Not RapeLay. More like what my head does every time RapeLay comes up on the internet.
I’d heard of this game once before, sometime last year, I think–my initial and instinctive reaction was revulsion, of course, and it was the same this time when I came across it again–
But, I thought, for some reason this time impelled to actually analyze my feelings…why am I so revolted? The reason I actually felt moved to give it more thought this time round was because of a recent few minutes I spent watching my older son play Fallout 3.
I absolutely loved the first two Fallout games, and if I weren’t still deeply inmeshed in World of Warcraft, would no doubt have been all over it as soon as I gave it to my son this past Christmas (with a small token pause in my headlong rush in acknowledgement of the fact that I bought it for him, not me!). Naturally, by this time he’s already played it through more than once, but he was feeling at loose ends the other day and decided to give it another run, and I sat and watched him play for a little while.
If you haven’t played Fallout 3 yourself yet, lemme tell you–some of those deaths are gory. The Fallout 3 graphic captioning this post is actually not the most grotesque end your various foes in the game can come to at your hands–and just like the earlier games, you can target specific body parts, but unlike the previous games, the special effects graphics are really state-of-the-art when it comes to depicting the mayhem subsequently wrought. I was simultaneously fascinated and repelled, and it came back to haunt me later–why am I so up-in-arms about a videogame displaying cruel and graphic rape and yet relaxed enough about a game that displays cruel and graphic murder enough to buy it for my son for Christmas..? After all, I even consider murder a worse crime than rape–murder is the worst crime there is. Any other crime committed against your person, the chance always exists, however great or slight, that you may someday recover some to all of your quality of life. When you’re murdered, guaranteed! you will never get over that.
After some brow-furrowing thought, I managed to boil the salient differences between the two games down to three points:
1. The point of the game: Fallout 3 is not Murder 3. The object of the game is not simply to murder as many different people as possible, one after the other. In RapeLay, the object of the game is simply to rape, period. In Fallout 3, the player is trying to complete the main and side storylines present in the game–generally rescuing person A or finding site B or recovering important object C–the killing is also frequently in self-defense or in defense of others. In RapeLay, the player is there to rape every member of a specific family that crosses his path; there are no storylines to complete and certainly nobody that can be saved by the rapes committed–quite the opposite; the goal is to torture them all until they break.
2. The specificity of the victims: Fallout 3 is not Klansman 3. The people that are killed are of every race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation–those attributes are generally cosmetic only and quite irrelevant to the point of whatever storyline the player is engaged upon. Now, it would be quite different if the player was portrayed as white and every single person the player could kill was portrayed as black, wouldn’t it? In RapeLay, the player is there solely to assault females. Women. Girls. Period. The violence presented is aimed solely and only towards one specific subgroup of humanity.
3. The age of the victims: Fallout 3 is not Pedophile 3. As a matter of fact, in Fallout 3, you can’t kill kids at all. There are child characters, but they are unkillable. By contrast, in RapeLay, you are specifically encouraged to rape, I quote, “virgin schoolgirls.” ‘Nuff said.
Rape culture, anyone..?
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