Hotline Miami 2 Devs Remove "Rape Scene" From Demo

[Imp_Emissary]

Really? Rape is only seen as a big deal because it's a "mostly women's issue"?

The U.S. Military would disagree.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/20/victims-of-sex-assaults-in-military-are-mostly-sil/?page=all

In 2012, 26,000 rapes. 12,000 women, and 14,000 men.

Rape is an issue for everyone. Men and women. It doesn't matter who gets raped more. Anyone who thinks otherwise, isn't connected to reality.

As for them keeping it in the game? It's there choice in the end. If they really think they need it, they'll keep it.

"The US Military would disagree" well...not to be rude or anything, but no shit dude, in that very same article you will see this:

The survey determined that 26,000 service members were victims of sexual assault last year, based on the 6.1 percent of female and 1.2 percent of male respondents who claimed to have suffered such abuse. With an active-duty force of 200,000 women and 1.2 million men, that amounts to roughly 12,000 female victims and 14,000 male victims.

Despite the whopping population different between the genders, the proportion of women being assaulted (compared to their population) is over 5 times higher than males.
But then you'll probably say "well it says a lot of males don't report it", and then this turns into a completely other kind of discussion because we have to start making up numbers, etc .

Here's just a random google result on the male vs female rape ratios from a less biased population (i.e. not dominated by 1 gender and skewing the hell out of stats):
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/11/male-female-rape-statistics-graphic

Now enough about statistics, lets get back to the thread about Hotline Miami 2

Saying "no shit" isn't very rude. Unless you write it like this: NO SHIT!
Anyway.

For someone saying "no shit", you seem to be unable to smell it when it's under your nose.

"Rape is an issue for everyone. Men and women. It doesn't matter who gets raped more."[sub](<- The point of "the shit".)[/sub]

Indeed. Women are more likely to get raped, but they are hardly alone.

As for Hotline Miami. I also said my bit about it already.

In the end the game's creators will decide to keep it or not. This isn't censorship. It's Dennaton Games hearing criticism of the Demo[sub](not even the full game)[/sub], and deciding to make changes to it of their own will.

 

[Depulcator]

And so the whiny butthurt social justice warriors, force another game that they probably weren't gonna play any way to change. WAY TO GO!

 

[Robert Marrs]

Thankfully, everyone who is set off by one thing is set off by everything else, so this is a fair and accurate statement.

If you can slaughter people with reckless abandon but a rape scene troubles you, you've got bigger problems you need to sort out than making sure video games cater to your needs.


If we continue to worry about the wants of people who are offended by digital media, we will never grow as a medium.

I think he puts it best when he says

"To those people who genuinely care about triggers, let me ask you a question: do you care about war veterans with PTSD who get triggered by images of guns and weapons or violence in the media? Do you feel bad when you play a game that has guns in it... knowing that somewhere they might be triggering someone? Or what about someone who has gone through any trauma? Do you believe that all triggers for them should be censored too?"

What a great video. The amount of hypocrisy these people are displaying is astonishing. Honestly I hate to be closed minded but if you watch that video and still disagree you should feel ashamed at the double standard you are upholding.

 

[SushiJaguar]

Any time that anyone tries to protect me like I'm some delicate flower, I'm very much inclined to tell them to fuck off. Bring on the rape scenes, in the pursuit of being mature about storytelling in video games. Bring on the rape scenes, to help people become aware that shit doesn't fly.

But I'll tell you what right now. If people are too afraid of backlash and controversy to depict things that might bring up some bad memories, then they shouldn't be making games for mature audiences in the first place. I hate with a passion each and every single person who has a kneejerk reaction to the very mention of rape, because you're just dragging us back. And as for that prize fool that dared, that flipping DARED to insinuate that rape is worse than murder needs to be removed from the internet and have his freedom of speech rights removed.

I'm so fucking happy that I'd alive and raped instead of DEAD and raped, you moron.

 

[Robert Marrs]

Thankfully, everyone who is set off by one thing is set off by everything else, so this is a fair and accurate statement.

If you can slaughter people with reckless abandon but a rape scene troubles you, you've got bigger problems you need to sort out than making sure video games cater to your needs.


If we continue to worry about the wants of people who are offended by digital media, we will never grow as a medium.

I think he puts it best when he says

"To those people who genuinely care about triggers, let me ask you a question: do you care about war veterans with PTSD who get triggered by images of guns and weapons or violence in the media? Do you feel bad when you play a game that has guns in it... knowing that somewhere they might be triggering someone? Or what about someone who has gone through any trauma? Do you believe that all triggers for them should be censored too?"

What a great video. The amount of hypocrisy these people are displaying is astonishing. Honestly I hate to be closed minded but if you watch that video and still disagree you should feel ashamed at the double standard you are upholding.

I haven't watched the video and I can't right now but I want to take a guess at it's contents.

Ahem "Why should game developers remove things that upset you when you clearly don't care about the people who get upset over the violence in each and every modern GTA game (and both Hotline Miamis while we're at it)"

Am I off the mark?

Pretty much spot on. The PTSD thing is the most important point I think as someone already said. If you are so worried about rape and how it might be a trigger for rape victims why the silence on veterans who might be triggered by the swarm of movies and video games with guns and violence? The fact is these people don't care until it affects them and I feel like that should invalidate anything they have to say. If you don't care about anyone but yourselves why should anyone care about you?

 

[thenoblitt]

its called artistic expression, things like this dont get changed in other forms of art, but why video games?

 

[Dense_Electric]

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"

So what you're saying is that game developers should never make a game involving any sort of shooting, because it might be traumatic to shooting survivors. You MUST be saying that, because it's EXACTLY the same logic.

Media sometimes portrays unpleasant things and the dark parts of our society, deal with it.

 

[Erttheking]

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Ok, this is really bugging me. The game did not change. At all. They took the rape scene out of the demo. That is all. The artificial flat out says that it is going to still be in the game where it would be in context and make sense. They decided to take it out of the demo because it was out of context, made no sense within the context of the demo, so they decided that it served no purpose and removed it from the demo. The rape scene will still be in the game, so there really is no reason to be so angry.

EDIT:

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.

Ok, apparently I need to rephrase my argument. It may not reappear in the main game, but not because they're afraid to use a rape scene, they WANT to have it in, but they're not going to put it in if they feel that they can't make it work, not because they were pressured too. I've done a lot of writing, I like to consider myself to be a writer, and I can tell you from experience that you can imagine ideas for a story that seem great, but when you get to the point where you were planning to write it, sometimes you stop and look at the direction the story went and say "On second thought, this isn't going to work." It's like with a first draft. Sometimes things that seemed like a good idea at first seem like a bad idea down the line.

 

[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"

So what you're saying is that game developers should never make a game involving any sort of shooting, because it might be traumatic to shooting survivors. You MUST be saying that, because it's EXACTLY the same logic.

Media sometimes portrays unpleasant things and the dark parts of our society, deal with it.

There's a fundamental misunderstanding of my argument.

I don't think anything should be censored because of content, and I don't think anything's off limits. A game that deals with rape is okay. A game that deals with murder is okay. All art, as long as its production is not harmful, is okay. I mean, making a zombie movie where you actually shoot extras isn't cool, but you get what I'm saying.

But there's a fundamental problem with how people are reacting to the news that Hotline Miami's developers have altered a demo, and may alter the gameplay, because they don't want to trigger traumatic episodes in the (unfortunately surprisingly large) percent of their audience that may have experienced rape. Because this isn't censorship. This isn't someone standing up and saying, "No, you can't make your art like this because it makes me feel bad." This is someone saying, "This art triggers traumatic episodes," and the person creating the art responding, "Oh, shit, I didn't want to do that."

Imagine you're with some friends, telling jokes, and you make a crack about a nun getting into a drunk driving accident. One of your friends goes pale and leaves because his friend was killed in a drunk driving accident. Of course you were within your rights to make a drunk driving joke. Of course it's okay to do so. But was making your friend trudge off, shaken and sweating and about to cry, really the effect you'd intended to have? And if you had to do it again, would you have made the same joke?

I'm going to go one further. While I think it's perfectly okay for the Hotline Miami devs to remove the rape from their trailer, and I don't think that's censorship (which is the attitude I'm coming down against), I also think it's okay to show or imply rape in a trailer. But I think there needs to be an indication that's where it's going. If I were traumatized by a shooting incident (which are about ten thousand times rarer than rapes, and can have very different psychological effects, but I digress), then I wouldn't say, "Nobody gets to make games about shooting." But I'd like to have some kind of indication if the trailer I was about to watch had shooting in it.

When you watch a Call of Duty trailer, you expect gun violence. But pretty much nobody watches anything and expects a sudden rape interlude. And again, all that happened was that people shared how the rape interlude made them feel and the developers decided they didn't want to make people feel like that. It's not censorship, and it's really shitty to equate discussing one's trauma with calling for the oppression of free speech.

 

[NeedsaBetterName22]

I'd just like to point out to some people here that even though murder victims certainly aren't complaining, you seem to be ignoring attempted murder victims. Who's to say that graphic violence in video games doesn't bring up painful memories? I only say this because I do have a friend who was nearly killed in a mugging (stabbed multiple times). He spent several years in therapy but he's still massively uncomfortable with, for example, watching action movies that have a lot of blood. So I don't really think you can claim that murder in video games can't bring up painful memories in the same way a rape does. It very much depends on the psychological state of the individual and what they've endured.

 

[Psychobabble]

Once again here we all are arguing over some vile atrocity perpetrated against a character in a video game. We can split hairs about what kind of violence is worse than another, and claim artistic rights vs censorship until the cows come home. It isn't going to solve anything.

I feel the real discussion we should be having is why our society seems to feel the need to glorify brutal and sinister acts of violence as enjoyable entertainment. Has our society become so gauche, so base, that we find it enjoyable to watch or even participate in fictionalized violent actions that most of us would find repugnantly horrifying in real life? What by Jove is wrong with all of us?

 

[Rutskarn]

When you watch a Call of Duty trailer, you expect gun violence. But pretty much nobody watches anything and expects a sudden rape interlude.

Straw Dogs, A Serbian Film, The Aristocrats.

Things that are all famous for dealing with rape--which is beside my point, which is that someone watching a Hotline Miami trailer, given that the franchise has nothing to do with sexual violence, wouldn't go into it expecting a rape scene.

And as far as "calling for censorship" goes, and "rape culture," whether or not anyone was calling for it--and I sure as shit didn't see it--that's clearly not the people the Hotline Miami devs are addressing. Their press release is clear. What they made affected people in a way they never wanted to.

And it's a problem that the community's immediate reaction to this is anger at the people who didn't like it. I mean, presumably you read the release, and you read what I wrote, and your reaction was still that I was calling for censorship, or that I was speaking up for people who were.

 

[NeedsaBetterName22]

Once again here we all are arguing over some vile atrocity perpetrated against a character in a video game. We can split hairs about what kind of violence is worse than another, and claim artistic rights vs censorship until the cows come home. It isn't going to solve anything.

I feel the real discussion we should be having is why our society seems to feel the need to glorify brutal and sinister acts of violence as enjoyable entertainment. Has our society become so gauche, so base, that we find it enjoyable to watch or even participate in fictionalized violent actions that most of us would find repugnantly horrifying in real life? What the hell is wrong with all of us?

You act like fictionalized violence is a product of our society and hasn't been a large part of media since the beginning of human history. loved some violent media. [http://totem.mirgt.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/06.hunting-scene-on-the-cave-paintings1.jpg]

You think the Renaissance was special? [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q9lNrHO3joU/TZNR33QT0SI/AAAAAAAACB0/q8tC6n9VZCQ/s640/judith_beheading_holofernes_by_caravaggio1.jpg]

How about the pre-Meiji Japan? [http://maniart.ne.jp/mani/imagemani/jigoku.JPG]

Pre-Columbus Meso-American cultures? [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/53/Codex_Magliabechiano_(141_cropped).jpg/300px-Codex_Magliabechiano_(141_cropped).jpg]



'Has our society become so gauche, so base'. Nope. We're just doing what we've been doing for thousands of years, so I don't really think 'our society' gets to take credit for that.

 

[thejackyl]

As a repeat victim of rape/sexual assault (I was 4 or 5 and I remember at least two occurrences of it), I can understand why people are upset with rape scenes in any media and seeing the trailer (which showed maybe 3 seconds of the scene), I found it unsettling, and distasteful without context.

The context that it's a movie within a video game and therefore not real TWICE doesn't necessarily make it better, but I can at least understand there being reasoning if it's story related and not just a "nearly kill and rape this character" situation.

And even though I dislike the scene from what I've seen of it, I hope it doesn't get censored, but also that it's handled properly.

Another thing I would like to point out (As someone no doubt had already done before me, but I'm saying it again.) One can justify murder, but I doubt anyone can justify rape.

There's no situation I can think of that can be summed up as "If I didn't rape them, something bad would have happened." You can defend murder in self-defense, but could you also rape in self defense? Probably not.'

Also, I want it known that, even though I was raped as a child and am still affected by it (I'm VERY slow to trust and have issues initiating physical... anything), but for the most part I'm pretty okay talking about it, and I feel like an asshole when I laugh at a rape joke, but my sense of humor has always been pitch black.

 

[NeedsaBetterName22]

Another thing I would like to point out (As someone no doubt had already done before me, but I'm saying it again.) One can justify murder, but I doubt anyone can justify rape.

One cannot justify murder. One can justify killing in self-defense, but it is morally repulsive to consider murder a justified offense. Objectively, killing in self-defense IS NOT murder, by any legal or moral definition. The word you're looking for is homicide, and in the context of self-defense it can be seen as 'justified homicide'. But murder is a malicious act of violence that terminates the life of another individual.

 

[thejackyl]

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Perhaps that's how I should have worded it, but that's more or less what I meant. It's possible to justify killing a LOT easier than it is to justify rape.