Someone once observed that the idea of being a teenager is a relatively recent concept; an idea that was born out of the increasing prosperity of the Western world, and more than a little by the creation of a new popular culture that catered to the market of moneyed teenagers. It's why you don't see six-year olds hawking newspapers and smoking cigarettes on the streets of New York City today, and more than a little it's been responsible for the very unusual trend of pop culture being age-categorized, and eventually growing up or being rediscovered to respectability. After all, we're the generation where toys went from "he'll grow out of those" to Todd McFarlane museum-quality collectibles, and animation-ghetto Saturday morning cartoons are being re-released on slick-covered DVDs to cater to the grown-up market.
One of the things that's relatively new is the academic interest in pop culture. That's really really recent, especially anything that goes into analysis, theory, or philosophy instead of straight histories and biographies. It's a weird mix because I don't think the people that want to talk about these things like grown-ups have quite gotten over the mindset of treating their material as, well, just another book or body of literature. So we get things like New Critical Essays on H. P. Lovecraft and Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore, both books that have their vital fluid pumping organ in about the right place, but both of which are also rather off the mark and full of shit that people wrote to get published with trendy buzzwords rather than have any sort of deep insight or do the fucking research.
Until now, I haven't seen a comparable effort for gaming - Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress and
Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Dungeons & Dra​gons: One Woman's Quest to Trade Self-Help for Elf-Help by Shelly Mazzanoble are rather twee works where Shelly seems to assume that having a pair of ovaries is a good substitute for a set of brains, and Sex, Dice, and Gamer Chicks by Johnny Nexus and James Desborough is rather more of the same - these people, having been in the gaming scene for years and with some talent for writing, assume that they have something worthwhile to say on the subject, but mostly they just offer some rather stale observations and anecdotes. Unlike real academics, they have no real analytic tools at their disposal, and mistake anecdotes and generalized statements for serious grown-up talk about sex and gaming.
Okay, just to be fair: I hate Johnny Nexus because I suffered through his terrible novel Game Night, so that might be affecting my evaluation of his bit.
10% of the profits from this book go to the EFF, which is weird but I support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so that's part of the reason I finally bought this.
Introduction: Reflections on Game Rape, Feminism, Sadomasochism, And SelfhoodIf Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.
~ Marcus Brigstocke
...Okay, the title isn't really making me look forward to this, but let's see where is goes. The writer is Clarisse Thorn, one of the editors, whose little bio-piece here let's us know that she's a feminist S&M writer who has worked for both traditional print journalism and Jezebel. She has her own website, but I'll let you find it. I can't say I've read anything of hers, but I also can't say I haven't because Jezebel is one of the few GawkerMedia sites not blocked at work and things get slow sometimes.
The introduction starts out with a quote from "a 2007 game review on SomethingAwful, a comedy website that profiles horrifying geek media" - which is maybe missing the point a little, considering SA had that whole "Horrors of Porn" series out there for a while. It's still surprising to me to find books that cite non-academic, media-centric pop culture sites. Maybe I'm not just used to it, but it still feels a bit wild west in that nobody quite does it in the same way and the snippets, taken out of their web context, read weird on the printed page.
The actual point of the quote (RapeLay) is, I think, just to sort of shock the reader. Certainly Thorn doesn't actually discuss it much, as the actual opening to her introduction amounts to: "For most people, rape in gaming is an odd and unfamiliar concept." She doesn't say it quite like that, but that's the gist, and...well, I don't quite fucking buy it. One might as well say, "For most people, rape in a fast-food restaurant is an odd and unfamiliar concept." It seems to assume a level of innocence or relevance completely absent from the subject at hand - certainly, rape in books, plays, film, television, and pornography isn't particularly odd or unfamiliar in most concepts, so why the fuck should gaming be singled out as "huh?"
Thorn does a quick blur-the-line about "gaming" as the Olympics, beer pong, and gambling to electronic gaming (erotic roleplay and TTRPGs are not mentioned), and zeroes in on the latter by discussing how rape isn't hard-coded into World of Warcraft or Super Mario Bros - and that this gives the false impression to many "mainstream" gamers that there is no rape in gaming, but as the essays in the book will show, there are many types of roleplay and it just isn't show. Honestly, I don't think she's quite making the point she wants to make here.
"Loser gets a paddle up their ass."
Finally, Thorn gets to the meat of the intro: she read Julian Dibbell's A Rape in Cyberspace and wanted to learn more about it because she's a feminist gamer into S&M. No really, that's what she says! Because of her interest in S&M, she knows about rapeplay and rape fantasies; because of her training as a feminist concerned with sexual assault, she's familiar with the real consequences of rape to the individual; and S&M rape fantasies are basically a subset of rape in gaming. Indeed, I think in another context you could make a strong study on rapeplay as a microcosm for rape fantasy, but I digress.
Three pages in, we get something like what Thorn probably should have led off with:
Having said all that, Thorn goes to a quick history gaming that begins in 1974 with Dungeons & Dragons. This is sort of an expanded version of the "What is an RPG?" section from most game books, right down to a hypothetical Game Master/Player interaction scene. The history segues into talking about the other essays in the book, since the essays are all ordered chronologically and more-or-less go from early RPGs to console and PC games. There's some snippets on Vampire: the Masquerade, FATAL, and Kult, then she gets into LARPs, which leads to MUDs, which leads to MMOs. Bonus points for mentioning Custer's Revenge.What makes rape different from other forms of violence showcased in games? How does rape in gaming, which has a real emotional effect on some participants, help us investigate ideas of psychological "reality?" Looking at rape in gaming provides an opportunity to reflect on how people construct our identities - as well as social norms around gender and violence.
Honestly, I think maybe Thorn tries to cover too much here, and by necessity leaves too much out for this to be satisfying to my inner gamer or academic. Sample quotes:
Electronic games also opened a new possibility: characters without a player behind them might be raped.
These are a bit out of context, but I think the main problem I have with this mini-history is that Thorn still seems to feel a distinction between "mainstream" and "adult" games - something I rather see it as a spectrum of sexually explicit content - and pretty much ignores the development of the adult side of gaming. While giving your character stats and dice to roll was a relatively recent development, sexual roleplay has deep roots, and to ignore the history of erotic gaming and focusing in on just a couple examples plucked from the aether seems to do a disservice to what she's trying to accomplish, which is provide the (presumably non-gamer) reader with some perspective on the essays. I can grasp that Thorn is basically trying to say "the ways that people roleplay have gotten more intricate as the technology has ramped up, and rape as a sexual element is used in all of these to varied purpose and effect" - but she never quite comes out and says that, which is kind of frustrating.I found the use of rape in Plundered Hearts particularly problematic. Yes, it was meant to be in the style of classic bodice-rippers, and rape is a trope of that genre. However, structurally the use of rape was deeply flawed.
There's a 2004 card game called Pimp: the Backhanding by White Wolf, in which players beat up prostitutes and force them onto the market. (The game does not distinguish between consensual sexual work and coercive sex trafficking.)
Okay, I thought this was an April Fool's joke until I google'd it.
Ow. Twist the knife deeper.The grandparents of the gaming community, tabletop RPGs, now occupy a dwindling niche.
...the introduction goes on. We're now on page 10, and Thorn is listing the issues, starting with Feminist Considerations. This is, I think, Thorn's best part of the introduction because she actually addresses rape in gaming in an intelligent way that had me nodding my head as I was reading. It's truly the best thing she's written so far, and deserves to be read by every gamer before they start writing a post about rape to their forum of choice.
She does lose a bit of steam when she gets to the Dickwolves.
I won't go more into this than to say: yes, this was a bad joke; yes, people made a big deal about it; and yes, the PA guys were absolute dicks about it and still are.
Moving past that thought, Thorn continues to make several good, strong points - how rape in our society is still considered primarily a male-on-female crime, and how gamer culture is still primarily male-dominated. She doesn't push this into straw feminist territory though; she notes that the idea that "every male is a rapist" is rape myth bullshit. As she notes:
I think there's a big difference between a gaming group that engages in non-consensual rapey behavior against a real person, versus a game like RapeLay that includes a rape story against a piece of software.
Term of the book so far: "rape quests." Man, I always needed that for talking about Corruption of Champions.
Part C. is "The Social Influence of Porn and Video Games," which again could be extended into an essay, although the repeated use of the term "Porn Battlefield" is a little jarring for some reason. The main point to make is the commonality of arguments against sex/violence in both porn and gaming - with the common defense being that both provide a relatively harmless outlet for sexual or violent impulses - and then briefly trips into a "Sex Education Is the Cure for Many Social Ills" rant, which I kind of expected to segue into a call to arms for roleplaying as part of Sex Ed, but she never makes that specific statement.The Camarilla expects high-octane emotional situations.
Part D. (page 18 of the introduction, Crystal Dragon Jesus wept) is "Immersion." It's hard for me to parse this section, but that's what Google Image Search is for:
Well, something like that. What Thorn is really getting at is that while some people might mock others for getting too into their characters, or for subjecting themselves to certain S&M experiences, immersive erotic roleplay is not necessarily negative and can also be beneficial in certain circumstances. Stealing a part of one quote from clinical psychologist Peggy Kleinplatz:
On the other side, Thorn offers a second-hand anecdote about a player in a "lock-in LARP" who got raped. This was disturbing on many levels, not least of which is that everybody stayed in character even after they found out what happened. However, even Thorn couldn't find any reference to this or "lock-in LARPs" online, so maybe (hopefully) take that one with a grain of salt.The notion that survivors of childhood sexual abuse can endeavor to resolve their pain via erotic explorations is bound to make many therapists recoil. Yet I have come to respect the power of (what some therapists might call), such "corrective emotional experiences" to transform one's relations with the past.
So. A bit of a mixed bag of an introduction, which I think hit some good points but could have been substantially shorter. Tomorrow, on to the first essay!
