Many in the gaming world felt sideswiped by RapeLay. After a few years of Wii expansion, Grand Theft Auto IV narrative essaying, and the emergence of art game design, few Western gamers expected a rape simulator to steal headlines. But then it did when, after multiple user complaints, Amazon banned the Japanese import title from its Marketplace. RapeLay puts you in control of an office worker who is a subway groper, child molester, and rapist. The gameplay is a literal recreation of rape in which players can use the mouse cursor to select body parts to grope. Hauntingly, many of the games rape scenarios begin in public settings and the passersby are always translucent humanoids that shuffle past in oblivion. The game is a masochistic variation between absurd fantasies (your victims orgasm) and anguished self-loathing (your victims can kill you in revenge, and your character can commit suicide). Many people will find RapeLay offensive to the core. It’s a tasteless game in most ways. I think it’s tasteless not because of the subject but because it shows its subject with such adolescent egotism.

In John Waters’ “Female Trouble,” Divine rapes herself in a gutter-scraping slapstick. In Gaspar Noe’s “Irreversible,” Monica Belluci is raped in one long unbroken take that is one of the cruelest scenes in cinema. RapeLay is dwarfed in comparison to those works, but the fact that it merits comparison is worth remembering.

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