Well I'm glad they actually took the time to listen to feedback and actually considered the feelings of people who could have been affected by this in their lives and are working out a way to, hopefully, make it work better. It's certainly an improvement over those guys at penny arcade who opted to respond to a relatively small backlash with an obnoxious sarcasm laced insult which baited people into an actual hostile response and then sold merchandise relating to it specifically meant as a giant middle finger to the people who complained (in essence Penny Arcade sold t-shirts the unspoken goal of which being to mock rape victims). It's good to see that at least SOME people in the games industry are capable of admitting fault and actually looking at their work critically instead of leaping onto the knee jerk defensive and hostile tactics that so often plague responses like this.
So yeah, good on them.
As far as the idea of rape being in games well... no. I don't want that.
Simple fact is it's really easy to just shout 'hypocrisy' when games (and media in general) make entertainment out of killing but absolutely condemn rape but maybe people could benefit and take the time to think about WHY that is.
Why is it that EVERY SINGLE TIME a writer truly wants to make an unlikeable repulsive vile villain who the audience is expected to despise in totality and be almost physically sickened by their mere presence and know without any question that they are beyond any kind of redemption and the only thing that can fix them is a bullet, the creator will almost always make them a rapist?
We can chalk it down to simple hypocrisy but when this is a trend that has been going on for decades maybe we could actually look into that and seriously wonder why that might be.
There is a reason why rape is percieved differently to killing, normally I'd just say watch the Jimquisition episode on the topic but I'll just state my own take on the subject.
In my opinion we expect the villain to do evil stuff, we expect him to kill, steal or organize terror attacks or schemes and unless the story is specifically about it, rape is just something that goes beyond any kind of rationality and just enters the realm of unnecessary cruelty.
There are pragmatic reasons to do all the other things villains do in stories. Murder? People can get in your way or try to stop you. Theft? You may need the resources and stealing them is an easy way to do that. Torture? You need information and that's an easy way to do that. Arson? Blow up your enemies and send them a message.
But rape? Again unless it is 'that kind of a movie' (generally I hate 'that kind of a movie' by the way) it is just a layer of needless illogical cruelty. It doesn't aid in a villain's plan on any pragmatic level, it doesn't do anything that any other method couldn't accomplish. If you have your villain do that it implies that he (or sometimes she) is just an extra level of cruel. Using another person's body for their own sick pleasures and not for any kind of actual rational reason. If you have a villain do this it just sends the message that they are twisted and cruel right to their rotten cores and you cannot ask an audience to like a person who is like that. If a villain commits rape they are in essence consigning themselves to always being evil without redemption no matter what by the audience.
Similarly we'll tolerate a lot from our heroes and even our most brutal anti heroes but never rape. They can kill, they can commit arson, they can steal and they can torture but rape? Not a chance.
Just as it's not surprising that writers often use rape as a crutch to establish a villain as truly evil its just as common for writers to establish a hero as a good guy by having him (or her) save someone else from being raped. That's probably why 'saving someone in an alley' is so common in super hero movies, action movies and various others and especially common if we have a morally ambiguous anti-hero as our lead because it is an easy way to say 'as brutal and cold as he seems on the outside, this scenes he's still a good guy'.
Another thing is that while murder CAN be very personal and cruel it can also be incredibly in-personal. Soldier's killing one another on the battlefield I would never call murder, it's a war and almost a sort of combat arena. As Jim said it's 'equal opportunity'. In a match on Halo I could be killing any number of enemies on a perfect kill streak only to then get killed by someone else, it's a match on more or less even ground where anyone can kill anyone else because the balance of power isn't tilted towards one person over another. Now I haven't played hotline miami but from what I gather you're a crazy guy killing members of gangs and mobsters (I think, go easy on me if I'm wrong) and that's the difference between you killing them, no matter how brutally, and a guy raping a wounded woman bleeding out on the floor. THEY CAN FIGHT BACK, you are locked in a combat arena and they can just as easily kill you as you them.
Rape by contrast is ALWAYS personal, it is by definition a very intimate thing. It can be long and drawn out and the lasting effects can haunt a survivor for the rest of their lives. You can't make the act of rape in-personal, you just can't. It is very personal and very brutal, likewise you can't put a moral spin on it either. Like I said there isn't even a justified reason (in terms of sheer logic anyway) for a VILLAIN to do it, so to hell with even trying with a character the audience is expected to root for or at least identify with. You can put a moral spin on killing by being put into a 'kill or be killed' scenario but there's no such thing as a 'rape or be raped' counterpoint. Rape requires a victim, which means it requires someone unable to fight back and it turn it means it requires someone with the level of cruelty to do that to somebody. In my opinion you just cannot make light of a scenario like that.
That's why people can sort of shout 'fucking awesome' when the villain blows up a city of millions of people while cringe in sickness when another villain merely rapes one person. It's almost like a variant on the 'tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall into a hole and die'. An entire city dying IS technically worse than one rape but we are able to divorce ourselves from that reality because of how far removed from our reality it is, meanwhile, again, rape is intimate and personal and much easier to comprehend and be disturbed by.
Imagine if Loki randomly raped someone during his conquest of Earth in the Avengers, somehow I doubt he'd have been as popular then. Sure he unleashed an alien invasion on New York and killed god knows how many people but that's what supervillains are expected to do, rape is just an extra layer of needlessly cruel.
And sure there are games like GTA and Saints row where you can shoot civilians and it's sometimes played off as a laugh but bare in mind the mechanics that killing has going for it, the whole impersonal angle, and then also consider that killing can end in a matter of seconds. Gunshot, bang, dead. When we consider then the divorce from reality mentioned above we can actually make this sequence funny. Make it a big oversized gun, give the guy being shot a hilarious last line ("Oh fuck my donkey.") and shoot him and send him flying fifty feet away and he lands with a cartoon splat.
Bam, instant slapstick. The element of slapstick in a nutshell, cause and effect, someone suffers and it is snappy and quick. I just don't see how one could do a slapstick rape scene without it looking really, really bad.
So yeah if you want my honest opinion I'm not surprised people can handle seeing their 'hero' cut stab slice and shoot his way through god knows how many goons are are also trying to shoot him but get turned off by a scene of him then grabbing a helpless wounded young woman and starts violating her, and I don't think it is hypocritical AT ALL.
Rape and murder are two very different things percieved in two very different ways. Neither one is actually objectively 'better' or 'worse' and the use of one in one form of media doesn't prove the other should be used as well. It merely proves that of two bad crimes, we have found moral loopholes for murder that doesn't exist for rape and frankly I don't care if people think this means giving we're giving rape an unfair bad name because rape IS a bad thing and deserves to be condemned and I don't lose any sleep at night knowing that people do condemn it.
Now while I do think rape has it's place in the art as do all the darker parts of the human experience it needs to be handled with deft hands and tact and not the kind of sleazy marketing like we saw with Tomb Raider or just thrown in for shock value and if it turns out that's all this scene in Hotline Miami 2 turns out to be then I do not think anything has been lost artistically by having it removed. Right now we don't know enough about the context to judge but I a skeptical to say the least.
And look while we may say 'oh everyone knows rape is bad so what's the big deal' one should remember the Steubenville case. The town took the rapist's side, the victim was villified and harassed and the news media tried to make the two rapists into tragic victims. Somehow I don't see a mass killer getting the same kind of media treatment, and that right there might be the biggest distinction.
We all know what murder is, there is no ambiguity. If a guy goes and shoots a whole bunch of people for no reason people aren't going to try to fight for his freedom, they aren't going to try and make him look sympathetic on television, they aren't going to try and put all the blame on the people he killed and they aren't going to try to harass the victim's families into silence. And all of those things have happened in rape cases.
We know what murder is and unless we are mentally insane we are comfortable with that, with rape not so much. Most rapes are done by people the victim knows in their own life, on top of that a good portion of rapes go unreported because people are afraid of being socially shamed for it. Women fear being branded a slut, men fear being branded as weak. When a person is murdered people generally don't HIDE that fact because they aren't generally worried that people will mock them for it.
Also to consider is that while murder is unambiguous, you can say you killed someone in self defence but if you take a gun and shoot someone no matter what the context you still know you killed them, a lot of the time rapists either have successfully convinced themselves or geniuenly don't believe they have committed rape. The whole 'she was dressed as a whore', 'she lead me on', 'she totally wanted it' arguments more or less exist from this as does the 'she doesn't want to admit she's a slut so she's lying' approach. Because rape is harder to get someone arrested for than murder and given how hard it can be to define in contrast there are a lot of people who would have committed textbook rape but can comfortably convince themselves that they haven't. That's why the whole 'victim blaming' culture still exists.
Hell an example of this could once be found on this very website, people talked endlessly about whether or not hooking up with a seriously drunk girl could be considered 'rape' and, despicably, a really common argument was 'well they were being irresponsible and should live with the consequences' and apart from small numbers of people who were drowned out by all the dissenting voices no one seemed to bring up the obvious What about the sober person's responsibility to do the right thing in that circumstance? How come someone else being drunk and irresponsible meant the sober person could do whatever they wanted? That is the theory of victim blaming at it's core. I'm not responsible for what I do to you because YOU should have been more careless.
With that in mind, in my opinion, while this attitude is still prevalent I'd rather not see games make entertainment out of sexual assault.
But that's just my two cents as to why I think this is as it is.
