A note on the use of rape in video games

A few days ago, a…umm, a discussion of sorts…was happening about whether or not games exploit rape, because the use of rape in games is briefly mentioned in this Nightline story that had just aired, and because Hotline Miami 2 was effectively banned in Australia due to a rape scene. In response to some people saying that games do not exploit rape, I tweeted these:

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A lot of people responded asking me if I think that rape should be off-limits for games, or asking me what I mean when I say that games exploit rape. And no, I don’t think that rape should be off-limits; I just think it’s a topic that needs to be handled seriously and responsibly, and that by and large, games have no interest in engaging with rape in a truly serious way. 

Instead, it is sometimes used as environmental texture, an easy and sensationalistic way of saying “The world of this game is a rough and ugly place where bad men do brutal and horrifying things to women and that’s just the way it is.”   

Depictions like this essentially present rape as “normal.” This is simply a thing that men inevitably do to women. Yes, they present rape as “bad,” but only as a way to make you hate the men doing it, which is often followed up by you responding to their violent act with more violence, killing them, delivering the game’s version of justice. These games generally aren’t concerned with presenting the women who are raped as human beings we should fully empathize with, nor are they remotely concerned with seriously considering the tremendous emotional and psychological effects of rape. And of course, because they are employing rape as a device to add texture to their worlds rather than as something to be seriously examined, interrogated and challenged, there is no critique present, no exploration of the cultural forces that contribute to the prevalence of such violence. It is just a device that is being used to generate a particular effect. That’s all it is.

It’s also a problem that our relationship with rape in games–the threat of it, the implication of it or its clear occurrence–is usually as a playable male character, while the person actually being raped or threatened with rape is usually a female character. 

In Metal Gear Solid, Solid Snake and Liquid Snake have their manliest man shirtless punchfight contest on top of a massive walking tank and then Solid Snake, as the victor, gets to rescue Meryl. Meryl says of her ordeal, “It wasn’t that bad. I didn’t give in to the torture…and things even worse than that.”

You play as Snake in Metal Gear Solid, and your relationship with this event is not as something that has been done to you but as something that has been done to a woman Snake wants to protect. By focusing so overwhelmingly on the experiences of men, games, like movies but perhaps to an even greater extent, reinforce the widespread notion that everyone should be able to project themselves onto and empathize with the experiences of men, that these experiences are universal, but that it is strange for men to truly be able to project themselves onto women and empathize with their experiences as human beings. This viewing of female experience as inherently other becomes explicitly clear when male public figures, in condemning instances of sexual assault and rape, often say things like “I wouldn’t want that to happen to my daughter/sister.” They can put themselves in the shoes of a man whose female relative has suffered sexual violence and understand that pain, but often can’t express direct empathy for the victimized woman herself. 

When games like Metal Gear Solid employ rape as a narrative device, they do so at a remove. If we are upset at all by what has happened, it is because we identify with Snake’s failure as the hero to be able to protect Meryl and prevent this from happening, not because we empathize with what Meryl has been through. 

MGS also completely glosses over the tremendous emotional and psychological pain of rape (and torture!); Meryl seems to simply suck it up and carry on with her life. Just as bad, if not worse, is the fact that Ocelot, who orders or allows or commits (probably commits) the offscreen actions Meryl has suffered, is a “bad guy” but not one players are meant to look down upon as some shameful excuse for a human being. Instead, he is a celebrated character, a “badass,” charismatic villain. 

In responding to my tweets, many people essentially said, “Rape happens in real life, shouldn’t games be able to deal with that?” And yes, I suppose they should, though any game that was seriously interested in confronting rape would, I think, be emotionally challenging, would ask us to empathize directly with a victim of rape, and would honestly confront the emotional and psychological effects that can accompany being raped. 

Let’s not kid ourselves that games like Metal Gear Solid and Metro: Last Light are using rape in a responsible and meaningful way. They just participate in the longstanding video game tradition of victimizing women to easily generate an emotional response or to lend texture to their worlds and try to convince us that we are playing mature and serious games.