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Japanese ESRB Bans Rape Depiction In Games
eldavojohn writes "The Ethics Organization of Computer Software (EOCS), now 233 companies strong, and met in Tokyo yesterday to ban a controversial title from Japan known as RapeLay, an eroge game (something much more adult than the more popular dating simulators). It's gotten a lot of press as reviewers have noted at one point the player must force sex on a 12-year-old. More importantly, the large ($353 million annually) adult game industry in Japan will now need to stay away from rape in their games if they wish to remain a member of EOCS. RapeLay seems to be available on Amazon's UK and JP sites, sparking outrage and causing a former US Ambassador to Japan to write an editorial criticizing Japan, saying, 'Only Japan allows people to possess these hideous images without penalty. Six of the G-7 countries have found ways to protect the innocent from being prosecuted for possession of child pornography. Is it not time for Japan to find a way to punish the guilty?' Singapore's Straits Times has more details, pointing out that it's still not illegal to possess these materials in Japan. We discussed this and other games last month in an editorial."
Damn, the torrenting of this game is gonna skyrocket after the article. Teh forbidden fruit in action.
Because oh no, those poor imaginary cartoon characters need judicial protection!
Won't someone think of the imaginary children?
Since when has Slashdot trumpeted fascism? Now we're cheering outlawing things because they're offensive?
wellbeing of fictional 12-year-old? who cares!
rape game is disturbing, but hardly hurting anyone.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
Raping a character in a video game is no more real than killing said character. At what point will we become liable for murder when playing a shooter? Put simply:
There's no crime here, asshole. The only thing anyone is guilty of here, is pandering.
You know, there are many routes one can go to ban violent sexual video games/porn like this, and I'm not sure if I agree with the rational involved here. More or less, everything I've heard politicians spew (appropriate verb) about this stuff is basically "It causes people to go out and rape." Much like the dodgy connection between violent video games and real life violence (anecdotal evidence non-withstanding), I don't really buy it. Especially since each individual culture seems to have entirely different responses to various social laws. As a good example, banning guns in the US causes violent crime rates to rise (see: Washington DC), but Japan has far less of an issue, where guns have more or less been illegal for civilians since WWII. (Side note: I have not checked these numbers recently. Don't bother picking them out, it's an illustration that could rapidly be replaced with another to make the same point. Forrest for the trees and all that).
On a different note though, one of my professors had a very good reason to ban violent pornography, without going for the correlation link (which he bought into anyways. Professors are human after all). We had just finished reading J.S. Mills' On LIberty, which more or less states that "The only reason to abridge a person's personal freedom is harm to others. Moral disgust is not an adequate reason to stop someone, unless if they are going to harm someone else directly or indirectly (Say, if by being an alcoholic they are incapable of parental duties, etc)." His point was, if this pornographic material spreads the ideology that women are sexual objects existing only for men's pleasure, which causes women to self-censor themselves and their ideas due to peer pressure, fear, or general brain washing, then it must be banned.
But, politicians aren't arguing this, because they don't actually care about freedom, they care about making it look like they're doing something in order to ensure re-election. Because 90% of "concerned" parents in the suburbs are going to say "Rape is bad, rape games depict rape, so it must enforce rape, and this politician banning rape games must be fighting rape! Vote for him!" And we just helped him too, by the way.
Let's go back to the old NES days. The only thing that ever made people do was eat mushrooms and beat the shit outta turtles. Those were the days, young prepubescent CGI girls could safely wander the streets.
90% of video games involve depictions of violent crime, murder, war. Most people (with obvious exceptions, Jack Thompson), accept that they are FICTION.
Argue that these are disgusting, encourage degradation of women: don't say that they are in themselves criminal.
"Punish the guilty". Nice turn of phrase. Just declare something you don't like is criminal, assume anyone charged with looking at it is "guilty", and proceed directly to punishment.
Perhaps this US ambassador should consider the comparitive figures for actual rape of real people who really exist in America and Japan.
Surely this difference is far too big to be explained purely as a reporting bias. 34.20 compared to 1.48 per 100,000 people, first figures I found. It's pretty clear that giving potential rapists the ability to do so in a fictional environment where they do not hurt any real people is a good way of making them less likely to do it for real. "Don't hurt anyone, that would be bad" is a better way of getting people not to hurt anyone than "revealing your fantasies makes you damned whether you hurt anyone or not."
If it is ok to murder in games it should be OK to rape. Nothing wrong with it, and I have no reason to be anonymous!
This is something I've never understood. Why is it OK for a PG-13 type game to have the player mowing down hundreds of realistic-looking human enemies with an automatic rifle, but the moment there's any sexual content whatsoever the game is banned and there's a moral panic? Take the Hot Coffee GTA mod for example, the game is all about killing people and blowing shit up, and then there's an outcry over a scene where adults have consensual relations?
I'm not condoning actual rape in any form, but surely a simulation of such a thing running on someone's computer can't be worse than an equally detailed simulation of killing and then dismembering someone with a chainsaw? In extreme cases, it may even be a way for sexual misfits to satisfy their urges without harming actual, living people, letting them be functional members of society.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Length or magnitude of UID# does not correlate with either age, intelligence or maturity, only length of time since the registration on /.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
And what's the reason behind this, now? The ban on child porn is, rightfully so, assumed to protect the kids that are used in the material.
If we disconnect rape from the consumption of media, which is a good idea IMO, and there is no victim in drawn childporn... what reason remains to ban it?
I'm normally not a fan of government getting their tentacles into everything but I suppose in this instance turnabout is fair play.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
In order for something to be a crime, it must be demonstrated that it causes harm, suffering, or loss. There has to be a victim. Now, the victim could be argued to be society as a whole, but I've not seen any actual proof that rape games make people rape or violent games make people violent.
I have played the game mentioned in TFA out of curiosity. It was linked to on a forum I frequent. It wasn't disturbing to me at all because I took it for what it is: fiction. Fictional depictions of death don't disturb me either, and I think any reasonable person would consider death worse than rape.
Rape is terrible, so is murder. Those crimes are even more disturbing and tragic when they happen to children. But that's not these people are arguing against. Raping children (or anyone) is ALREADY illegal. The opponents of this game are not arguing against rape, they are arguing against free speech but are confusing the debate by painting the other side as being pro-rape. Stop confusing the issue and argue on the facts. You are talking about banning a form of expression. What is being expressed is a terrible thing, yes, but freedom of speech doesn't just protect things you find agreeable. Polite speech doesn't require protection.
Censorship is always worse than what is being censored.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
If they ban all games/movies/comics/books where someone gets killed, a very small subset of all will remain. But still, if you are worried about rape you should be more about killing.
I think pretending we don't have these fantasies is unhealthy, and someone repressing their sexual feelings probably contributes to an inability to channel their more violent desires into harmless channels. If the thought of raping a schoolgirl turns you on - buy your wife a uniform and play together. More likely than not (55% chance) she's into the same thing.
IMHO: Fantasizing about rape is no more likely to make you a rapist, than reading SF novels will make you an astronaut.
Simply to arrest the people who want to view it as a preventative to keep them from acting out those fantasies.
Maybe it's because Japan has one of the lowest rape per capita countries.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_percap-crime-rapes-per-capita
Hence the need to relief these urges virtually. That would be a good thing, no??
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
Nice job. This is what I always say as well. I love GTA, but am absolutely against real violence. I've never been in a fight, always preferring to find a peaceful way out. I certainly don't steal cars and use them to run over pedestrians, despite that being one of my giddy pleasures in GTA (GTA is satire, folks).
I'll go one up, though.
I've actually played the game in question, to see what the fuss was about.
It's the silliest, most pathetic thing I've ever seen. It's not even fun. It's not even funny. It's just dumb. It didn't make me want to feel 12-year-olds up on the train; it made me want to geek-slap whatever losers thought it up. I suspect that the only people who play it are the creepy shut-in otakus that populate the greasy periphery of Japanese culture. They hate women because they haven't figured out that being unwashed, boring, and lacking any interest in society doesn't really result in chicks flocking to your door.
There is no reason to ban much of anything. I'm all about coming down like the wrath of god on people who abuse children and/or take pictures of it, but I can't see how those pictures make the problem worse. I think that we all get pissed off at what is represented in those pictures and in games like this, and, lacking an appropriate outlet, we go after the easy target: the people who have the stuff. It's ridiculous, even when we're talking about actual images of actual people.
If we want child pornography to be illegal (we do!), then you go after the people who make it. If we want drugs to be illegal (we do--for some of them), then we need to go after the people who provide them. If we want to determine some entertainment to be obscene (I don't have a problem with that, actually), then, once again, we really only need to concern ourselves with those who produce it. All these arguments that people consuming or possessing these things we don't like is the problem because it leads to this, that, and the other are bunk, as far as I can tell. It's just a lot easier to find these people, because there are so many of them, so it looks like something is being done.
What's being done, however, is a bunch of probably-harmless losers getting their lives ruined and then forced to live on the public dime in jail. It's ridiculous. Even more so when we're talking about cartoon people.
Indeed. I can't count how often I've thought of strangling my boss. If it becomes a crime to even imagine having sex with a kid, then, logically, it would have to become a crime to have fantasies about killing your boss, too.
Then we'd have to get death penalty instated around the globe for we just cannot build all the prisons we'd need then.
There're some things that Tux should just not be involved with... *shudder*
"Those who have those urges towards children may feel prodded seeing the depicted acts to try them in the real world."
Research suggests otherwise. People need a harmless and legal outlet for their urges; for teleiophilic adults, options include sex with another consenting adult or adult pornography for those who can't find a partner. For paedophiles, the already short list of harmless and legal outlets is becoming ever shorter due to the moral crusaders who seek to ban everything which they find offensive. Shotacon/lolicon are one of the few outlets which are still legally available in some countries (although cartoons are quickly being criminalised). If you ban everything which may arouse paedophiles, you'll be left with people who simply ignore the law or people who are dangerously bitter, angry and hostile towards society.
Policy advisors would benefit from actually doing research with responsible paedophiles rather than making assumptions about the effects of certain stimuli. Listening to childrens' charities is a huge mistake, as charities have a motivation to make things worse in order to encourage further donations from naive, shallow citizens.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
Are you sure? Going after dealers only increases the risk, which increases the price , which increases the reward, which increases the violence.
The drug issue, as with child porn (and violent porn, and to some extent porn in general) is more complicated than anyone seems willing to admit.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Experienced tentacle monster. Will rape for food.
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