Split-Screen :: The Game-Geek’s Daily Read

It’s been going on for months. Illusion Soft’s Rapelay was released in 2006 but has been in the spotlight of controversy after some one posted it on Amazon. Lo and behold as British Parliament MP Keith Vaz declares his devotion towards preventing any commercial sale of Rapelay outside Japan (though a quick peek at any torrent site reveals it’s availability). It’s easy to be offended by a game whose concept revolves around raping a family of women, one of them being much below the age of consent. But the controversy and subsequent banning of Rapelay is especially ironic when you take into consideration the amount of explicit “fantasy” material that actually reaches the mainstream. And we sure as hell aren’t talking about Illusion Soft’s very own Battle Raper series.

Hirayasu Sato’s Naked Blood (1995) underscores this point perfectly. A scientist slips three women an experimental drug that reroutes nerve sensations to convert physical pain into sexual pleasure. From then on, each woman fulfills her own personal desire through increasingly grotesque methods of self-mutilation and cannibalism. A cult movie that you may never get your hands on unlike any Saw or Hostel, right? Wrong. It can be procured from Netflix without much effort. Yes, the very same Netflix that partnered with Microsoft almost a year ago to instantly stream movies and TV shows via Xbox LIVE. Macabre, sexually disturbing and easily available to children – check, check and check.

Then there’s Shigurui: Death Frenzy, a 2007 anime of vengeance and sword-fighting. Like all samurai properties, buckets of blood and nudity is the name of the game. However, Shigurui takes the violence to a whole other realm of suffering. One scene in the first episode itself depicts a man ripping his guts out from an abdominal wound, said guts rendered with cutting edge visuals. It also takes a page out of Naked Blood’s book with it’s mutilation of the female body and subsequent cannibalism portions. In 2009, it’s gotten a full DVD and Blu-ray (the PS3′s media format) release with sizable adverts adorning major anime sites. Let’s not even start on the amount of sensationalist crud flourishing on our news channels these days, weeks, months and years.

The number of examples are large, tolerated and marketed. The entire mass media market is flooded with the most lucid depictions of disturbia this side of snuff. Does going about simply banning these franchises curtail interest in them? Small fries like Rapelay can easily be thumped on by bored politicians, town-criers and activists alike. They can be used to condemn all of gaming for it’s effects on children. The truth of the matter, however, is that sex and violence is available in hundreds of other places and backed by the most powerful sponsors. So any one who associates pain, suffering and sexist violence with video games, let them dissociate the same from other media, go home, look in the mirror, foolishly convince themselves that it’s “just a movie” and act entertained for the sake of cash and brain cells they’ll never get back.