If it comes down to consent, what's wrong with a 'rape simulator'? Is there a party involved in this simulator who is not consenting?

Yeah, people who don't play THAT sort of game.

Well, because rape simulator kind of drives away prospective customers and doesn't accurately describe a vast genre of video gaming. In many of the ones I've seen, read summaries of, or had people tell me about, consent is garnered a good majority of the time. When they're not, its part of the genre or it's the kind of thing most people wouldn't want anyway.

Not quite following.



Nor do Barbie Horse Princess games. You think we shouldn't let people play those either, just because they're less popular?



Consent is garnered from who precisely? The player? He consents because he's playing, and could presumably stop if he wanted. The company? If there's no consent that's not rape, it's theft. The artificial, animated character displayed on the screen, who is a series of lines of computer code? It gets no consent. It's computer code. It cannot possibly give consent, any more than a rock or my car can. So who are you talking about?

Your question was about whether we should ban handcuffs as they imply non-consent. I was merely rebutting that part of your musing. Handcuffs do not necessarily mean non-consent, they do, however, transfer quite a degree of control and choice to another party. That is not, in itself, evil.


My commentary on "rape simulators" will have to wait.

It should be noted that, while I'm not deeply familiar with the genre, "rape simulator" seems even less appropriate a monicker for eroge in which the player's avatar is able or encouraged to rape than the terming of first-person shooters as "murder simulator"; I'm not aware of any significant aspect of the experience that is realistically modeled.

Maybe "rape-oriented game" or "rape-oriented eroge"?

~J

Eroge / Dating Simulators is actually a pretty wide genre all by itself, with really no equivalent in the west (well, one could make an argument for video game text rpgs like Zork, but who plays those? ).

I'm talking off of the top of my head here, so people who are more familiar with this genre, please feel free to expand or correct me.

You've got series like the aforementioned Air, whose main focus is on the story and not on gettin' it on with the girls. In fact, later versions of the game and the series edit out most of, if not all, the porn. Same goes with Kanon, the game made by the same time prior to Air.

Then there's ones with a lot more focus on teh pornz, like Xchange (which I'm not going to hunt down a link to, because I'm writing this at work and don't feel like having sysadmins jumping all over me) but is really, really frigging silly. Basically, you're a boy turned into a girl, and you get yourself into all sorts of situations in order to change back (or you accept it; Mandy's Law of Anime Gender Bending at work). It's a mixture between consent and no consent, but it's so weird and over the top that you can ignore a lot of the ickier implications.

When I talk about consent in these situations, by the by, I mean consent in-game, between you and the pixels. Yes, it's a weird concept to roll through your head, but as computer AI increases...

And then there's Bible Black and / or Mahou Shojo Ai (I *think* I'm getting that one right, and if you think I'm linking to either of those, you're crazy) which is basically an excuse for porn, weird porn, and oh my god porn. Consent is definitely not involved in these (barring some crazy side hookups, iirc).

As Kage said, this is analogous to the FPS genre here in the west and its wide range of what's out there. There's stuff like Mirror's Edge, which advocate jumping and dodging and avoiding direct conflict, to Halo who's direct, balls on hoo-yah Marine stuff, and the Tom Clancy games, which are a lot more tactical and cerebral. They're all part of the same "genre", but they don't much resemble each other other than they're in first person and you use guns to shoot people in the face.

And before anyone accuses me of being a dirty, perverted otaku, you pick this stuff up if you're familiar with the anime subculture. Air / Kanon got a lot of attention in the west because of Megatokyo, and the other three are rather popular if you're familiar with the Site That Shall Be Named.

So...yeah.

So what's the complaint?

I gotta tell you, it's noon, I'm still burned out from a concert last night, and I could not for the life of me tell you.

Wanna just shake hands, nod sagely, and walk away? I'm good with it.

I don't know, reading about all of the eroge you keep up with, I'm a little nervous about touching your hands

(I tease, of course. Not sure what precisely we're agreeing to, but I'm happy to agree to it.)

I'm not a pervert! I just, uh, hang out on perverted websites! Like this one!

*laughs* like I said, hanging out in general among older anime fans, and you'll eventually come to know about eroges and visual novels. Air / Kanon I learned about through Megatokyo; the other I learned from 4chan (yep, I'll admit I go there). So it's not like I'm some dirty pervert! You just hear about things often enough and you'll eventually pick it up through geek osmosis.

My point is, I think that I misread what you were saying. I think I thought, in my brain addled mind yesterday morning (again: late night, went to a concert, got only three hours of sleep before going into work) that you were tarring the whole of the dating simulators with the "date rape simulators" that someone else posted about, and I tried to defend it using Kage's analogy. Did I do it well? I'm not going to go up and read through that again, because god only knows how terrible it is.

That's why I was just like, screw it, I'll tell him to agree to disagree, and wash my hands of it. And here I am now..

Oh, no, I have no problem with dating simulators. I was just wondering why people thought they should somehow be banned as being rape simulators. It didn't make sense to me either.

All right, I see where the issue came from. I interrupted an entirely seperate conversation. You can take my long-winded explanation and stick it underneath the ones where I try to explain to Wyldknight why he's being reactionary.

Anything new to report, Kage?

Aside from the fact that the protagonist has discovered that he possesses a power that cannot be restrained by clothing, not really.

I'm spending some time on the game this afternoon, though, so you might get more tidbits later

~J

Curiously enough, it seems to be organized into "episodes", and they replayed the intro movie at the start of the second one. I wonder if it was originally released piece-by-piece or if they're just doing this because they can?

Edit: now the tsundere character (the president of Russia) is calling Yukino tsundere.

(She isn't, not remotely)

~J

"Come to that, Yukino, why are you wearing a nurse's outfit?"

Now the power of the president's song has induced a bunch of orphans and nursing home residents to dance naked around a bonfire.

~J

"There we were, in front of the public, President and Vice President, getting lectured by the president of Russia. This is the world's most embarrassing sight."

~J

Heh, now they have a little break to explain that a President can't propose legislation, and so therefore influences legislation through messages that say (and I translate, roughly) "I'd kinda like things this way, maybe?".

I was aware going into the game, of course, that Japan's government resembles a parliamentary system more than it does the US government (what with a Prime Minister who is a member of the legislature), but it's funny to see little reminders that the figurehead of state being detached from the legislature is not a familiar thing to the target audience.

In other news, I think our protagonist might be getting ready to make a move on the President! They've just retired to her room (to watch anime, as it happens, but who knows where it might end up). Watch this space for updates!

~J