The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Tournament of Douchebaggery

This weekend, gaming sleuths who care about such things discovered that DriveThruRPG, one of the largest sites for downloadable PDFs for RPGs, was selling a game called Tournament of Rapists.

The Tournament of Rapists details the sadistic Rape Pure Flight circuit, expanding on what you’ve seen already and introducing dangerous new sexual predators. This sadistic bloodsport takes place in abandoned office buildings and atop Tokyo rooftops. An assortment of superhumanly powerful and inhumanly misogynistic men, and even worse women, step into impromptu fighting arenas, killing and raping the weaker in search of a multi-billion yen fight purse provided by a half-oni billionaire in thrall to dark impulses.

How awful is it?

There’s a stunt called “Triggering,” which gives you a bonus when attacking and raping previous victims of sexual assault.

DriveThruRPG, after an initial delay and hemming and hawing that looked pretty awful, ultimately decided to pull the product.

We spoke to the publisher and they have decided to withdraw the title from sale. (1/3)
If they choose to republish it we have asked but not demanded that they consider some changes to the title. (2/3)
 A more detailed blog post from our CEo is forthcoming after the weekend and staff being out of office. (3/3)

Needless to say, gaming’s worst hashtag immediately stepped up and loudly declared their support for this misogynistic piece of shit.

  1. If you want to make a game that is literally about nothing but rape, you should feel free to do so.  The government should not be involved with this.
  2. Still, you’re an asshole and you should expect everyone decent in the game community to use THEIR freedom of speech to point that out vociferously.
  3. If you run a shop, you have the freedom to decide if you want to sell items that alienate large portions of your customers.  We don’t make Christian bookstores sell satanic bibles,Target is free to decide if they want to sell confederate flags, and Apple is free to reject AO content.  Freedom includes this choice too.  Nobody is entitled to your sales platform.
  4. If you sell a game, you have (and should have) the freedom to decide if you want to support vendors who make bad decisions.  Kudos to Exploding Rogue, Dungeon World and Pathfinder/Paizo for speaking up.
  5. If you’re the sort of person who wants to play a glorified rape simulator in a tabletop session with 5 of your closest friends, then what the fuck is wrong with you?

Should games feel they have to avoid sexual content, racial conflicts and other ‘PC’ topics?  Of course not.  However, gamers should feel encouraged to ring the shame bell when ever a game chooses to actively reward and encourage players for engaging in sexual assault and racial-driven violence.  As Brianna Wu says, good gamers should care deeply about games and game creators who make content that actively and unquestionably alienates huge swaths of gamers and potential gamers.

7 Comments

  1. Jason

    My favorite part is always the hypocrisy. Somehow, asking a store to not carry an item is censorship, but asking a company to not support a website because of what they write is not censorship. So apparently, if the SJWs hadn’t asked DriveThruRPG to remove the item, and instead had asked all other game developers to stop using DriveThruRPG, that would have been fine.

  2. Vhaegrant

    I think a lot of the thunder is lost when you find out the product line the sourcebook is from has been going since 2007 ( https://rpggeek.com/rpgsetting/22761/black-tokyo ). While the sourcebooks were being released under relatively bland names no-one seems to have been the wiser. It took the publisher themselves to put ‘Rapist’ in the title before offense seems to have been taken.
    People are aware of what Hentai is? Why the sudden shock at this sourcebook?

    • MechaCrash

      I think the problem, to put it frankly, is that the fact that most of what Chris A. Fields write is horrible shit requires you to actually read it. When it’s called “Tournament of Rapists,” the horrible is front and center.

      • Vhaegrant

        You’re never forced to read anything, you choose to because of curiosity.
        I enjoy Anime, as such I’m aware of the existence of Hentai (and worse) and what it involves and choose not to watch it.
        It is one of the most powerful choices you have as a consumer, to buy or not to buy.
        Of course there is also the decision to ban a product or campaign to have the distributor withdraw from supporting the product.

        The more cynical part of me suspects the publisher knew exactly what they were doing. Courting controversy for a product to boost interest and hopefully sales.

        • MechaCrash

          …whoops, dropped a word there which kind of changes things.

          I meant to say that the problem is that knowing what he writes is horrible requires you to read it, “Tournament of Rapists” has it front and center, which is how his game that’s full of rape demons and shit armor flew under the radar at DTRPG so long.

  3. Vhaegrant

    A quick quote from the writer of the sourcebook Chris A Field….

    ‘Tournament of Rapists, which is for my Black Tokyo Campaign Setting is a lot nastier. Intentionally so. This is a really, really adults only setting that deals with some nasty, unpleasant elements and has since the first book came out. Rape, misogyny, and the worst kinds slavery exist in the setting- mostly as evils for the players to fight.

    Tournaments of Rapists was intended to expand on a villainous organization/plot-thread that’s been out there since day one in the setting. The book’s a really dark riff on fighting games like Mortal Kombat and Tekken, mixed with really nasty rape-fetish elements and gore. The intent was to create some really vile bad guys the players WANT to kick the living crap out of.

    Open for other questions,
    CHRIS’ – http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=33060

  4. Mizahnyx

    On an ideal world, everyone is a paragon of rightfulness and justice, no one has problematic or traumatic feelings, everyone contributes to the common good, and every conflict is resolved peacefully with no lasting physical or psychological trauma for the parts involved.

    On the real world, living can be painful, circumstances, interactions, can harm us permanently, leaving trauma in our bodies and souls. That trauma is repressed, constituting a part of ourselves who never sees the broadlight. We all have some sort of dark side, a side B unknown to others, problems, complexes, thoughts that when repressed become only stronger without a valid way to be expressed.

    Some people that uses valid concepts of social justice to harm instead of to heal will use the hidden, repressed shadow of others as a way to shame them into submission, using coded weasel words like “problematic”, like a constant way to assert an artificial moral superiority and thus, status in their communities.

    On the other hand, by engaging with this inner shadow through play-spaces, we sometimes can confront it, and even heal it, instead or repressing it and being harmed by it. That varies from person to person, what for an individual can be too much and triggering, for other can be a way to engage and start being in control. “Problematic” media can fulfill this role.

    I agree with Brianna about professional standards. But as someone with hacker mentality, standards for me are “the box”, a set of guidelines or heuristics true most of times, but not in all of cases. And sometimes, for specific cases, you have to go against the rules, think outside of the box, to get the optimum.

    So while I understand that having an RPG titled “Tournament of Rapists” on sale for a general public is disrespectful for woman, and applaud the decision to retire it from general sale, I also think of the unlikely case of the material being used to heal instead of to harm or mock suffering. And I think that could be said also about any material deemed problematic. I refuse to be told what to say, what to write, what to play, what to create, what to use to be healed.

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