Hotline Miami 2 Devs Remove "Rape Scene" From Demo

[Andy Chalk]

Hotline Miami 2 Devs Remove "Rape Scene" From Demo

Dennaton Games hopes it can "fix" a scene of implied sexual assault in Hotline Miami 2, saying that it actually has meaning to the two characters it involves.

The demo for the upcoming Hotline Miami 2 drew considerable criticism back in August for its inclusion of a scene in which the player's character pins down a female NPC and then drops his pants. It's quickly revealed that the whole thing is part of an in-game movie, but the segment nonetheless left a lot of players feeling very uncomfortable, to the point that the developers have cut it from the demo completely and are now trying to rework it.

"We were really sad that some people were so affected by it, because maybe they had been through something like that of their own. Maybe they had a terrible experience of their own that was triggered by the game. That was not intentional at all," Dennaton's Dennis Wedin told Rock, Paper, Shotgun. "We didn't add the scene just to be controversial. There is a meaning to these two characters. There's a lot more to them than just this scene."

But while the scene has been removed from the demo, Wedin suggested that it could reappear in the full game. "We're going to work with it, see if we can fix it," he said. "You get a bigger picture when you play the whole game, which is lost in the demo of course."

Wedin also said that players will learn more about the characters involved in the scene as the game progresses and noted that there will actually be a number of playable female characters in the full release.

Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/09/05/hotline-miami-devs-reconsidering-sexual-assault-scene/]


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[Rutskarn]

Somehow I know how this is going to play out.

"Hey, look, I liked Hotline Miami a lot, but when I saw the demo...it brought back a lot of horrible things, alright? It made me relive the worst day of my life. I just thought you should know."

"Oh, shit, we didn't want to do that. I mean, we're fucking game makers. We want people to have fun, not relive trauma. Let's see if we can maybe rework it so it's less horrible."

Later:

Internet Hate Brigade: "WTFOMG TEH CENSORSHIPZ! STFU RAPE SURVIVORS, STOP DISCUSSING WHAT THINGS ARE LIKE FOR YOU"

 

[Fappy]

It was kind of dumb of them to include it without the proper context in the demo, but this is probably the best move they could make. Take it out of the demo to avoid controversy, but include it in the full game (with the context of the scene intact). Hopefully people will keep their torches and pitchforks at home until we understand the purpose of the scene.

 

[Story]

Yeah, I kinda saw this coming.
I can't help but feel we aren't missing something without it though.

 

[Dr.Awkward]

They said it was a movie, correct? Have they tried adding a silhouette of an audience to the bottom of the screen with some grain effects?

 

[Genocidicles]

Simulated brutal mass murder: No problemo!

Short rape scene: Basically as bad as the holocaust.

It's not even a 'real' rape scene. It's part of a movie in the game for crying out loud.

Whereas the player character can 'really' gun people down, slit their throats, cave their skulls in, jab their eyes out with a broken pool cue or throw boiling water in their faces and watch the skin melt off, and that's all perfectly fine as you said.

 

[Yuuki]

But you can imagine being pinned down, your clothes taken off, having someone on top of you, stealing from you, touching you, hurting you. You can imagine the screams. You can imagine the crying. It's painfully human.

(note: every time I say the word "rape scene" below I'm fully aware this wasn't even intended to be an actual rape scene)
I actually have an easier time imagining myself getting murdered, because I've seen it happen a million times in a million different ways in entertainment mediums, than imagining myself getting sexually assaulted / raped IRL. In fact, rape is probably most alien form of crime/violence to me than anything else, people constantly avoid talking/showing it and it is quickly kicked under the rug. I've seen horrendous torture scenes, realistic war movies where we realize just how much harm a single bullet actually does to a fleshy human, etc. Hell I think I've seen movies about how black people were treated like slaves and killed/butchered like cattle, but I don't recall seeing a colossal negative reaction from black people screaming "nooooo this reminds me too much of stuff etc".
But rape is a big no-no in terms of bringing up the realities of life in entertainment mediums.

Now I get that there ARE many survivors of rape / sexual assault and watching even 5 seconds of it in an 8 hour game could possibly make them completely lose their handle on reality and re-live their very worst nightmares. I believe that could happen for some people.

But I also believe that an artist should be able to release whatever they like, and then the consumers can criticize them on the finished product. When they do change something, it should be to make their final product better in their own eyes - not to satisfy the whims and cave-into demands of people.
The dumbest thing these guys did was release the DEMO with the goddamn rape scene - of course there is going to be a knee-jerk reaction to it, there's always a knee-jerk reaction to anything related to highlighting power-differences between the genders.
If the rape scene was simply released in the final game, I highly HIGHLY doubt it would have more than an absolutely tiny/negligible impact on people's (and reviewers'/critics') final ratings of it.

Developers need to stand their ground with what they intend to release in their game.

 

[TiberiusEsuriens]

What I am so curious about is that devs repeatedly include these types of sexual abuse in trailers at all. It's like there's a bullet point in every trailer list that says, "-Must include only and all of the most edgy and provacative content."

"We didn't add the scene just to be controversial. There is a meaning to these two characters. There's a lot more to them than just this scene... You get a bigger picture when you play the whole game, which is lost in the demo of course."

This is the case in every single game like this (Heavy Rain and Tomb Raider, just to name a few). They are often of minimal impact or consequence in the games, and EVERY SINGLE GOD DANG TIME the devs are all, "Oh you just don't get it, you gotta play the full game to understand" and then proceed to show it in part to us anyways. They are included in trailers strictly for the shock factor, then immediately get defensive when they're "surprised" that people were shocked by it. And it almost always works against them. It ALWAYS sparks controversy, rape debate, and vilification of the entire gaming community. If you want your game to have an edgy character arc, try not including something like rape because it is essentially mainstream now. And people wonder why the Tropes vs Women videos exist [facepalm].

Listen, devs, if you want to include something like this in a character arc feel free to do it, just stop throwing it out there to the wolves in promo videos because of that "any publicity is good publicity" thing. Of every game I have played in my entire life all of the best (or even good in any way whatsoever) characters and stories are given the patience, breathing room, and respect to show themselves to the player only when they are ready. Bad things have been happening to characters in games long before now, but it is only now that it is the driving advertisement for the game and characters that people have had a problem with it. All of these games where someone comes out early for promotion and says, "but this rape is ESSENTIAL to her character growth" is shooting that character's growth in the foot. You might as well be grabbing our faces and shoving them into the screen screaming "CARE ABOUT THEM NOW, WHY WON'T YOU LISTEN!?"

To take the rape controversy out of it, heavily promoting this particular type of generic character backstory is the equivalent of promoting Empire Strikes Back to a non-Star Wars fan by saying, "Luke learning Darth Vader is his father right after getting his arm chopped off is essential to his character's growth." It may be true, but you've just made me hate everything about it because I wasn't allowed to slowly settle into it. Without the leadup a reveal like this too early has a negative impact.

 

[Yuuki]

That's the artists' choice. People spoke their mind and they decided to change things. For selling more copies and making more money, or because they agreed with the backlash. If they believed they were right, they wouldn't change it.

We'll see if it's in the final game.

In fact I believe even if they kept it in the final game, almost nobody will bring it up because the "hotline maiami rape scene omfg" bandwagon will have long passed. That's how these things tend to work, knee-jerk reaction bandwagons.
Golden example: Lara Croft "rape scene". MASSIVE knee-jerk reaction when it was shown in the trailer. Once it was released as part of the full game, nobody gave a fuck. I repeat: nobody gave a single fuck. Not because it didn't turn out to be a rape scene and the guy was simply trying to kill her (and then she shoots him in the face), we could still have seen MANY protests from people claiming that it reminded them of the time they had their hands tied and were felt-up and then pinned-down by their assaulter. No, it's just that the particular bandwagon for that game/issue had already passed. Toot toot.

 

[Demonreach]

I have been the victim of a violent assault, is that somehow "less" terrible than being raped? If for a while I found images of violence to be traumatic would you agree to censor all the games? Didn't think so..

 

[Yuuki]

Congratulations on being dismissive towards the concerns of rape victims and attempting to label their opinions "bandwagons."

Please, there's no point trying to poke the bee hive by saying stuff like that. That exact sentence has been said countless times before in the countless other gender-politics-threads, I recommend digging them up and going through people's responses because I'm a tad exhausted at this point.

Pretty much every single "this offends me, remove it! remove it!" topic that has been brought up in the last 2-3 years regarding gaming has been a bandwagon that has swiftly passed, this is absolutely no different.

 

[Doom972]

This is where the "deal with it" attitude would've been the best. Some people get raped, some people get shot, some people see other people (sometimes friends) get killed horribly. Does this mean that every game needs to take it into consideration? No.

If they're going to fix their game about a drugged psychopath murderer for every thing people might find offensive because of stuff that they've gone through, there wouldn't be much left in it.

Somehow I know how this is going to play out.

"Hey, look, I liked Hotline Miami a lot, but when I saw the demo...it brought back a lot of horrible things, alright? It made me relive the worst day of my life. I just thought you should know."

"Oh, shit, we didn't want to do that. I mean, we're fucking game makers. We want people to have fun, not relive trauma. Let's see if we can maybe rework it so it's less horrible."

Later:

Internet Hate Brigade: "WTFOMG TEH CENSORSHIPZ! STFU RAPE SURVIVORS, STOP DISCUSSING WHAT THINGS ARE LIKE FOR YOU"

Internet Hate Brigade? How about the silent majority who wanted the developers to just do their own thing, and didn't say anything before because there was nothing bad with it in the first place.

 

[Torque2100]

*Snip*

[HEADING=2]Murder and rape are not the same.[/HEADING]

*Snip*

I'm going to agree with Maiev Shadowsong here, Killing and Rape are two different kinds of evil but there is one important distinction you have to keep in mind with this discussion.

Sometimes Killing is justified, but Rape is NEVER justified.

Killing is the act of taking another human being's life away. There are situations where Killing is, regrettably, a justifiable course of action or the only course of action. For example, I don't think that anyone would argue that Killing isn't justified when a person is confronted by an angry mob intent on doing grievous bodily harm to a them or killing them or their loved ones. Likewise killing is justified when a lone psycho with a gun storms a workplace and takes innocent people hostage.

Let's contrast this with Rape which is the act of forcibly using someone else's body for the rapist's sick pleasure. It's never justified. There is never a situation where Rape is a justifiable course of action, and believe me the Japanese have been trying for DECADES to contrive one with no success. When you get down to it, all Rape is is using someone else's body so you can get off. There's never a higher cause and Rape can never serve any other purpose than the Rapists pleasure.

 

[Demonreach]

You're all missing the point. It's not about what is good or bad or justified or whatever else. The question is whether the game should be changed to protect the emotionally vulnerable. The answer is no.