The video game lobby claims it is being treated unfairly and has asked the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal. The law was supposed to have taken effect in 2006, but lower courts have struck it down, ruling it unconstitutional and an infringement of free speech. This would include hugely popular games like Grand Theft Auto IV, where the gamer can choose to be a criminal and shoot down policemen and civilians. Supreme Court said it would review a law in California, prohibiting sales of violent games to minors.
What’s worse, most of the world’s until-recently-burgeoning economies are hesitant to bring in strict laws to monitor video games, because it might transgress that sacred, albeit hackneyed, phrase – Freedom of Expression. And they’re not being made by two deviants sitting in a basement they’re published by companies. What came as a shock was that sexual harassment, largely seen as the domain of uneducated ruffians, has now become a niche market for video games, penetrating the world through the web. And I’m definitely certain no woman in India has entered her twenties without being sexually harassed at least once – only, we call it ‘eve-teasing’. I’m almost as certain their parents don’t know what ‘RapeLay’ is. However, I’m pretty certain their parents have no clue they’ve heard of the game. There’s a chance, of course, that they might have been armchair philosophising about the denigration of society. I don’t know whether any of them had downloaded it or played it. Apparently, the game went out of print.īut for some reason, there was a group of kids sitting at an upmarket coffee shop in Chennai, discussing the game. In May 2009, the women’s rights group Equality Now started a successful campaign to get it off the shelves worldwide, and Illusion pulled the title off their website. At an advanced stage, the gamer and his friends can rape her and two other women, get them pregnant and force them to abort. The gamer can then choose tools to sexually harass her in any way, from lifting her skirt to groping her.
She asks, “can I help you with something?” It opens with a teenage girl standing alone on a metro station platform. His friends had begun to shush him, and after turning around to look at my expression, the speaker joined his friends in staring embarrassedly at the table, until one of them started a discussion on cricket.įor those in the dark, ‘RapeLay’ was a video game released in Japan by the company Illusion in 2006. The speaker, whose back was turned to me, went on, “dude, there’s this chick and you’re supposed to…what, da?” I turned around, not so discreetly, and saw a group of well-dressed boys sitting at the next table. The voice was that typically proud-to-have-broken semi-baritone of the college student just out of his teens. ONG>“What are you saying, da, you haven’t heard of ‘RapeLay’?!”
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