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.Jimothy Sterling said: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.
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."