Are there really any issues games shouldn’t touch?
Lewis Denby July 25, 2012 - 1:00 pmFeature: From rape to religion, games that tackle serious issues come under a lot of scrutiny – and often find themselves in the firing line. But should this be the case? We explore games’ fear of the taboo, and look at five games that didn’t shy away from the big topics.
Lara Croft doesn’t get raped in Tomb Raider – someone on the team just got a bit confused, and dropped 2012′s biggest gaming bombshell that turned out not to be true. Instead, should you fail to fend off attackers in this particular scene, she gets murdered. No harm done.
But games do murder all the time. In fact, you could argue that murder is our favourite pastime – the sport that attracts the masses to our peculiar hobby. We gun down foe after foe without second thought, but when the other awful crime rears its head? Nope! Games have gone too far.
There are a couple of obvious reasons for this, of course. Firstly, if you are the victim of a rape, you must endure that for the rest of your life; if you have been murdered, you are dead. This glosses over the horrendous agony that the person’s friends and family will feel, certainly, but it’s still an argument worth noting. And secondly, rape has to do with sex, and sex is – despite pretty much everyone doing it and understanding that it’s fine – an act that’s still a curious taboo in our culture. Combine a taboo with such an awful act, and you’ve got your recipe for controversy when it comes to injecting it into the media.
FIVE GAMES THAT DIDN’T SHY AWAY…
1. The Binding of Isaac
WHAT IT TACKLED: Religion, and the things people do in its name.
WHAT HAPPENED: Nintendo wouldn’t release it, citing “questionable religious content”, but everyone else seemed unfazed – the creativity of the game itself garnered far more chatter than its choice to ask questions of religion.
But literature, film and even theatre can cover the likes of rape without much of an uproar. Maybe this is because they’re considered more valid forms of artistic expression, or platforms from which it’s okay to make statements. But that only explains why outsiders would consider it strange that a videogame might dare to include a rape scene.
Far more problematic than the possibility of Lara Croft being raped were accompanying comments which suggested this was so you’d want to “protect” Lara. Again, it seemed in the end to be nothing more than an unfortunate choice of words than anything more malicious – but that the gaming populace jumped on the alleged rape itself, rather than the troubling dialogue surrounding it, is something I found interesting.
FIVE GAMES THAT DIDN’T SHY AWAY…
2. The Path
WHAT IT TACKLED: Possibly the sexual abuse of children, although only very abstractly. Death and the nature of maturity, most certainly.
WHAT HAPPENED: A few mainstream outlets got wind of this artsy indie game and decided it was a game about raping children, which it definitely wasn’t. The Path caused just as much of a stir by being an abstract art game sold on Steam, though.
Are we saying that games – the things we hold so dearly – should not be subject to the same creative freedoms as other media? This certainly seemed to be the attitude behind an article I read earlier today, which began by saying games should be able to tackle any issues they wish before selecting five that they probably shouldn’t.
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Comments (9)
Completely agree. There are plenty of touchy issues which absolutely should be addressed by art, and I see no reason why gaming should be excluded from that.
As someone who played part of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! it always annoyed me when people said it was glorifying the events that happened at Columbine High School. The fact that when your character dies in the game they end up in hell, was always ignored. Plus the tone of language used in the game is pretty sarcastic – it was obvious how disgusted the game’s creators were of the two young men that committed the original, devastating act plus the media’s reaction to them.
The thing is that there’s still this idea in the minds of people who don’t play games that games are intended to be played only by young children. Besides, getting people to confront these issues ‘first-hand’ makes the impact seemingly more intense.
The “argument” of rape being worse than murder is rather perverse. If you seriously believe that a rapist murdering his victim afterwards would be some kind of a mercy, you are a sick individual.
As a female gamer, I agree completely with everything that was said, including the feminism bit. There is such thing as ‘too little’ and ‘too much’, and that applies to feminism too.
I also love books and I love art, and I don’t see why games can’t be used to address touchy subjects like the ones mentioned above, too. Maybe it’s because instead of reading about someone committing the act of rape, YOU instead are the one doing it, and I guess that does make a difference. You can either learn from the experience, as the makers of the Super Columbine Massacre RPG! intended, or you can take it from a different perspective and think it’s encouraging you to do all those things. In my opinion, it all comes down to who you are and how you think.
I thought this was a very good article, I think it can be very persuasive to someone who is touchy about these things
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Well, the main difference is that killing be it people or animals may serve a positive purpose, accepted by society, in case of animals, for food, clothing and materials, in case of people mainly to protect or to punish.
So, as such whether the act of killing is good or bad depends on the motive, so we can lie to ourselves and get ourselves to think that the act itself is just or necessary.
Even in Mortal Kombat: You kill the other guy because unless you kill him, he kills you. So, if you want to survive, you better rip out that spinal column to make sure he doesn’t get back up again… You get my point.
Rape on the other hand (in Western societies that is) can never serve a positive purpose. You don’t save person A by raping person B, rape is not an accepted form of punishment and you don’t put somebody out of their misery by raping them.It is always a selfish act at the expense of another person. Even torture as horrible as it is, can be argued to serve a positive purpose in certain cases.
So, I think it is not that hard to graps, why society has a much larger problem with rape than murder.
However, this does not explain, why in the US showing an exposed boob is widely considered worse than a headshot with brains splattering. That to me is sexual repression. They rape thing I get completely
I clicked on this link, thinking I would find Rule of Rose. I love it. But unfortunately, not as a game. It tackled PTSD for a child and even sexual abuse.
As a person who majored in psychology, that was one of the most realistic portrayals of childhood trauma and it also shows how, if a child is given control without supervision, would be so cruel. It’s like how JM Barrie described Peter Pan: He will never grow up, and without an authority figure to tell him right or wrong, would not be able to feel sympathy for murder. Also, like the Lord of the Flies.
Childhood trauma at it’s finest.
I clicked on this link, thinking I would find Rule of Rose. I love it. But unfortunately, not as a game. would love it as a movie though. It tackled PTSD for a child and even sexual abuse.
As a person who majored in psychology, that was one of the most realistic portrayals of childhood trauma and it also shows how, if a child is given control without supervision, would be so cruel. It’s like how JM Barrie described Peter Pan: He will never grow up, and without an authority figure to tell him right or wrong, would not be able to feel sympathy for murder. Also, like the Lord of the Flies.
Childhood trauma at it’s finest.