Jimquisition: Rape vs. Murder

[Shjade]

Please bear in mind that my video's intent is not to discuss the right/lack of right of any of these games to exist, at least outside of the throwaway comment near the end. I'm talking about *why* the two subjects are handled differently, not the right/wrong in *how* they are handled. While I may discuss that subject in a future video, it would be too much to discuss it in the same video as this one.

Have to admit, when I read the video's title I was sorta hoping it'd address the subject of people getting upset about rape, the word, being used as trash-talk/description of performance in playing of games i.e. "I just raped that guy so hard." I find those arguments about whether it's worse to say you raped someone than to describe what you literally just did to them (involving, say, a shotgun at close range followed by some napalm) interesting and amusing at times.

When it comes to game content, though, eh...it really depends on how you're handling it. I mean, I'm looking at context, as was mentioned in the video. There's a load of possible scenarios involving killing people: military action, self-defense, survival needs, assassination, etc. compared to far fewer plausible contexts for rape. If rape's the central focus of the game, that means the game's context is going to be screwed up pretty much regardless. If this Hypothetical Rape Game is based on the idea that your character is going out in search of women (or men?) to beat down and rape, I'd have to think it would be pretty much just as bad if he (or she?) were hunting down people to murder, not because rape = murder, but because of the stalking and motivation and so on. It's not so much the rape itself that's the rotten core of this concept; it's more the fetid cherry on top of a game that's completely structured to play a monster/serial killer/what have you.

From the other side of the same idea, I'm trying to think of games wherein adding a rape element probably wouldn't change much about how bad the people involved are and/or how "inappropriate" the game is. Saints Row 2 comes to mind. Not because of the wanton murder and nakedness and general wtf behavior throughout the bulk of the game, though that helps. No, I'm thinking of a particular scene in which your character abducts the girlfriend (non-combatant, victim) of one of the bad bosses, stuffs her in the trunk of a car and tricks the baddie into crushing her to death with a monster truck.

Think about that for a minute.

There's no self-defense justification. There's no monetary or military gain from her death. It doesn't do anything to benefit you or your goals at all, really. All it accomplishes is ruining the girl's life (via messily ending it in a rather terrifying and probably painful manner) and pissing off the boss. That's it. Your character just does it because he (or she) is a colossal bastard.

Now, if instead in this event the girlfriend is raped and sent home to her beau to tell him about how she was traumatized, it would accomplish pretty much the same thing. Would it make the game better/worse? I dunno, I don't think it would really change much of anything - you're a monster either way.

Of course, given it probably wouldn't change much of anything, there's no reason to include rape there. It wouldn't add anything to the story any more than it would detract from it. It'd just be something thrown in for the sake of having rape in a game, and that's not a good thing either.

tl;dr - There are probably contexts wherein rape could be included in a game without completely corrupting the game with it, but it'd be pretty hard to do without making it some kind of exploitative fanservice for creeps. Or, to put it another way, it's very hard to justify including rape in a game, even in cases where it might "make sense."

 

[Phasmal]

I thought this episode was really good.
I wouldn't have known quite how to phrase it myself, but I'm glad someone is able to put it a bit more coherantly than I would.

I think that at the moment we have enough trouble with real-life rape being trivialised and dismissed, and I really think the best thing video games can do is just stay out of it.
Not to mention, as a female gamer - that's really the last thing I want in games.
Now, I'm going to try and get out of this thread before I get flamed for this opinion.

 

[Cecilthedarkknight_234]

I disagree. If you ban rape and rape discussions and somehow remove it from life entirely, why not do the same for dentistry, dentists, everything to do with teeth? I mean, it's pretty traumatic, painful, everybody hates it... Or paper-cuts. Man, those hurt.
Death on the other hand is a final full stop, a big ending, there is nothing (as far as I know) beyond death. There are no chances to heal yourself emotionally and physically.

Tl;dr: Death-end, rape-pain, thus saying rape is NONO while death is ok is hypocrisy.

Again, Dentistry can be justified. You dont NEED to go to a dentist.

Rape is not. There is no justification for Rape, period.

it's called the cycle of abuse not that it justifies rape but if child is raped over x amount years by a predator then turns around and does the same because he or she never got help for the abuse then it goes in cycle that needs to addressed. No there is never a just cause for rape however given a person's weak state of mind and enduring amount of abuse he or she might of took it's understandable why the person would repeat the cycle, to make some-one hurt or feel bad as they do.

So I'm supposed to feel sorry for a guy who rapes today because he was raped 20 years ago? That is a piss poor excuse and it gets no sympathy from me.

there are kids that rape younger kids or are you unaware of that?? Kids that where molested for 5 years from ages 6-7 to 11-12 feel frustrated in pain and don't know what the hell to do. They look for some younger than them and take it out on that person because the person's psyche was already broken at a young age. You really need to read up and study case laws on this stuff it's actually sad how this damn cycle of abuse goes with out as much glance or care to talk about. No if person was raped 20 years ago as a kid then goes out and rapes it's not legit reason or even a damn excuse however you have to take into factor did that person get help over those twenty years or did he or she little it bottle up and explode because of the shame/guilt of what happened.

There is nothing as cut or dry that some it just twisted evil sh** with no morals unless they are "sociopaths". Mental health issues play alot into this so don't excuse it as b.s. You're talking to a victim of molest ion to begin with that would rather kill him-self than commit such a horrible act of rape or sex abuse.

 

[The Great JT]

Rape really is a touchy subject to approach, so I can kind of understand why mainstream games tend to avoid it. I mean, the gaming industry gets enough flak for violence, and rape is another beast altogether.

 

[RPGxMadness]

http://youtu.be/ymNdfdQvdVc

This is the quote from Dave Chappelle that Jim used, note that everyone is laughing and applauding...

 

[WanderingFool]

While I rarely watch your videos, Im glad I decided to watch this one. I agree with everything said.

 

[Dastardly]

Honestly, I'm still not sure you've sold me on rape being worse than murder. If you examine the crimes objectively, murder is still worse because it ends a person's life. Rape leaves them intact to live another day.

But you're arguing this from the permanence of the result. And yeah, murder is forever, which makes it definitely more permanent... but that's not always what people mean by "worse." (And let's also remember that rape can't be "undone," so it's not exactly transitory.)

It's not really about the victim or the act, but about the perpetrator. Any of us, if pressed hard enough, can think of a situation in which someone could make us so angry we would want to kill them. We can put ourselves in "the killer's shoes" in some way. Not every killer, not every circumstance, but some.

What's more, we see situations in the world in which killing is justified (thus meaning it's, you know, not "murder," per se). The act is occasionally excusable, and most games put is in that sort of situation. But even when we're not in that situation (like running around in GTA gunning down civvies for no reason), the ground has already been broken on the act itself, so we can turn a blind eye since it's just fantasy.

(I'm not saying we feel sorry for a serial killer, or anything like that, but the fact that we can in some distant way understand killing... well, that takes some of the sting out of what the guy did. He's a guy that misused killing, but we retain the knowledge that sometimes it's necessary, or at least understandable. We know that killing occasionally has a "correct" us, and that it can even happen accidentally, so some of the taboo surrounding the at itself is mitigated -- we look at the circumstances and the perpetrator to determine right/wrong.)

Bur rape? There is no situation in which it is justified. I don't think anyone out there can think of a situation in which someone could make them so angry they would want to rape them. We are not able to put ourselves in the killer's shoes, so there is absolutely not even the slightest seed of sympathy or understanding. There is no "correct" way to use rape, so that marks anyone who would use it with a particular brand of intentional evil.

There are no mitigating circumstances. The act is completely evil, so the person who chose to do it is also completely evil.

And that's why they're viewed so differently, in the broad sense. Now, the family of a murder victim will feel differently, because they are personally tied to the crime and its consequences, so let's be very sure: We're talking about the general public feeling on the perpetrators.

(This idea also explains why we all -- even murderers and rapists -- hold a special hatred for child molestors, by the way.)

snip

(To include for relevant above argument re: How we can relate to murder/killing vs. how we cannot relate to rapists)

 

[Twinmill5000]

Here's the thing about rape.

It's not about the sex involved. It's about the loss of power the individual feels, the complete helplessness that overcomes them as they realize they're completely powerless and have to either bend to the will of this menacing individual, and only hope to get away in one piece (read: not also murdered). It's about taking the walls an individual has built up in today's society, everything they know about how to function in a civil world, and tearing them down. Suddenly, the world's a much more brutish place, people can't be trusted, especially if they happen to have a penis, and, thanks to our culture's complete and utterly sickening fear of all things sexual, the victims feel as if they cannot convey their feelings, their experiences regarding the event, to anyone.

That's rape.

I could argue that torture's worse, in essence, it's about the same thing, but with less sex and more injury. I could, but I won't, because of one logical fallacy that everyone always forgets.

Sex is still a taboo subject.
Being cut open, and as sickening as this is, is something to brag about for some groups of people.

And as long as sex is a taboo subject, Rape will always be more difficult to go through (not to mention more of a taboo subject taboo subject taboo subject) than torture. The reason being, that rape will be much harder to recover from mentally so long as victims feel that they have nowhere to turn for help with the trauma they experienced.

That's all I have to say on the subject. We don't need more rape games. We need a game with a rape victim as the lead, and the story, nomatter what it is, told through their perspective. Games are a powerful tool of conveyance. Developers should utilize this.

 

[WouldYouKindly]

It's quite simple to me. We've all had a desire to hurt someone at some point, maybe not kill, but hurt is immensely common. Now, very few people have a desire to rape people, fortunately.

But most people have the desire to have sex, while the person object of the desire migh not want to have sex with said person.

There are hundreds of girls that post dozens of seminaked and/or sexy pictures of them on facebook, and they have public accounts or private but accept all requests, in that case, I'm not saying is right if someone rape them but if someone does i wouldn't say it wasn't 100% inevitable. I know i wish i had sex with them when i see them.

But sex, in spite of what some religions will tell you, is a completely natural and completely necessary biological function which there shouldn't be shame attached to. It doesn't serve the survival of the species if I smash the face in of the guy who just cut me off. Furthermore, you don't want to rape them, you'd like to have consensual sex with them.

Rape is extremely common in places like Saudi Arabia even though there are laws forcing what they see as modest dress. The issue is not how women dress, it's the dehumanization of women. Places where women are given full rights and there's less social stigma on their sexual activity tend to have less incidences of rape.

 

[Aureliano]

Slippery slopes and censorship. If there's a topic that cannot be written about for fear of the very real possibility of an author being accused of committing or desiring to commit the action under discussion, does that set a dangerous precedent for free speech?

The common sense argument says no, but since when have you seen common people act sensibly when it comes to censorship?

To be fair, he never advocates censorship. He even says quite explicitly he is not saying they shouldn't be made. What he's saying is it's inappropriate, in bad taste, etc. Basically he'd defend the right for someone to make a game about rape, but he wouldn't invite them home.

Think about this - the ACLU threw its weight behind the KKK and NAMBLA, not because they believe in their causes, but they believe in the right for them to speak.

To invoke an old adage: love the sinner, hate the sin. The fact that somebody has made fiction about a difficult topic does not make them a bad person. Presumably meeting them and seeing how much you like them is how you can tell whether or not you'd want to hang out with them.

 

[Ipsen]

Seems correct.

Given the circumstances, if it's you or them. You're probably going to choose to kill.

I'll stand up for the complexity of murder here and propose this question: If you're in the 'kill or be killed' scenario, who provokes it beforehand?

 

[IDBash]

AWESOME VIDEO! Just one correction, the biblical quote is "Thou shalt not murder" not thou shalt not kill... And even in that, murder is placed on the same level as adultery, as defined contextually would be sex of any kind outside of marriage, which is much less offensive as rape. The result of murder and adultery were both the death penalty by stoning at the time.

Killing injustly is murder, killing with justice, ie death penalty, war, self defense, etc, is a completely different statement. Just wanted to clarify that. And for those idiots that will argue they are the same, LOOK IT UP IN A DICTIONARY!

 

[Malty Milk Whistle]

The reference to gregor Clegane MADE this for me.

Slow clap jim!

 

[mike1921]

This is all true, but to be frank I consider rapelay a game the same way I consider everything on redtube movies, yea they fit in the medium technically but they're porn first, the medium second. I doubt of the people who enjoy rapelay, that many of them are doing it because they consider it a good game, they enjoy it because it's about their fetish, and you don't choose your fetish, which would definitely be better than looking for real world rape porn (as in with porn actors) if only because the possibility is existent (even if infinitesimal) that it's real rape, and easily better than them looking for real ,not acted out rape porn. There's lots of videos I could find that are rape porn but no one is insulting the movie industry for it

I would definitely find it distasteful if the next GTA had a section where you rape someone though. That actually makes rape blend in with what's supposed to be the fun in a way, and obviously you don't know what you're getting into. If you played rapelay and had no idea what you were getting into than I envy your purity.

 

[orangeapples]

If I want to make a new villain that is worse that is worse than all other villains combined, what what could be worse than rape?

 

[Ashoten]

See Jim you can be thoughtful when you try lol.

But seriously rape is even worse then being an animal. From everything I know about Zoology in every species it is the female that makes the ultimate choice of who to mate with and when. I am sure there are a few exceptions like for invertebrates where mating doesn't involve sex.

 

[IDBash]

And as long as sex is a taboo subject, Rape will always be more difficult to go through (not to mention more of a taboo subject taboo subject taboo subject) than torture. The reason being, that rape will be much harder to recover from mentally so long as victims feel that they have nowhere to turn for help with the trauma they experienced.

Sex has not been taboo for a long time, at least not in my family or many many families around me. Also, people have all kinds of places to turn to and are almost forced to utilize them, and I know 4 women in my family alone that will always struggle with the fact that they were raped by some old pervert.

It is a scar that will never go away on anyone it is done to and it changes their perspective forever. When you are in the bedroom you can't do certain positions because of the insuing flashbacks, you can't use certain phrases as they will cause blackouts. Murder of any kind will never give a person that as they are dead. The person committing the murder will forever have to deal with it whereas the rapist just wants more.

And you know what, while I am ranting on the subject, it does not have to do with the fact that men and women are different because rape usually occurs on underage children, both boys and girls alike. And usually rapists have to rape at least 30 children before they get caught............ So, they are definitely on different levels and will/should always stay that way.

 

[Ishigami]

Hhhmmm I'm a little confused here.
Isn't murder the act of killing a human with malice afterthought?
The way I see it Jim does not really showcase nor argue in favour of murder... he argues in favour of homicide or killing in general.

I agree though. A game where there player rapes is a horribly bad idea however I certainly also think that a game may include rape in order to develop a character or story.