Hell’s Toy Store
By Pat Racimora on April 19, 2009 at 9:25 AM in Current Affairs
OK, my cartoon illustration is largely the figment of my darker imagination, but one of the games actually exists. And it gives new clarity to the term “disgusting.” Can you guess which one it is?
Maybe I am getting old, but when I was a little kid Monopoly was the most aggressive game you could buy. I also recall running around outdoors every day until our mothers called us in for dinner.
Today, videogame simulations rule. Pale-faced children (mostly boys) spend hours alone in darkened rooms during daylight hours chasing and shooting everything from human-looking foes to alien creatures (who also look human, save for their hue, extra bumps and knobs, and dermatological issues). The realism is increasingly stunning. It’s like being there.
Rapelay, developed in Japan and not sold in the United States, allows the player to stalk three women (who don’t look particularly Japanese). However, thanks to clever pirates, downloads are available on the Internet that have been translated into English. If you enter “Rapelay” into Google, you get a half million hits.
The action is not pretty. Here is a descriptive clip by “Zigfried” :
After several painfully tedious minutes, the poor girl runs away in fright, presumably to tattle to the police, a neighbor, or a Junker. Unfortunately, all three women choose to run somewhere secluded where it’s easy to pin them down, tear off their clothes, and anally rape them. There are other options too, such as coerced blowjobs, but none of them are consensual. It all boils down to raping women and jizzing into or across their bodies.
“Sniff… sniff… I w-w-want to die…”
That’s the kind of dialogue you’ll hear after each rape. Then you’ll either snap some quick photographs of their desecrated bodies or rape them again to shut them up. RapeLay contains a lot of rape.
I don’t want to keep going on with this, but if you are interested, Leigh Alexander wrote a well-done review of Rapelay in its cultural context. Alexander’s conclusion after playing the game:
In fan forums, the feedback on RapeLay is as creepy as the game’s premise–”hours of fun,” one user posted. After downloading and playing the game myself, I would have to disagree with that review–a more accurate assessment might be “hours of getting depressed about the fate of humankind.”
Whether Rapelay encourages players to seek out and mimic an actual assault remains an open question. Research reveals that violent pornography does trigger acting-out in some people. The bigger issue is the power of desensitization, and that can overpower anyone. Being exposed to anything over and over again blunts any emotional impact or moral outrage it might have had earlier on.
As for the other games pictured, I pray they stay buried deep in the basement of my own head. When rape, torture, and killing become “ho hum” we will surely have lost all of our humanity.
























