected to female characters being threatened with rape in games. Those of us who are interested in video games as a serious art form -- as well as those who just didn't mind the threat of rape in a game -- made sure to voice their support. Not necessarily for there to be rape in Tomb Raider but just an openness to the inclusion in games. In my first "real" post on this blog, I posted a link to an article on Destructoid by Holly Green. I looked over it again today and found a segment I really liked:

"Given the statistics on sexual assault, rape is a pretty common experience for women. We talk so much about wanting games to grow up and feature the female perspective, and yet we shy away from the one experience that nearly all of us share. And why? Because it's too real?"

Even if, as the critics believed, that men weren't threatened with rape in games, this sounds like a good jumping-on point to open up discussions about featuring rape in video games. I remember there being more supporters of a more mature attitude to the subject of rape in games, so Green certainly isn't alone, and I hope to see more debates on it in the future.

• Female characters are the only ones who have to be broken down to be built back up, not male ones.

This is where I think the WhatCulture article falls flat, as well as other bloggers who decided to make this argument after it turned out the Tomb Raider reboot didn't have a rape scene. It moves the goalposts to focus on weakness instead of rape. To me, that comes across as an attempt to keep criticising the Tomb Raider reboot when you've lost the original reason. I know it sounds cynical but I feel like it's an attempt to gain hits for your articles while the game is still in the public consciousness.

Anyway, WhatCulture's article sums up the point above with this statement:

"There seems to be a different set of rules when taking about male and female leads. Men are naturally talented and efficient killers where as Lara apparently needs to be broken down before she can shine."

First of all, we should eliminate the idea that showing weakness is a bad thing. Back in September, I wrote this:

"Did Sarah Connor's weakness in Terminator stop her from being strong in Terminator 2? What about Ripley in Alien? It's not even specific to women; did Peter Parker have super-strength even while being beaten up by bullies? It sounds like certain audiences wouldn't be satisfied unless Lara was clutching a pair of handguns at birth."

I stick by what I said back then. Bearing that in mind, even assuming that it was only women who were broken down and built back up, the flipside of the argument is that men always being portrayed as automatically strong isn't a good thing. Interestingly, Rhianna Pratchett, of all people, makes a good point about this in an interview with Eurogamer from November last year:

"It can be a little jarring, seeing her crying and being vulnerable, because we haven't seen this Lara before. We're taking a risk, making her appear scared and doubt herself, but that's where bravery comes from. You can't have bravery without fear. And fear is a dangerous thing to show in games, because we're so used to capable characters who can do everything."

According to Pratchett, this is not a gender issue. "Male characters are often undercooked. We probably suffer from the fact we don't think about them as being human - they're heroic and there's not much else to them. That is a problem."

I've criticised Pratchett a few times on this blog but I have to give credit where credit's due; she hits the nail on the head with the statements above. Without delving into any specific games -- pick any modern shooter, I'm sure you'll get one -- I'm very tired of seeing the "heroic and not much else to them" characters. I enjoy characters with pronounced qualities other than just heroism, whether it's humour, quirkiness and, yes, weakness. If all else fails, mute characters are great too; it allows you to project a personality of your own onto the character.

The heart of the matter, however, is that women aren't the only ones to be broken down to be built back up. Jason Brody, the protagonist of Far Cry 3, has this in spades. Faced with hordes of pirates who kidnapped his friends and murdered his brother, he's a terrified twenty-five-year-old kid from Hollywood who suddenly has to learn to kill people. Although, knowing the writer of Far Cry 3 (more on him later), this was probably some weird attempt at "meta-commentary" on the status quo of gaming and how he wanted to subvert it.

Jason Brody isn't alone. Metal Gear Solid 3's Naked Snake -- the man who would become Big Boss -- had to have his limbs broken and get thrown off a bridge before he could come back and save the day. Plus, I'm sure none of us will forget the torture scene where he was beaten so badly that he wet himself and then had his eye shot out. Heavy Rain was a game featuring nothing but the breaking down of the main character. Fable 2, even though your character could be male or female, started with the main character being kicked out of a window as a child before beginning their journey to heroism. Outside of gaming, remember how I mentioned Sarah Connor above? Well couldn't the same thing be said about her son, John? Even though he's a character who grows up to be an inspirational military leader, he wasn't that way as a teenager. He tried to act tough but his crying made for a couple of rather poignant moments in Terminator 2. He was also rather helpless, never using a gun himself but always handing ammunition to either his mother or the T-800, Arnold Schwarzeneggar's Terminator.

Saying that all the objections raised in the bullet points above are reasons why examples of male rape aren't more widely condemned in video games, like the Tomb Raider "non-rape" was, is quite a big stretch. I admit that. I'm quite happy to go with WhatCulture's explanation that Tomb Raider was singled-out because Crystal Dynamics mentioned rape in their E3 presentation and featured it prominently. However, I think my responses are worth bearing in mind if you want to discuss the pros and cons of featuring rape in video games. Leaping to the idea that rape or even weakness in video games is only something that affects women just promotes the double standard.

For more information on the positives and negatives of including rape in video games, I highly recommend this article by GamingSymmetry: Rape in Video Games: Where is the Line? It's definitely supportive of the inclusion of rape in video games but it's a fantastic read, regardless of your stance.

I don't want to seem too negative on the reactions towards rape in the gaming industry because, in spite of the backlash against Tomb Raider, I haven't noticed any other games that feature rape receiving the same attention (other than RapeLay, of course, for obvious reasons). In fact, all the articles I've seen that write about the rape in Far Cry 3 have treated it with the seriousness that it deserves:

Kotaku - Here Are Three Possible Reasons For Including Rape In Far Cry 3
Kill Screen - Why is there a rape in Far Cry 3 and why is it different from the rape scene in Pulp Fiction?
Rock, Paper, Shotgun - What I Loathe About Far Cry 3 

For Kotaku, I'd only read their third reason; "Rape as a thing that not even Ubisoft knows WTF is doing in the game". Like Patricia Hernandez, writer of that article, I think it's the most likely of the three reasons.

I was very critical of Rock, Paper, Shotgun back in my criticism #1ReasonWhy and, while I still dislike the blog post I linked to back then, I have a lot of praise for them this time around. Their opinions about the rape in Far Cry 3 gel with my own (which I'll write about towards the end of this blog post) and I think they hit the nail on the head:

"And then there’s the rapey bit. (Oddly, this paragraph is also a spoiler.) General rule: unless your game is about rape, or willing to truly deal with the subject, maybe steer clear of rape. It’s way too big of a subject to nonchalantly include, and it’s pretty abhorrent to use it as a mere plot beat. The rape in FC3 is threatened and implied, rather than witnessed, but it’s so thrown away, used to say, “This man who did it is terrible!” rather than to explore the true horror for the repeatedly abused victim. The perpetrator happens to be one of the best written and acted characters in game – especially acted. It’s a fantastic performance. And his being a monster makes that all the more affecting. But in the end, the reveal of Jason’s victimisation is flippant, and the ludicrous mystic-trippy scene in which you QTE kill Buck is just plain offensive in the context. I think it was intended to further the brutal horror faced by these rich suburban kids, but in the end it’s an awkward, potentially upsetting misfire."

This is a very welcome criticism of the rape in Far Cry 3, since I think it hits upon the important reasons why it offends and why it doesn't fit into a video game.

That'd be enough on its own but then we get to the interview that Rock, Paper, Shotgun did with the writer, Jeffrey Yohalem. Yohalem already gave an interview to Eurogamer before the one with RPS and already, his ideas seem incredibly "out-there". From what I understand, reading articles about Far Cry 3 that weren't about the rape, the story faced a lot of criticism because the plot surrounded a typical American white guy who helps save the natives of the island that he's on and becomes their chosen warrior. In popular culture, this trope is jokingly called "Mighty Whitey", in that a lone white man ends up saving the day for his black companions. You've probably already seen a bit of criticism on the three sites linked to above.

Anyway, this has to be explained because I'd like to write a little bit about one of the Far Cry 3 endings (NSFW). It doesn't have anything to do with rape but I don't want to write another blog post about Far Cry 3, so this seems like a good place to put it. According to Eurogamer:

In one ending, Jason chooses to live out his days with Citra, where he - being the ultimate badass that he is - will continue to protect the island. Only Citra has other plans and decides to murder the oblivious bloke instead.

As it turns out, Citra never really needed to be saved and the whole thing is a commentary on the princess rescuing complex that permeates the medium. "Jason conjures up this whole idea that Citra needs saving and he's gonna save her, when in reality it was all a ritual she created to find a sperm donor, and she kills him," Yohalem explained.

“Sex, violence, and the player is killed. Here are the things that satisfy our animal side as men, but they're subverted because it's a female doing it." Yohalem likened the ending to Princess Peach stabbing Mario. “Now that I'm thinking about it, that final scene should have been Citra castrating Jason. Seriously, that's the point! It is like, 'You win, motherf*****!' It's totally like, 'F*** you, you misogynist idiot!'”

I don't quite know where to begin with an argument so ... insane.

First of all, it sums up male disposability and the disregard for fathers in one fell swoop. A sentence at the beginning of the Eurogamer interview says, "Far Cry 3's questionable writing has often been criticised after writer Jeffrey Yohalem stated the game would be about 'subverting video game clichés', when in fact the game seemed to be filled with regular old video game clichés". To me, that sentence describes Yohalem's skewed view on that ending. Video games are already a medium where violence by women against men is a lot more accepted than the reverse, so what cliché is being subverted by having Citra stab Jason at the end of the game?

Presumably, Yohalem is referring to his "Princess Peach stabbing Mario" line. We never see the damsel-in-distress stabbing the hero. However, we've seen plenty of games with "sexy, violent" women so, again, what's being subverted here? If I understand this correctly, Yohalem seems to be under the impression that the player allowing Jason to have sex with Citra acts as his reward; it "satisfies our animal side as men". Not only does that show a depressingly low opinion of men but I'd like to point out that for Jason to reach this point, he has to kill his friends in order to do it. To me, that sounds (A) like a typical video game binary choice of ending, like Star Wars games tend to have if you want to turn to the dark side or not and (B) not much of a reward at all. The bad ending. It appeals to men though, right? Sex with a hot girl!

No. Reverse the sexes. While a female FPS protagonist being stabbed in the middle of sex would be an incredible subversion, it'd also be seen as incredibly insulting. As in "misogynistic beyond belief". If some insulting stereotypes about women could be added into the mix, like having the female protagonist talk about shoe shopping, that'd be perfect. The fact is that I can't imagine that scenario being faced with anything other than a backlash. Yet this scenario, the one actually in Far Cry 3, is described by Yohalem as "f*** you, you misogynist idiot"? This ending is about as misandrist as it can get, without resorting to Yohalem's even-more-ridiculous castration ending, and he thinks that this is some great act of revenge against a misogynist?

Yohalem's arguments are incredibly offensive and downright bizarre. Thankfully, Rock, Paper, Shotgun's interview with Jeffrey Yohalem is a delight to read. They pull absolutely no punches and, to me, it reads like Yohalem struggles to justify his supposed "meta-commentary" on gaming. He seems to have an inflated opinion of his writing. However, I'm just here to write about the rape, and here's what RPS and Yohalem had to say about it:

Jeffrey Yohalem: I thought we went so extreme in such a huge number of ways, that we had been totally exaggerated. I’ve played all of these games, so the shocking thing for me is that people would think this is serious. At the same time, all of the articles coming out didn’t come out for other games. So there must be some form of exaggeration, I must have succeeded at exaggerating. For example, the rape by Buck being glossed over, where he rapes Keith, or implied rape, that’s so exaggerated because it’s taking the exploitation of female characters in videogames and saying, well what if it’s a man, how do you feel then?

In most games that exploitations is glossed over, so in this case it’s glossed over. So by swapping out the Keith character for a female character, and then not having this deep emotional scene acknowledging the sadness from how these guy feels from that, it makes you really uncomfortable.

I'm going to pause here for a moment because, while I normally refrain from insulting the people making the argument, I think this quote shows just how clueless Jeffrey Yohalem really is. This idea that Keith being raped was something exaggerated, for example. It stems from the idea that men haven't been exploited and couldn't be exploited. In Yohalem's view, with all his ideas about stabbing the white male hero who fantasises about sex with a hot girl, seems to think that exploitation is something to be used against male gamers. In this case, the rape of a male character isn't any serious commentary on men being raped in real life or an acknowledgement that "yes, men are raped too and yes, it's just as horrible". It's just something to make male gamers feel uncomfortable because it doesn't fit into the "male power fantasy" that Yohalem wants to subvert so desperately.

I can't express just how ignorant this is because, obviously, men are raped in real life. The game's content is one thing, and I'll come to my thoughts on that soon enough, but what Yohalem explains in the interview here is his desire to take a serious issue (that he doesn't seem to think is serious) and use it to make his gaming audience feel uncomfortable ... just because. Because women have been exploited in games too. As if Yohalem wants to say, "so there, Far Cry 3 player, how do you feel now!?" I can't explain just how much this cheapens an important and widespread real-life issue and how anyone could be so stupid as to want to put it in the game for that reason.

Anyway, Yohalem finishes answering that particular question -- he mentions his wish to castrate Jason Brody again -- and luckily, RPS share my feelings on the subject for the next question:

RPS: You say the rape scene is critiquing how mawkishly rape scenes can be shown, but I’m not sure I understand your point when you say you changed it to a man to say something. When I played it, I saw that it was a situation where a man had been repeatedly raped. I didn’t think, “Ah, but it’s a man rather than a woman.” I didn’t find anything to make me compare it to rape scenes featuring women. What I fear with that scene is that it ends up becoming a sarcastic remark, at the expense of a really traumatising subject.

Jeffrey Yohalem: Well, I don’t think it downplays a traumatising subject. Keith is not okay after that. He says very little for the rest of the game. You know, in Assassin’s Creed II your mother is raped, and she doesn’t talk for the rest of the game. So Keith is very similar. What he says after the rape is he tells you your brother is dead. Then he doesn’t talk. I don’t think that it downplays or is sarcastic. None of this is intended to be ironic – I don’t like games, or jokes, that hold people at arm’s length – that the only emotion that people can experience is the irony or the sarcasm of it, which is something I think was going on a lot in entertainment three or four years ago, maybe even two years ago, where it was all about, “Look how funny we are – we’re making fun of this.” That’s not the point at all.

It’s not intended to be glossed over in that sense. The intent was to not allow there to be some kind of cathartic sad scene where people get to deal with the fact that Keith’s been through this. I don’t give you the satisfaction, and it is a satisfaction, when you watch a character go through experiencing the torture of what they’ve just been through, it satisfies the player’s expectations of that thing being addressed. So that scene is taken away from the player. So you have this disturbing exchange of power, something Jason and Buck experience, where Buck forces Jason to call him sir, demeans Jason and his manhood, this diminishing of who Jason is – of who the player is, because the player is in Jason’s body.

And then the player experiences what Buck did to Keith. I really do think that it being a man matters. Throughout the game you have Daisy and Lisa, and Citra, and you expect certain things, the mistreatment of those characters, because of how past videogames have treated them. I don’t think you’re expected Keith to be treated as an object in that way. The fact that Buck did that is shocking, because it hasn’t really happened in videogames before. And at the same time, videogames have a primarily male audience, so it’s very easy to have this gratuitous portrayal of women in other games be glossed over and allowed by its audience, because it’s not them. To really hit someone where they live, I think destabilises the trope. I’m hoping in the future when you encounter the objectification of women in games, you go, “Maybe this is uncomfortable, the way I felt uncomfortable in Far Cry 3.”

The first thing I'd like to point out about Yohalem's answer to this question is that he seems to contradict himself. He begins by saying "none of [Keith's rape] is intended to be ironic" but finishes by saying that the fact that he's male is meant to be ironic. This is meant to make you feel bad for the female characters who've been exploited in video games, without much concern for Keith himself. He's just a device Yohalem is using to make you think about female exploitation. That's the biggest problem here; Yohalem has trivialised an incredibly serious issue here -- rape -- in order to raise awareness about a much less serious one -- female exploitation in popular culture. I'd also like to ask any of my readers this question; has any female character ever been exploited as horribly, offensively and pointlessly as Keith in Far Cry 3? Please let me know. It'll also be interesting to find out if they were knowingly exploited, as Yohalem did to Keith, or if they were exploited purely out of ignorance, such as bad writing or character design.

It's also worth mentioning that I'm confident female gamers would feel just as uncomfortable as male gamers about Keith's rape and I'm sure there are plenty of male gamers who've felt uncomfortable about female exploitation in games before. So has Yohalem pointlessly trivialised rape for an issue that didn't really exist?

I have so much respect for Rock, Paper, Shotgun for echoing the sentiments of the gaming community in their question; seeing Keith's rape not as "rape, with a woman switched out for a man" but as "a man being raped". To me, that emphasises just how out-of-touch Yohalem is and I hope this interview comes back to bite him.

I've written all about the reactions (or lack of reactions) to rape in video games in this post but I haven't given my opinion on the rape in Far Cry 3 itself. It's worth mentioning that I wrote all of this before reading Jeffrey Yohalem's twisted interview. Well, I'm in two minds about it; on the one hand, I feel like Keith's reaction to it was reasonably well-done. It isn't played for laughs and there's one moment, just before Keith reunites with his friends, when he turns to Jason and says, "don't tell them about this". That actually made me feel uncomfortable, which I think was the intended effect; it's worth bearing in mind that Far Cry is a very mature game. It's often meant to shock and disturb. So I feel like Keith's desire to keep his rape a secret, even in the middle of a situation where he and his friends had all had to suffer the ordeal of captivity, brutal treatment and their friends and family members being killed, to be a depressingly realistic portrayal. Even in that horrible scenario, he still felt too ashamed to speak up.

On the other hand, Far Cry 3 also does a great job of showing exactly why rape shouldn't be featured in a video game. Very shortly after reuniting with Keith, the player is put back in control of Jason so he can have a knife fight with Buck. To me, this is where the whole issue falls apart. In spite of the fact that I wrote a moment ago that Far Cry is often meant to shock and disturb, there are times when it just plumbs the depths of bad taste and offensiveness. I would probably object to this happening later in the game anyway but the player is still reeling from discovering how traumatised Keith is when they're put back in control of Jason and told to have a knife fight with the bad guy.

Not only does it happen too soon but remember when there were concerns that Lara's run-in with her assailant would be a quick-time event? As in "press X to avoid rape"? Technically, that's exactly what happens in Far Cry 3. Without saying it, it's implied that failing the knife fight quick-time event would kill Jason and leave Buck to rape Keith as much as he liked. This is exactly what people were worried about with the Tomb Raider example, so where's the outcry for Far Cry 3? Also, if there's a sequence in a game that trivialises rape more than the knife fight itself, I'd be interested in seeing it; it's as if the game is saying to the player, "play this fun quick-time knife fight! Earn an achievement by killing the rapist!" And yes, you really do earn an achievement. The fact that you had to do a typical video game fetch quest in order to save a rape victim also leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Plus, as mentioned above, Keith's rape serves as our introduction to the character, is glossed over ridiculously quickly and isn't delved into for the rest of the game.

What confuses me about this whole situation is that Far Cry 3 is a prime example of all the good and bad that can come with featuring rape in a video game. It treats it seriously in some places but trivialises it in others. If the gaming community actually wants to debate the benefits vs. the downsides of portraying rape in video games, you won't find a better case for both than Far Cry 3. So we spent most of June and July debating the pros and cons of rape in a game that doesn't have any while we've completely ignored one of the ones that does. For now, let's give video game journalists and bloggers the benefit of the doubt and say that they would've reacted just as strongly if the rape scenes in Far Cry 3, F.E.A.R 2 and Mafia 2 had been known about before they were released. It's a lot to ask -- Jeffrey Yohalem has practically outright said his writing was intended to be misandric and there hasn't been an outcry yet (please, gaming journalists, can you make a bigger example of him?) -- but all the sites I've seen about Far Cry 3 have treated the male-on-male rape with the seriousness it deserves. To that end, you could even say that there isn't a double standard ... but annoyingly, Yohalem's offensive answers keep me from writing that.

Besides, who knows? Maybe a game featuring a male rape victim being taken seriously will make gamers consider the issue a little more themselves. Maybe Yohalem's incredibly offensive intentions will have the opposite reaction. I can only hope.

As always, feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail at themalesofgames@gmail.com.

#1ReasonWhy

This has been an insane few days.

For anyone who isn't a member of Twitter, a few days ago, a man by the name of Luke Crane posted this tweet:

It's a simple enough question, with a simple enough answer (that we'll come to later on). I doubt Luke Crane, or anyone else, could've predicted the response he received to this single tweet. Many, many, many people waded in with their answers, each stating one reason why there were so few lady game creators (hence the hashtag "#1ReasonWhy"). These came from all manner of people from inside and outside the gaming industry.

Obviously, I didn't read them all. I don't even have a Twitter account, since I prefer to read long messages rather than short ones. Thankfully, however, there were plenty of articles on the subject, all showing some of the examples of #1ReasonWhy tweets. The hashtag even earned its own site. All-in-all, there's been an astounding outpouring of support for and from women in the gaming industry.

With it, there's also been an astounding outpouring of hypocrisy, biased arguments and double standards, to the point that its difficult to even know where to begin. Before we go into the tweets themselves, take a look at a couple of the articles that I've been perusing.

This article from Gamespot was where the #1ReasonWhy hashtag first caught my attention. This article, by Carolyn Petit and Laura Parker, does a decent job of explaining what the hashtag is but doesn't really go beyond the "we have to do something!" attitude. They don't reach any conclusions on what to do but overall, the attitude expressed is a step up from the sentiments expressed elsewhere.

Case in point: this article by Nathan Grayson on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. To sum up, it's one big call-to-arms "for men to stop acting like self-centered slobs. It’s time for men to stop turning every step of progress into an agonizing uphill battle". It has a rather disturbing, "you're either with us or against us" attitude, so men who disagree or just don't wish to help are targets of Grayson's ire. In spite of the writer's claim that he is "not trying to propose some damsel-in-distress “let’s handsomely save the day” argument," this may be one of the biggest examples of "White Knighting" I've ever seen online. It's a condescending pep talk that assumes the worst of men and, coincidentally, is a real-life example of what I mentioned in my previous two blog posts; it suggests that men are only valuable based on how useful they are to women. If they're not being useful to women, they're "self-centered slobs".

I haven't got into the actual reasons given by the #1ReasonWhy hashtags yet. Something I should make clear is that there isn't enough time in the world to go through every single tweet, obviously, and there may be some good, legitimate reasons that I haven't seen. However, just browsing through the reports on #1ReasonWhy, I didn't find a single tweet I cared for and most of them highlight exactly why people like myself take issue with the focus on women in gaming. Let's jump right in. What's a reason why there are so few lady game creators?

There's going to be more from Rhianna Pratchett before this blog is over with but this is as good a place as any to start. Creating appropriately-dressed female characters is a rarity, rather than the norm, according to Pratchett. This is a reason why there are so few lady game creators.

The first thought that sprung to mind when reading this was, "isn't that an incentive for women to join the video game industry rather than avoid it?" Presumably, if there's something women want to change in the gaming industry, staying out of it and complaining isn't as effective a method as getting involved and being able to influence things. So it doesn't make sense for the lack of appropriately-dressed female characters to be a reason why women aren't creating video games and, if Pratchett thinks it is, she paints women as a very illogical bunch.

The second thought I had about this was one that I had been thinking about before I ever saw the tweet. When having various debates about gender issues elsewhere online, it felt like the critics of the portrayal of women in video games would cherry pick their examples and use them of evidence of a wider issue. For example, using Ivy from Soul Calibur as an example of sexualised women while ignoring the same series' Talim, Cassandra, Hilde, Amy and Seung Mina. They'll acknowledge the notoriously misogynistic Metroid: Other M without necessarily singing the praises of Samus herself as an example of positive female portrayals in games. And no matter what great strides the industry makes in "appropriately-dressed female characters" -- Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2. Elena Fisher from Uncharted. Jennifer Mui from Mercenaries. Jade from Beyond Good & Evil. Amaterasu from Okami. Lara Croft's latest redesign. Various RPGs from both Japan and the West -- the industry will always, always, always still be stereotyped as one filled with scantily-clad female designs by the same women who should be pleased by the progress.

Next:

You might know Ashly Burch from the "Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'" video series on Gametrailers (and maybe elsewhere; I don't follow them very closely). And after reading this tweet, you'd be forgiven for thinking that she's new to the internet.

Look, I'm not saying that threats of rape and violence isn't a good reason for women to avoid the video game industry. It's a good reason for anyone to avoid the industry of whoever is making those threats. However, like I said, this is the internet and these comments come with the territory. I've been on messageboards where I've suffered both threats before. Well, I can't quite recall a rape threat but I can recall other threats of sexual violence very vividly.

I dealt with this by using the ignore functions of certain forums and avoiding others entirely. It works well. Also, yes, I developed a thicker skin. Which is an argument I hate having to use because I've been given that "helpful" piece of advice before and it's an incredibly irritating thing to read. It implies there's something wrong with you rather than the obnoxious moron throwing you insults. However, keep something in mind here; Ashly Burch is a public figure, thanks to her videos. All public figures receive mindless insults. Did she think she'd escape the insults simply because she's female? More worryingly, does she think that's a good reason that she should?

If anyone wants to crack down on the trolls that make these comments, be my guest. However, you'd have to be a pretty despicable person to only do it for half the gaming population while leaving the other half to suffer the insults and threats.

Wow, talk about stereotypical.

While I'd certainly agree there's not enough investment in AAA games about something other than war -- I'm not sure about the other three. I can think of one AAA western, a few contenders for AAA racing games and absolutely no sports ones, let alone football -- there's some unfortunate implications here. There's a disturbing undertone that paints the majority of the "male-dominated" video game industry as being incredibly stereotypically male. For that matter, it paints the women already in the video game industry with the exact same brush.

I assume Samit Sarkar is talking about this particular press release:

What a Character 2 (400 Microsoft Points) – Kasumi hops into a black bunny swimsuit, Mila masquerades as Bass while Zack transforms into an alien, and Christie turns heads in black leather bondage gear.

First of all, let's get the obvious out the way; we've now completely ignored common, if stereotypical, criticisms of the gaming industry and devolved completely into speculation. Unless we're meant to assume that Sarkar knows the sexual interests of every woman interested in joining the gaming industry, I think he's clutching at straws here. Secondly, it's just like the Rhianna Pratchett example above; joining the industry would give women a better chance to have their voices heard. It's an incentive to join and the costume is hardly going to disappear simply because they choose to remain gamers rather than developers/journalists, is it?

Thirdly, and this is an important point, it's an example of the hypocrisy and lack of research done to support the #1ReasonWhy campaign (if it can be called that). Take a look at this Lee Chaolan costume from Tekken 6:

That's Lee in his "bondage gear" costume. I was searching for the Tekken Tag Tournament 2 version -- I didn't even know it appeared in Tekken 6 -- but the fact that it was featured in two games in the series supports my argument more; two Tekken games where Lee sports a costume that emphasies his abs and yet the one worn by a woman in a game known for its sexualised female characters is the eyebrow-raiser? Sex-negative feminists like to pounce on games that sexualise female characters but the poor research and hypocrisy shown by Sarkar above shows that they really couldn't care less about the men. "Oh, there are other examples of bondage gear in games? Oh, who cares, it's on a man."

This was actually one of the first tweets about the #1ReasonWhy issue I saw and, almost immediately, it made me realise why I disliked the campaign.

In spite of the fact that I criticise a lot of supposedly-feminist arguments here on this blog, I have a lot of love and respect for women. A lot. I think if women want to achieve their goals, they have the intelligence and talent to do so. That goes for the gaming industry as well. Although feminist arguments have always been subjects of my criticism, women themselves never have been. I'll come back to this in a second.

Going back to Rhianna's tweet; "But what if the player is female?" Let's assume she's talking about a stereotypically masculine game, such as Gears Of War. A squad of burly men who curse in every sentence, walking around in heavy sci-fi armour and blasting aliens. It seems like a game that would warrant Rhianna's question. "But what if the player is female?"

My response would have to be, "she'll enjoy the game as much as a male player". If I was a female gamer, I know that I would be tremendously insulted by Pratchett's statement that there's something different about me that needs to be catered to by developers. Simply because of my sex, a new question needs to be asked because there's an assumption that I should be treated differently. That unless something is added or changed to suit me, I'll see a gameplay video and say, "oh, I can't play this. I'm female!"

So although feminist arguments have always been subjects of my criticism, women themselves never have been and I would never hold such a low opinion of women to think that they can't adapt to play any game. This is what struck me about the #1ReasonWhy campaign as a whole; it treats women like children who need to be catered to rather than rational and mature adults who can adapt. These tweets are not asking for equality, for women to be treated the same as the men. These are asking for special treatment. They demand the industry adapt to them rather than they adapt to it.

In the sidebar, I link to a men's rights activist on Youtube called GirlWritesWhat. She once said something that I think describes this situation quite well: "Anti-feminism is the radical notion that women are adults". There is nothing in these tweets to make women seem strong or independent. If these tweets were to be listened to, the women demanding change would, effectively, be children; needing other people to give them change rather than changing things for themselves. And I completely despair at this whole fiasco because of it.

There are honestly so many eyebrow-raising tweets for #1ReasonWhy that I've had to decide against using some of them that I've had saved specifically for this blog. That's irritating but it's probably for the best; this blog post would never end if I took the time out to respond to every single one. There are a few other things I wanted to mention though.

First of all, it's worth reading this interview with Christine Phelan of Valve. I'll quote the relevant portion of the interview:

"It certainly seems as though Phelan’s experiences in the industry have been overwhelmingly positive thus far. And she’s not afraid to express her disgruntlement when FMV – referring to recent allegations that the video game industry is too male-dominated and even sexist – asks whether she has faced any particular challenges or obstacles in her career due to her gender.

“Aaaah, I really hate this question!” she replies. “I think asking it only serves to highlight the fact that I am a minority in my industry, and there are so many more interesting questions that could be asked instead!

“There are a ton of dudes in the games industry, yes – it’s a bit of a pickle jar.  I have never, however, been treated as anything but a team member and an equal by my coworkers and it’s a major disservice to them that folks automatically assume they will treat me differently because I am a woman.  At the end of the day I am the work I produce, not a pair of boobs.  It’s individuals who may or may not be sexist, and those are folks who reside in the broader ‘asshole’ category that applies to all things, not just games.

“I think the only challenge, if it can be called one, is that people assume I am challenged because I am a woman in this industry.  I am a game developer first, and my gender has nothing to do with it.”

I know for a fact people will say "well, it's Valve. They know how to treat people!" which I think does more to undermine Phelan's point than highlight it. I can't help thinking that painting all developers as sexist assholes except "internet-approved" ones is something to be avoided. As Phelan says, it's a disservice to her coworkers. She raises some other good points. "It's individuals who may or may not be sexist, and those are folks who reside in the broader ‘asshole’ category that applies to all things, not just games". For example, is Ashly Burch under the impression that it's only gamers who make impolite comments? Likewise, a bunch of tweets I didn't post mentioned being groped at conventions. Holding up the gaming industry as an example of this rather than specific "assholes" in every industry doesn't do anybody any favours. In fact, it's exactly what Jack Thompson used to do.

When I read the scapegoat reasons people use -- and that's really all the #1ReasonWhy campaign is -- I can't help but shake my head. Not because of the branding of an industry I love as "sexist" but the fact that it comes across as incredibly unprofessional. This might seem like an odd tangent but I'm a fan of The Apprentice (the UK version). A few seasons ago, one of the final five candidates was criticised by an interviewer for his reliance on "blame culture"; he blamed his parents for their lack of support and he blamed his former business partner for their business going under. He was unable to take responsibility for himself. That's what my mind kept going back to when reading some of these tweets; "blame culture" would be a perfect term to describe it.

Remember back at the start of this blog? Luke Crane asked "where are there so few lady creators?" I said this was a simple enough question with a simple enough answer. The simple enough answer is this: "there aren't enough women who are interested in games development enough to get involved in it". That's it. The #1ReasonWhy tweets are looking for reasons why women aren't interested in games development but in spite of the silly stereotyping of an entire sex based on things like outfits, hurtful comments and "but what if the player is female?" but while these people are all looking for scapegoats, the fact is that it's simply an industry that appeals to more men than women. Let's say I enrolled in a games development course and saw a greater number of men than women. Would my logical mind say, "more men than women. Must be sexism," or, "more men than women. Women mustn't have been as interested"?

Luckily, someone brought this point up on Twitter:

This is a Twitter user called Jason Clem talking to Kevin VanOrd, senior editor at Gamespot. First of all, I was glad to finally find out why Gamespot posts so many articles about women in games on their website, but I was a lot more pleased to find that someone called a #1ReasonWhy-er out on the illogical argument. What we see here is the typical treatment of women as children from the feminist, VanOrd, when the sensible, rational critic actually suggests a way to help them out. The whole argument can be summed up like this:

Clem: "Well, maybe more women should get involved and take more prominent roles in the industry then."
VanOrd: "No, no, they can't! The industry needs to be fixed first, those poor dears just can't handle it as it is!"

Looks very different when it's written down like that, doesn't it? Yet that's the message being sent out every time women in the video game industry play the victim card.

Clem himself gave me permission to post this conversation and, according to him, VanOrd blocked him after this short exchange. When looking through the #1ReasonWhy topic I spoke to him in, however, I came across this fantastic post by a fellow member of the AVoiceForMen forums (username "Crow"). Frankly, it blows my "simple enough explanation" out of the water:

"One of the largest issues I tend to come across in these sorts of communal outbursts is the complete and utter disregard for any notion of progression or any understanding of how time works. Yes, you read that right, feminists just don't seem to understand the notion of "time".

Yes, most game development is male-dominated. Why? It's pretty simple: Ten years ago, the individuals who developed games were almost 100% male because they grew up in the '70's and early 80's. They were raised and found their hobby in gaming at a time when it was very, very male dominated. These individuals grew up loving games, and then they put in their time to work their way up the ladder or start their own studios. Simply put: how would we expect anything else?

Now these rants and raves about women in gaming is evidence of the progress of the industry. They show that more women are involved now than ten or twenty years ago. This is progress, and it is easily evidence of greater diversity in gaming.

So what will happen now? give it another ten years and the legions of women who entered gaming as an industry in the last ten years (and even more contemporaneously) will put in their time and get promoted and have a shot at making their own games.

This is the very sort of progress that the feminists are telling everyone doesn't exist.

Time + investment = change. It's simple. It's why media outlets aren't inundated with stories of homophobia, because that movement achieved it's goals wonderfully are is now in a post-achievement era where their injustices are acute and made up of smaller battles (of course not entirely finished, but comparatively). The Gay Rights movement won their battles a decade ago, and we're beginning to see the evidence and payoff for that community now.

A lot of this "gaming is sexist!" crud smells greatly of entitlement. The idea I get from wading through the articles, comments and Twitter hashtags is that women want the power, and they want it now. There's no concern that it takes time and investment, they're sick of being seen as what they are: overwhelmingly a younger, less-industry-advanced group who do not yet have power and control because very, very few women went into gaming as a career from the generation that sits in charge now. Give it ten years and it'll be very different.

Hell, it somewhat upsets me because there's no understanding that gaming has only been a very profitable industry for a short while. The individuals and companies who took the risks and often the awful results were men, and they paved the roads so that the entitled, whiny women of today can feel harassed and discriminated against in an industry that is profitable and popular."

So there we are. If there's a more sensible explanation for the lack of female creators in the video game industry, I've never read it. Crow's post highlights the logical reasons why there are so few female creators and does it without resorting to scapegoats.

There's more to be said on the bombardment of biased comments from the #1ReasonWhy campaign. A lot more. I'll leave it here for now though but before I do, I'd like to give some advice to any women who are in -- or thinking about getting into -- the video game industry.

First of all, just do it. There is no reason for you not to. #NoReasonWhy

Don't wait for things to change to suit you. There's a female comedian here in the UK called Sarah Millican who said something I think is appropriate here: "Don't look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Stomp along there and turn the fucker on yourself". You're a grown woman, not a child. You can change things.

There's a Margaret Thatcher quote I've been trying to work in here somewhere but could never find the right place for it. She famously said, "I owe nothing to women's lib". While searching for a good source for this quote, I actually found a better one:

American attorney, political commentator and Thatcher fan Carol Platt Liebau agrees. "Unfortunately feminism has become associated with a specific set of left-wing policy views centering around government-imposed solutions to perceived gender-based inequities, rather than simply with true female liberation – the opportunity, regardless of gender, to make one’s own choices and use one’s abilities to the fullest."

Whatever your stance on Thatcher's political career, I think both of these statements are appropriate. Thatcher's "I owe nothing to women's lib" made me think about Christine Phelan's view above. She, of course, didn't say that. The closest she said was, "at the end of the day I am the work I produce, not a pair of boobs," and, "I am a game developer first, and my gender has nothing to do with it." For all the begging for change and blaming of the current state of the game industry by the #1ReasonWhy-ers, there are women who have been successful in the industry. Not because things were changed to suit them but because of their own skills. Getting where they were on their own merits is something to be proud of and, believe it or not, exactly what the men in the industry have to do too. If I were female, I know I'd prefer that to the idea that I only got where I was because I had help.

So that's Thatcher's quote in a nutshell. Liebau's practically sums up the entire #1ReasonWhy campaign in a nutshell (but the critics in this case expect the gaming industry, rather than the government, to be the one with the solutions). "The opportunity, regardless of gender, to make one’s own choices and use one’s abilities to the fullest," is what everyone should bear in mind here. Women, you have that opportunity. You can use your abilities to their fullest in the video game industry and by insisting that you can't, that something must change, you're effectively creating your own glass ceiling.

Please feel free to leave a comment or write to me at themalesofgames@gmail.com.

A subject that nobody likes to talk about ... (NSFW)

I've decided that today's topic won't be about male expendability after all but about something else: the subject of rape in video games.

Rhianna Pratchett's interview on Gamespot got me thinking about something. Specifically, she said this:

"The world doesn't need any more Japanese rape-simulators."

And she's right. I completely agree, there's no argument there.

I would like to do a test though; for anyone reading this blog, without looking them up with a search engine or sneaking away to come up with an answer, can you name a game about rape or featuring a heavy amount of rape content that isn't RapeLay?

I may be wrong but it seems like the language Pratchett uses in the sentence above is ambiguous; one is too many rape-simulators, of course, but it could also sound like Pratchett believes the problem is more mainstream or prevalent than it is.

Before I wrote this blog, I did a search for articles on RapeLay and was both relieved and thankful to see that, while there were many places that pointed out it was misogynistic, there weren't any that stated it was representative of gaming as a whole. I was concerned about that cropping up but I think people were intelligent enough to realise that a niche game released in one country for one system doesn't represent gaming as a medium. However, there were plenty of articles that parroted the old Jack Thompson rhetoric; "it influences gamers to [insert crime here]". Completely untrue, of course. I mean, I'd question the kind of person buying RapeLay in the first place, but I wouldn't worry about your average gamer if they decided to play it to see the controversy for themselves.

Let's get this out of the way first; there are a ton of video games that feature rape. I've started browsing The Visual Novel Database over the past month or so and they have a whole bunch of tags about rape. "Attempted Rape", "Avoidable Rape", "Comedy Rape" ... the list goes on, twenty-two of them in all. Interestingly, there are no tags that are explicitly about men being rape victims in their database. There are tags such as "Rape By Female", although the victim of that could be either sex, and "Rape Victim Heroine" and "Rape Victim Protagonist" are two separate tags, although, again, the victim of the latter could be male or female.

One of the tags is interesting; "High Amounts Of Rape", which obviously returns the list of games with a high amount of rape content. I didn't count up all the games because there were four whole pages devoted solely to that one tag. So even though there's no shortage of games featuring rape, why is RapeLay the most well-known? Why was this the one seized upon by Something Awful and Equality Now? I imagine it's because the game revolves around controlling a character while he rapes someone else but, looking at the list of games that features "High Amounts Of Rape" on the VNDB, I find that hard to believe that's a good enough reason. Although I guess visual novels aren't held to the same standards as other games.

That's neither here nor there though. I'd actually like to write about one of the games on the VNDB without the "High Amounts Of Rape" tag but one that really, really deserves it. It does have "Rape By Female" and "Unavoidable Rape" but I have to imagine how much rape has to be in a game before "High Amounts Of Rape" is added to the tags. Unlike some of my previous blogs, however, this isn't going to be an attack on feminist arguments and pointing out certain hypocrisies by using male examples, such as in "The Objectification Double Standard". I actually don't think there has been enough examination of rape in niche video game genres to form debates on the subject. For now, we're all in the same boat.

I like to play as many different game genres as I can, including dating sims. I've played LovePlus, Imodoki no Vampire: Bloody Bride, one of the Tokimeki Memorial games ... they're RPGs at heart. I'm not as big a fan of visual novels and the few of those I've played have been freely available online, made by visual novel enthusiasts. Last month, however, I was interested in playing another dating sim and came across this game online:

It's called Discipline: The Record Of A Crusade. And it's completely and utterly awful. For the love of God, don't play it.

First of all, it's not a dating sim. It's a visual novel. I was disappointed about that but I stuck with it. I'd never played an "eroge" game before Discipline but I figured I knew what to expect. I didn't. To start with, the sexual scenes were more graphic than I imagined they'd be. I know that sounds prudish but trust me, I was expecting something explicit and it exceeded my expectations. There are five endings -- one good and four bad -- but I only had the stomach for the good ending and one bad one before uninstalling the game. So this isn't as comprehensive as it could be. Sorry about that.

There are three counts of a woman being forced or coerced into having sex, at least from what I played. There are so many counts of a man being forced or coerced into having sex or performing sexual acts that I couldn't even make an educated guess. Off the top of my head, I can think of eleven different women who force the protagonist into sex or sexual acts but they each have sex with him multiple times, so it's difficult to put a number to. The protagonist isn't the only one; the game is set in a school and two male members of the faculty suffer the same fate.

In a way, it's pointless to get annoyed about the amount of rape in Discipline. The game clearly isn't for me -- because, like it or not, games like Discipline and RapeLay do appeal to people -- so being shocked by the content is like being shocked that the next Final Fantasy is going to feature feminine-looking males. Having said that, even if the game featured no rape and the sex was all consensual, I still wouldn't enjoy it; the sex would still be graphic and placing the protagonist into scenarios where he had sex came across as very forced. Even if there wasn't any sex, the game would still irritate me; there are six male characters in the game and all but one of them is completely useless. Although that one character who isn't completely useless also happens to be a colossal pervert, so he's hardly a role model either.

Not to mention the amount of non-sexual abuse the male characters suffer. There's a running gag about the Assistant Dean of the school suffering at the hands of the villainess (he's run over, hit by an explosion, shot) before finally being raped himself. The protagonist, too, is involved in a running joke where one of the few nice female characters has a habit of punching him whenever he accidentally finds her in compromising situations, although it comes to the point where she attacks him just to wake him up. The climax of the story features the protagonist's baseball team going up against the villainess' team and -- surprise, surprise -- the three male members of the team are the most pitiful batsmen on the team. So to compensate, one of the female members outright states that they should get hit by the ball thrown by the pitcher, so it counts as a hit (sorry to any Americans reading; living in the UK, I'm not familiar with baseball terminology). The male members of the team rightly express outrage about this, given that the opponent's team has a professional pitcher and they could actually be killed by the balls hitting them ... and then they go out and do it anyway. When asked why the less-useful female members of the team don't do the same, the response is simple: "we're girls! You can't expect us do that!"

Speaking of physical abuse, there are many characters in the game who I wanted to see the protagonist beat up, all of them female. However, the one character who he does beat up and we're meant side with him over? The poor transperson who has been brainwashed by the villainess into falling in love with him. The game's narration tells us "he's a guy!" in a horrified tone but it's clear to anyone civilised reading the story that the protagonist's anger is directed at the wrong person.

All-in-all, it's a horrible game to play. I know it probably seems odd that I'm going into such detail over a game that very few people will have heard of. It's true. I'm not really trying to get across a point in the same way I have for previous blogs. However, looking up RapeLay on Wikipedia, there are a few things I do want to address:

"Articles in defence have also been written, many noting that rape is a lesser crime compared to murder, yet there are thousands of legal video games in which the goal is to kill enemies."

I'll be honest; if I had never played Discipline, I might've sided with the above statement with regards to RapeLay. I can definitely see where they're coming from with regards to murder being a worse crime than rape ... but just imagine an alternate universe where 99% of all games feature rape as the subject matter rather than death. It's hardly more appealing, is it?

I have to say, I could find myself supporting that train of thought. As well as the point about murder being a worse crime, it's worth bearing in mind that there have always been games about sex. There's a site called Lemon Amiga, which is a wonderful place if you were once an Amiga-owner, like myself. It features a database of all games to ever be released on the Amiga and even there, we can find adult-oriented games.

These are all real games. Yes, really.

Like I said earlier, I'm open to different genres and that includes the adult genre. I knew Discipline was an eroge game before I played it but I still played it. Even though it was too extreme for me and I can't recommend it to anyone else, I know there are people out there who would enjoy its content. Same goes for RapeLay. So I'm torn; I detested Discipline, I really did ... but even with regards to adult-oriented games, censoring them doesn't seem the way to go. They deserve varied content that appeals to everyone. Or we'd get a bunch of eroge games that are all the same. Like FPS games and Call Of Duty!

There is one point I want to make about RapeLay and for that, we have to go back to Wikipedia:

"Equality Now followed up on the game, urging activists to write to Illusion and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso in protest, arguing the game breaches Japan's obligations under the 1985 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women."

I've noticed while writing this blog that I often come up with male examples of issues that supposedly only affect women in games (or where women are the only examples we ever hear of). This was especially the case for "The Objectification Double Standard". I kind of figure that if I show that males are affected too, it's hardly an issue of misogyny in gaming. I'd like to note that this blog entry, where I wrote predominately about a game that featured a lot of female-on-male rape, wasn't intended to be like that. Although it does come in quite useful now; all I'll say is that RapeLay actually doesn't breach Japan's "1985 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women" because there are games that feature men being raped too. It's not discrimination against women if there are games that feature men being raped too. Hell, for that matter, there are tons more games that feature women being raped according to the VNDB, so it's odd to single out RapeLay.

Having said that, if it was just RapeLay that was protested against and, say, removed from the shelves, I wouldn't miss it. I'd be grateful, in fact. I'd only be annoyed if all games featuring women being raped were hunted down but games like Discipline still remained. That's when we'd have a serious problem.

You know the score by now: leave a comment or write to me at themalesofgames@gmail.com.

A Criticism of Rhianna Pratchett

This post will be much shorter than some of the others I've written and, yes, we're back on the subject of Tomb Raider.

For those of you who don't know who Rhianna Pratchett is, she's a professional writer who has worked on games such as Heavenly Sword, Mirror's Edge and the Overlord games. She's also the daughter of Terry Pratchett, writer of the Discworld series. More to the point, she's the lead writer of the Tomb Raider reboot.

She did an interview with Gamespot a few days ago, discussing the game, and I have a few issues with it. Here's just a few of the quotes from the interview:

Pratchett has the task of finding a side to Lara's personality that has been lost over the years in favour of an increasingly clichéd male sexual fantasy.

"[The way Lara was portrayed] shifted the focus away from what was particularly cool about her: the tough, action heroine and archaeology lover," Pratchett says. "It made me feel that these were games aimed squarely at guys, and therefore weren't necessarily for me."

"In the past developers have definitely forgotten about the brains bit [when dealing with female game characters], mainly because that’s an aspect of a character that can’t be depicted visually, it has to be done through smart dialogue and appropriate action. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a female character being attractive, even sexy, it’s just when it’s done in a purely 'tits out for the lads' way that it becomes rather embarrassing."

I should state that the last Tomb Raider game I played was Tomb Raider: Legend. So maybe someone can enlighten me; in Anniversary and Underworld, did Lara Croft suddenly stop loving archaeology and stop being tough? Did she suddenly lack intelligence and wit? From the Tomb Raider games I played, Lara was not lacking in any of the areas Pratchett criticised her for but, who knows, maybe something happened in the two latest Tomb Raider games. We'll give her the benefit of the doubt and if anyone wants to inform me of how true Pratchett's statements are, that'd be very welcome.

However, something I do take issue with is this assumption of what Lara is vs. what she should be. It's even more pronounced later in the interview. It reminds me of our old friend Anita Sarkeesian. Like Sarkeesian, Pratchett views a character in a certain way that others may not share. Unlike Sarkeesian -- at least for the time being -- Pratchett is in a position to change that character to be more to her liking.

That's a big, big problem. First of all, while I have no problems with characters being changed for legitimate reasons, I take issue with the idea that a character is in some way not "right" unless they're changed to fit a certain mould. Let's say Pratchett's right and Lara had lost her lustre in Anniversary and Underworld. If she wishes to restore Lara's personality as a witty archaeology-lover, that's fine. There's a chance she may want to do something else, however, that I'll take a moment to explain:

In a previous blog, I wrote, "I'm a member of a comic book forum, amongst others, and I rarely visit there any more because every other thread is about the portrayal of women in comics and more diversity on superhero teams". The threads about the portrayal of women in comic books ranges from their appearance (expect eye-rollingly hypocritical attitudes to the unrealistic appearances of men vs. the unrealistic appearances of women) to personalities. Normally, there'll be something along the lines of "DC is much better than Marvel in regards to female characters" and plenty of Marvel-blaming for not doing more to promote female heroes.

This is willfully ignoring the fact that whenever Marvel puts out a book starring a female character, it gets cancelled, often long after the sales numbers said it should be. Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, X-23, S.W.O.R.D. ... the list goes on. Yet Marvel continue to do so, even though it's bad business to keep putting out books that get cancelled! Inevitably, the cancellation of these titles will be met with responses of "this just proves the inherent sexism of comic book readers" and "are male readers just incapable of relating to female characters?" This just ignores the fact that a ton of male superheroes have had their books cancelled too. Ghost Rider, Moon Knight and my old favourite, the critically-acclaimed Captain Britain & MI:13. Hell, Dr. Strange has never been able to hold down a series. Obviously, none of these examples are evidence of sexism against men, and they're not, but none of the cancellation of the superheroines' series are either. That doesn't stop the fans -- if you can call them that -- from crying misogyny at every opportunity.

Anyway, that's just to give you an idea of what comic book fandom has become. The point is that in the attempts to keep these female characters' series afloat, several superheroines -- Wonder Woman, the aforementioned Ms. Marvel -- are pigeonholed into the "strong, independent woman" archetype. Earlier this year, Ms. Marvel was rebranded as Captain Marvel and given a popular female writer (Kelly Sue DeConnick, who has also appeared at Comic-Con's deeply patronising "Women Of Marvel" panels) in the hope that her book would survive. Time will tell if she will but just take a look at Comic Book Resources' preview of the first issue. It's something to behold; the misogynist villain offset by Captain America's heroic obedience. It's particularly jarring if you're a comic book fan; the villain being fought in that issue, Absorbing Man, was actually part of a supervillain duo with his wife, Titania. So of all the villains to make a misogynist, the married man who reguarly worked alongside a woman was a bizarre choice.

Kelly Sue DeConnick and Rhianna Pratchett are completely different people, however. There's a very good chance Lara won't end up being the silly battler of misogyny that Ms. Marvel has become. Although there is a point in all this; Pratchett has this idea that there is something wrong with a female character that needs to be fixed and she has an idea about how to fix it. She also is rather outspoken about the industry as a whole, as the "developers have definitely forgotten about the brains bit [when dealing with female game characters]" sentence above states. There's also this quote from Wikipedia, from when she was featured in Edge magazine's 'Game Industry's 100 Most Influential Women' list: 

"Games narrative is getting better, but we still have a long way to go. As the industry looks towards attracting a greater share of the mainstream audience, improving the way our games are told, as well as how they are played, will be more important than ever."

Now here's my criticism of Pratchett; this idea that there's something wrong with games or with characters. In my experience, Lara Croft was not a broken character in need of reinvention. Perhaps the games themselves needed a boot up the backside to make them fresh again (speaking of which, has any of the Tomb Raider reboot gameplay footage convinced anyone of that? Or is it all focused on the narrative?) but Lara Croft has been an all-around well-received character since her creation in the mid-nineties. Pratchett saw this woman as someone who needed to be fixed.

Likewise, her view of the gaming industry. "It's getting better" is something you say about sick people after an operation, not about writing in the gaming industry. Plus, and this is my real issue with Pratchett, if the quality of her writing is anything to go by, to put down the industry's writing as a whole (as well as Lara's characterisation in previous Tomb Raider games) is the pot calling the kettle black.

I don't like writing this kind of criticism, as it's not strictly about the portrayal of men or women in video games. However, I've played three of the games Pratchett has been the lead writer for and taken issue with the content in all of them. I'd have to play Overlord 1 and 2 to refresh my memory but I can recall the big reveals of the final bosses receiving very little build up. Don't quote me on that, however, because it's been a long time since I played the games. The other Rhianna Pratchett game I've played was Heavenly Sword. And between the misandry and unexplained plot elements, I think I said all there was to say about Heavenly Sword a few posts ago.

So not only has this woman has taken it upon herself to brand a beloved gaming icon as "wrong" and as someone whose sexiness was "done in a purely 'tits for the lads' way", she's also been put in charge of writing for that character. How insulting is it towards men that Pratchett outright said Lara was no longer a good character and the only ones who would like her were men, because of her appearance? Why not just say "guys are perverts" and get it out of the way? While we're on the subject, I hate the fact that Gamespot -- always a paragon of "unbiased" reporting -- states "Pratchett has the task of finding a side to Lara's personality that has been lost over the years in favour of an increasingly clichéd male sexual fantasy" as if it's a fact rather than Pratchett's opinion and nothing more.

I'm not going to say anything as ridiculous or unfair as "Pratchett is a useless writer". She's not. Heavenly Sword had hope. Overlord 1 had some good ideas. If she cuts down on the arrogance and, in Heavenly Sword's case, the incredible amount of misandry, she might be onto something decent. We'll have to wait and see in Tomb Raider's case but I'm not hopeful for the moment. To sum up, this attitude that there's something "wrong" with storytelling in the gaming industry or with female characters that she dislikes is insulting to everyone in the gaming industry who's ever written a script. It's even more insulting to the previous writers of the Tomb Raider games. And remember guys, even if you like a female character's personality, if Rhianna Pratchett thinks there's something wrong with her, she'll think you just like her because she's sexy and you like ogling hot girls!

I'm posting less these days, I've noticed. Not because of a lack of stuff I could write about but some wouldn't make for very good reading. For example, I'm tempted to write about the poor portrayals of men in Heavy Rain but the more I think about it, the more I think it'd just be a list of character names with a description next to them. I could write about the expendability of males in games but where do you start with a topic that big? It would probably be the easiest blog I ever had to write, given how prevalent it is, but couldn't you just hold up gaming as a whole? We occasionally hear the laughable sentence "gaming is institutionally misogynistic", so it'd be the perfect counterpoint to that. But isn't it a bit too ... obvious? To the point where it doesn't even need to be written about?

Anyway, thanks for reading and, as always, you can leave a comment below or sent me an e-mail at themalesofgames@gmail.com. Feel free to suggest a topic. I'm off to play Dishonored!