Hotline Miami 2 Devs Remove "Rape Scene" From Demo

Caiphus

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Mar 31, 2010
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Maiev Shadowsong said:
What? What's your problem exactly? I noticed a trend. I pointed out the trend. The end.
I don't have a problem with it; you can write what you want. I was pointing out that it isn't smart to imply that people are disagreeing with you because they are male. That then tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Father Time said:
If the argument was "Rape is more likely to be a nasty trigger for people" instead of "Rape is worse than murder." How would you feel?

Because I'd be more inclined to believe the first, and less to believe the second.
 

Caiphus

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Maiev Shadowsong said:
I didn't imply anything. You might have inferred something, but that's not what I said. I noticed A was happening. I pointed out A. That's all.
Well, oof, okay. I don't know if there's any other implication to be taken from "it occurs to me that the majority of people disagreeing with me are male."

I suppose you could have been just going on a complete non-sequitur. Perhaps everyone disagreeing with you also has brown hair. Or is currently sitting down in a chair. We'll leave it at that then.
 

Something Amyss

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Dec 3, 2008
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Rutskarn said:
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"
The internet is so reliable you could almost set your watch to it.

...If you still have a watch.
 

Vrex360

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Mar 2, 2009
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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.
 

Caiphus

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Father Time said:
To be perfectly frank, I don't know how many rape victims would actually be 'triggered' by this stuff. I haven't found a good source for even a ballpark amount.

But that's not important. So some players will be "triggered" by rape, why does that mean the scene needs to be removed when they can simply not play the game? We don't ban certain foods just because some people have deathly allergies to them (and don't try to tell me these triggers are worse than death). Some people are also going to be sickened by the excessive amounts of brutality and blood. Why do they matter less?
When you say the scene "needs to be removed", I'm not entirely sure what you mean. The devs themselves took it out of the game. Now, if they were forced to do so, by the Aussie government for example, I'd be more on your side. They also only took it out from the demo.

Trying to collect my thoughts:

On the side of 'They should have removed it':

- People who have been raped may be likely to get triggered over the demo. I also don't know the likelihood of it causing a trigger. I've never been raped. I have been sexually harassed rather badly at work, but that's not even close, really.

- If there's no context, it's unlikely to paint a good picture of your game.

- We're used to violence in games. Someone also knows what they're getting into when they buy hotline miami on the violence front. If we want to start going for rape, preferably do it in a mature, sensible way. It'll be difficult to do so in a demo.

- It might have painted the wrong picture of the game. From a marketing standpoint 'This game is about rape' isn't a good thing to have floating around before the game gets sold. Then again, controversy never hurt a game's sales.

'They shouldn't have removed it':

- It being in the demo probably actually serves as fair warning for people who might be triggered by this stuff to not buy the game.

- It's probably time for the medium to be thinking about maturely tackling the rape subject. (Although, like I said earlier, it would be rather difficult to do so in a demo.)

- The game is already super brutal, you are right.

- I can't stand horror games. They give me nightmares, partially thanks to a scary haunted house thing I went to when I was six, I think. Anyway, I don't play them, and I don't demand that horror elements be taken out of games. It would be silly for me to do so. (That said, someone playing Hotline Miami who might suffer a rape trigger won't know about it ahead of time. It's rather easy to stay away from horror games.) - this goes back to your point of 'why should violence/other triggers be less important?'

In any case the creators chose to remove it from the demo, just like they chose to put it in there in the first place. Can't really demand that they put it back in, while also telling them not to bow to pressure from consumers. That would be a bit hypocritical.


Thoughts?
 

Archer666

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I don't really see the need to remove it since it wasn't rape. It was a scene in a movie, so that would make it acting. If it was rape, then maybe it should have been altered. But I don't really see the need for it right now.

Personally, I think that this scene could be used as a way to show players that you are not a hero. I got the feeling that people playing HM didn't really think much of the killing they did. Even at the end when the music dies away, people would probably be like "Okay, I'm done. Lets go kill something else.". Such a scene set as an attempted rape really, really shows just what kind of character you are controlling. A sick, twisted person. A animal. This outrage, the feeling of being sick at playing this character, would hammer home that your character isn't "cool". At best, it would force to ask questions about what kind of person you are if you're playing this game, or... you know. "You like hurting people, don't you?"

Then again, this probably was a way for HM2 to get even more publicity. Any publicity is good publicity after all.
 

dementis

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Aug 28, 2009
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Torque2100 said:
Maiev Shadowsong said:
*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.
Surely the rape of a rapist would be justified, make the rapist experience the exact same feeling of weakness and vulnerability so they can have some understanding of what they did to their victim.

OT: I can see why an out of context scene would cause some trouble, but if they handle the story and context of the scene in the later game well then I can't see any issue. It would be nice to see more taboo subjects handled in modern media in an intelligent and mature manner.