Editor’s Note: The Following Article contains images that, while not genuinely pornographic, would not be a great thing for your boss to see over your shoulder. Please read responsibly.
by Adam Maresca
Thanks to the likes of open-source funding services like Kickstarter, the “marketplace of ideas” has never been more literal, or more troubling. Though their record is far from perfect , the service recently has come under fire again. This time the cause is the cancellation of the card game Tentacle Bento for, presumably, flagrantly violating the company’s obscenity guidelines. The fact the game tripled its initial goal and ran on the site for quite some time is not the major source of the outcry, though. It’s that the game was pulled from Kickstarter at all.
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| That Which Must Be Preserved At All Costs. |
Insert Credit’s initial coverage by Brandon Sheffield is one of the main sources of the complaints that got the project pulled, and his correspondence with John Cadice , the game’s designer, is telling. Sheffield found Cadice’s stance during their conversation to be duplicitous in the face of his demeanor from gameplay demonstration footage. But maybe the video in question was an informal setting, and the innuendo was being laid on thicker in the private company of friends. That could be mildly more understandable… but it’s not the case by a long shot. One need only look to Soda Pop Miniatures’ own promotional materials to realize Cadice is a weasel trying to escape the henhouse. Consider the following pairs of quotes; first halves are all statements by Cadice from the Sheffield interview, latter halves are either text or spoken audio found directly on the defunct Kickstarter page linked above.
1. “We do not in any way condone or illustrate violence in any way against any of the ladies in our game.” / “Your mission: get your slimy tentacles on as many of the student body as you can before time runs out.”
2. “We are not trying to be edgy, and very few of our backers find our product out of any kind of norm as it relates to their interests.” / “Sweet and adorable anime schoolgirls frolic through the brightly-lit halls of Takoashi, while the creeping tentacles of the offending aliens lie just out of sight, waiting to snatch their next victim.”
3. “We can run down a million rabbit holes just as bad by cross examining why women wear high heeled shoes, the appropriateness of camouflage as a textile pattern for children… etc etc etc. Show me ponies being ridden by children under a rainbow, and I will find someone to shout about the subjugation of intelligent animals for our petty amusement with as much intensity as this argument.” / “Tentacle Bento is a mature themed product not intended for sale to children under the age of 17.”
4. “The constant battery of sexual terminology (where there is not one instance in our product) and lines like ‘The style is a cute, lighthearted, pastel-colored look at the wonderful world of forcing your way inside a female against her will,’ is your assertion and not fact, and colored the whole conversation.” / “[$25 Donation Level] GRABBY HANDS: Early copy of the game, + exclusive promo card set!”
5. “I am providing a narrative about aliens grabbing up school girls. Notice the large sucker covered tentacles for ‘grabbing things.’ I do have a card with a girl being tickled, and another baking a cake… the perceived notion became the narrative here, and that is the problem. We do not address or imply what happens when you are capturing the students.” / “I can’t wait to get my hands on this new class of girls to see what kind of… ‘talent’ they might have.”
That the final line of the final pair is spoken by Marie-Claude Bourbonnais, a erotic nude / fetish model hired as both spokesperson and audience hook, should more or less complete the scene. Even if in spite of all this someone were to insist that Tentacle Bento is “not about rape” because it never names or depicts it explicitly, the game’s every decoration is predicated on the tropes of pornographic Japanese comic books that even PR Disaster Mode Cadice says the game is meant to “mock”. It’s the equivalent of a child waving his hands over you while chanting “I’m not touching you”, or using the word “ niggardly ” when discussing the current President’s economic policy.
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“We’ve paid her to endorse the game! That means we’re
equal opportunity, right?”
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Cadice is ably hoisting himself by his own petard, but this is not ultimately his story. The problems with a card game that makes abduction and heavily implied rape its main scoring mechanic should be fairly self-evident to the sane and sexually undisturbed, to say nothing of the erotic anime depictions of high school students. (And commissioned facsimiles of real people.) But even with the $30,000 in Kickstarter contributions nullified, the project has migrated to Soda Pop’s website… and is already four grand ahead of its previous high water mark.
So, in summary, we have a crass, insensitive trivialization of rape and an attempt to rebuke the offenders publicly. Word of the incident is starting to get around and an unrepentant “resistance” is reveling in its own callousness/indifference. What does Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade think?
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Par for the course!
The Internet, for all its boons and benefits, has opened a new chapter in social history, where those who would be shunned and shamed by local peers have been able to coalesce into geographically dislocated communities. When those fringe groups claim the “oppression” of animated TV program fans as equal to that of LGBT rights activists, most of us cringe or laugh derisively. When those communities are founded on principles liked mass-marketed rape pedophilia in a faux-Japanese cartoon candy coating, most of us coil in revulsion. But those who don’t see a problem seem to have plenty of money to burn, and cash knows no moral qualms. Perfectly free trade helps bring together war chests for good ideas as well as it does for reproachable ones.
“Free speech” is a powerful and volatile right, and one of the few that most Americans claim to both cherish and exercise regularly. We accept that the cost of abiding by the First Amendment are blind spots where reprehensible and harmful material can seep through. Nuanced caveats have to be added for things like hate speech, threatening elected officials, and yelling “fire” in a movie theater, but nevertheless there are plenty of vile creations that can pass for legal. That doesn’t mean, however, that we have to like it, or that we cannot attempt to curb the influence and reach works like Tentacle Bento have. It’s the difference between trying to burn every print copy of The Turner Diaries and, say, protesting the book getting a deluxe reprint and distribution by Penguin Classics.
In an unexpected satirical marriage of
those two less-than-appetizing ideas…
The fuss is minimal when award-winning Pakistani student filmmakers are denied visas for depicting the bloody truths of “drone warfare”. But get in Tentacle Bento’s way, and you have one of the figureheads of “gamer culture” taking up the sword because of that one time he read that falsely attributed Voltaire quote and got it in his brain that all ideas are of equal value. These developments should seem antithetical to the spirit of “free speech protection” to anyone who stops and thinks for five minutes, but there is a grain of terrible truth at the core of both events.
The new version of the “marketplace of ideas” is simply that: just another marketplace. Every dollar spent is an equal vote in favor of what economic theory defines as a product, be it a good, service, or idea . Each dollar might be equal to each other dollar, but clearly the way they’re spent and how many votes any given person can make varies wildly. The internet’s power of anonymity makes it easier for the depraved and deplorable to gain traction, while the imbalance of spending power that dictates our lives offline similarly drives the popularity contests of the Internet. And as imbalanced as this “playing field” already is, no realistic amount of money can be spent in opposition to prevent the next Tentacle Bento from coming to fruition. There’s no real vote at all, only a quota to meet.
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We actually
pay
to attend
our
“voter
registration drives”… who runs PAX again? |
The final ingredient is the reason anyone has bothered to publicly champion a ridiculously simple, boring-looking card game and its pandering, perverted titillation: the delusion of legitimacy that having a community grants. Fans and customers become interchangeable, and checking against common sense is steadily going out of fashion. Ethics become purely relative; money changes hands and inevitably pools with the most immediately attractive ideas, which generally are not the “best” from a sociological viewpoint. Beyond a certain threshold, some can even buy their way to a rarified kind of success that is both self-fulfilling and self-reproducing. All we can do is spend wisely and hope against hope that everyone else won’t chip in to help build and sustain abominations. Or, you know, at least have enough shame to do it in the dark and not scream about being persecuted.
(Haha, I’m just kidding, we’re locked in a cultural death spiral until the game industry suffers a catastrophic collapse without any guarantee of recovery.)
Adam Maresca also writes for Gamer’s Obstinacy & Kosternian Understanding.
