21st August, 2009: Virtual Rape: What Interfaces Mean to Games
So, blog… long time no see. How about we talk about rape, then? What an icebreaker.
You’ll have to forgive the slightly obnoxious title, but let me explain. I would like to address the issue of “virtual rape games”, in the context of thinking about video game interfaces. Now I shouldn’t even have to preface this by saying that as a female, and more importantly, as a normally-functioning human being, I find rape absolutely despicable beyond words. I’m also someone that generally does not believe in censorship. Whilst I do accept rape as a theme that can be explored in media, I would argue that it should only be done under careful circumstances. Whilst that’s my personal opinion however, it’s not necessarily one I am trying to assert in this post. Rather, I’d like to offer a different approach to looking at the topic, and one that hopefully provokes some further thought.
Violence and Kinaesthetic Mimicry
Let’s step back a bit: I was originally going to write an entry much like this a while ago; it was in the context of the fact that I found out have a chapter appearing in the forthcoming book: “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play” (It’ll be my first ‘proper’ publication, I am excited). There’ll be two volumes of this book published in 2010, and appearing in the second will be my chapter, tentatively entitled “How Games Can Touch You”. In it, I discuss the ethics of video game interfaces, and what the nature of the interface means to the game.
What does this mean exactly? Take the classic example (as I do in my book chapter) of Manhunt 2; it was banned by the BBFC, and garnered much controversy because the extreme violence was further exacerbated by the fact that it is playable on the Wii. Thanks to the motion-controlled Wii remote, the game therefore employs kinaesthetic mimicry: the player would have to enact violent acts such as garrotting, stabbing, castrating etc, rather than simply ‘pushing buttons’. Would the game have garnered the same amount of controversy if it had been developed solely for a non-kinaesthetic controller? Hilary Clinton et. al certainly seemed to have most issue with this particular aspect of the game, stating: “you’re basically teaching a child the behavioral sequencing of killing.” Meanwhile, the BBFC wrote of the game that it offers: “exceptionally little alleviation or distancing”. The term ‘distancing’ here is important in thinking about embodiment – a concept best explained by noting that when driving a car, a person essentially identifies themselves and the vehicle as one and the same – an oft given example, is when talking about being one’s car being hit, it is usual to say ‘they hit me’, rather than ‘they hit my car’. When we’re playing a game, we also feel a sense of embodiment.
So, do gestural interfaces grant us a stronger sense of player embodiment? Microsoft would certainly seem to think so, what with Natal being touted as “a huge leap forward in terms of the immersive and cinematic nature of gaming.” (Oh, that wonderful term: immersion…).
The Persuasive Controller
As well as arguably affording this greater sense of embodiment, the nature of an interface can also dictate how a game is played; in this sense, interfaces can be persuasive. What an interface looks like, and its perceived affordances in the player’s mind dictates their mental model of how the game should be played. Therefore, it is possible to purposefully use the control mechanism to design meaningful play experiences.
This is where the question of ethical responsibility comes into action: can interfaces actually dictate the moral decisions made by players? Imagine, if you will, the abstract example of a game which offers two courses of action – rather simplistically, let’s say, either being able to win by killing enemies, or taking a more pacifist course of action, such as sneaking around, or even being diplomatic (such a scenario is obviously very common in games). One can imagine that when faced with a kinaesthetic interface, it would be more tempting to take an active visceral action, such as shooting, slashing etc, versus simply remaining inactive. Such a temptation could be further exacerbated in a social play situation, where there is somewhat of an added social pressure to perform. Of course, such a situation can be also reversed; a game may instead offer a greater wealth of interactive possibility for having to perform a pacifist action versus a violent one, thus making this a more appealing course of action. For example, a designer could create the game so that being ‘stealthy’ is more kinaesthetically engaging and rewarding. Obviously there are several delicately-balanced factors to consider too, such as the relative difficulty of each action and the play-styles of the players themselves. However, as the nature of the controller affects the player’s mental model of the game and consequently, affects the choices the player may make in the game: this potentially provides the scope for influencing player actions towards certain choices over others; the choice of control mechanism itself thus potentially has persuasive powers.
Changing the Interface
This ability of interfaces to change the way a game is played is obvious when we think about existing games which use ‘traditional’ interfaces. Leigh Alexander wrote a Kotaku article in which Maxis’ Chris Hecker states: “Would Ico be better if you had to stand up and yell and hold out your arm all the time? … Is raise-your-left-hand-and-shake-it any more meaningful or accessible than push-the-triangle-button?” Interestingly, the example of Ico is also addressed by Gregerson & Grodal in their chapter in The Video Games Theory Reader 2 (2009). Imagine a Wii version of Ico in which you had to “bat the smoke monsters”. A kinaesthetic interface, which represents a wooden stick within the game, would alter the player’s mental model to shift the emphasis on the ‘fighting’ mechanic, and would perhaps lose the wider perspective afforded by the more ‘ambiguous’ traditional interface. Furthermore, the “the highly arbitrary mapping nature of the PS2 controller makes sure that the actions of the player and avatar stay detached”, so a kinaesthetic interface would perhaps lose the emotional aesthetics of the game which deal with “solitude, bonding, and attachment”.
Indeed, as well as Leigh’s article, I was rather glad to see, in the wake of the E3 announcement of Natal (and all the other interface one-upmanship that followed), that there was some good discussion going on regarding interfaces. This is important, and needs to happen more. One such example was the eminent Ian Bogost’s post on Gamasutra entitled “Persuasive Games: Gestures as Meaning”, in which he addresses the question of interface in the context of Brenda Brathwaite’s Train game.
Back to Virtual Rape
So, why rape, then? No, I’m not just being sensationalist, but it occurred to me recently, after reading Jim Sterling’s recent piece on Destructoid reviewing the controversy around the game “RapeLay”, that this subject is, perhaps, the perfect test case for my assertion that the interface matters to the game, and has a potentially enormous ethical impact. (Edit: Reading about the game Edmund was also a contributing factor to these thoughts, thanks for reminding me, Ian.)
For some background, here is how the Telegraph described the game when they covered the surrounding controversy:
“In Rapelay, gamers direct a character to sexually assault a mother and her two young daughters at an underground station, before raping any of a selection female characters… Rapelay, which was released in 2006, encourages players to force the virtual woman they rape to have an abortion. If they are allowed to give birth the woman throws the player’s character under a train, according to reviews of the game. It also has a feature allowing several players to team up against individual women.”
Now, there are those that would argue (Sterling included) that virtual rape games have a right to exist – this seems to generally boil down to either a dislike for censorship, or, rather prevalently, the argument that games are a valid form of media, of ‘art’. If rape is allowed to be addressed in (once-banned) films such as A Clockwork Orange, then why not in games, a medium that many of us are striving to be taken seriously, and thus, should be able to tackle adult material?
The question of whether RapeLay is ‘valid’ in its right to exist or not becomes ever-blurrier when you consider questions of interface: what would happen if this game was played with a kinaesthetic controller? What if, hypothetically, it was a game for the Wii (or was modded to play with a Wii controller), or another gestural interface. Could one imagine this game with Natal, even? So the process of raping a girl was kinaesthetically acted out? This therefore ventures further into the territory of a full-on ‘rape simulator’; would the undoubted public hysteria that would ensue be justified in such a case? If such a game were to be designed thus, is it then still the same principle of ‘artistic expression’ as a movie or a book with a rape scene?
I realise that this is a complex issue which raises complex questions, and there are many points of discussion here that I have not ventured into, but I really wanted to make this point about the impact – and in particular, the ethical impact – of the video game interface. I will be discussing these issues and many more in the aforementioned forthcoming book chapter, which I’ll no doubt post more about in due course.
I’d like to know your thoughts.
Posted at 10:52 pm | View Comments
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