A recent call by New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to ban a Japanese computer game in which players stalk and rape women on subways is drawing attention to cultural differences between the United States and Japan as exhibited in computer and video games.
As several Web sites, such as Slate.com and LATimes.com point out, efforts to ban the game are largely moot, as the game, RapeLay, is not available from American retailers and is not listed on Amazon.com or eBay.com. However, one can find a download of a translated version of the game in seconds on Google.com.
RapeLay is part of a genre of games in Japan known as eroge, or hentai. The games are more part of the pornography industry than the video game industry at large. A Slate.com article noted that eroge games are "usually sold alongside glossy comics, figurines, and animated smut in shops that cater to a common fetish for animated women; they don't share shelf space with Super Mario and Halo."
Although many would find the sexual violence in RapeLay repulsive, the gory violence present in Western games is likewise not very acceptable in Japan. Although the highly violent action game Gears of War 2 sold 1.4 million copies on its first day on American store shelves, Microsoft chose to not release the game in Japan.
In Gears of War 2, enemies often explode when shot with powerful weapons, which often results in blood and gore spraying the camera. One weapon frequently used is a chainsaw bayonet, which can cut enemies clean in half.
Even extremely violent games developed in Japan might not see the light of day in their country of origin. The Japanese game MadWorld, hailed as "blood-soaked action for the [Nintendo] Wii" by its publisher Sega, was recently released in the United States, but has not yet come to Japanese stores. And according to Sega, it may never.
Junior Ron Laidley believes that the difference between the violence in Japanese and American games is a matter of realism.
"Having played a lot of Japanese games, they are less violent than Western games when it comes to realism. With Western games, like Gears of War, you get very realistic, detailed deaths. Japanese games tend to depict less realistic violence but trade it for more disturbing images and perverse themes," Laidley said in an e-mail to the Daily. "Western games, whether violent or not, always try to be realistic, while many Japanese try to be more artistic, often throwing reality to the wind."
Laidley noted, however, that many Japanese games still have ample amounts of extremely graphic violence.
Although RapeLay is part of a fringe industry, it does exemplify the greater amount of sexual content in mainstream Japanese video and computer games than in Western games.
"Western games just simply throw in sex to be seen, not interacted with ... However, there are a fair number of sexual games released in Japan, not including the simulation game genre, based solely on pornographic material," Laidley said.
Laidley noted the popular Dead or Alive series of fighting games as a prime example of the prevalent sexual content in some Japanese games. The games are known not only for their solid game play mechanics, but also for their underdressed female characters.
But even relatively moderate amounts of sexual content in Western games can result in controversy. The 2007 game Mass Effect drew massive controversy after Fox News reported that the game had a "graphic" sex scene. In response, Jeff Brown, Electronic Arts vice president of communications said in a statement, "Sex scenes in Mass Effect are not graphic. These scenes are very similar to sex sequences frequently seen on network television in prime time." Mass Effect is rated M for Mature, which means that the game is not recommended for users under age 17 by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.
Although gamers and non-gamers alike might find perverse sexual content in games like RapeLay repulsive, many in other countries find just as offensive the images of limbs being severed and heads exploding that are so common in many popular Western games.
