Penn Jillette on Japanese rape game ‘Rapelay’
Penn Jillette, one-half of magic pranksters Penn & Teller, speaks his mind about the recent controversy over hentai rape game Rapelay. Check out the embedded clip below…
OR NOT – fucking Sony seems to think that viewing this clip anywhere other than YouTube is heresy, so you’ll actually have to go to YouTube to hear Penn’s commentary. Basically, it boils down to this:
Rape games are free speech. Free speech is protected. Plus, rape games don’t churn out rapists any more than dime-store murder novels churn out murderers.
Yep, sounds reasonable to me.
Oh, and here’s a clip of the game in question – which is embed-able.
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Comments
Hi Acorn,
I'm not so sure that's true. MIT Professor Henry Jenkins posted an essay entitled 'Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked' for PBS (which you can find here: http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/impac... that cites a good number of statistics. Among them: that juvenile violent crime is at a 30-year low, that most studies linking videogame playing to violent behavior are 'inconclusive', and that the kind of behavior encouraged in a game-setting doesn't translate into what children do outside of the game.
I think it's also worth noting that incidences of rape are 20 times higher in the U.S. than Japan…despite the fact that such 'rape simulators' are freely available in Japan, and banned in the U.S.
I'd love to say I agree with you, but the evidence is clearly contrary.
Free speech? Sure, but studies have shown that violence in video games DOES encourage violence in the kids who play them. Not hard to see what this encourages. This is downright scary.
Back in 1990 I remember I had a dream that it was the future and they had video games with rape in them. I don't think it was clairvoyance. I just think this sort of thing was obviously inevitably going to be created.