Amazon, Ebay and Britain all just banned the Japanese rape simulator Rapelay. Politicians and other preening crusading blowhards publicly decried it, thereby popularizing it. After .07 seconds of investigation, I found the game and had it running in an hour. The torrents are hugely popular due to the publicity. Whoops! Good job promoting rape, there, critics! You’re like the PR geniuses who send legal threats to poor, pissed off, professedly pathologically spiteful writers.

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If you haven’t seen a slasher film lately, Marcus Nisbett’s reboot of Friday the 13th feels paradoxically fresh. That’s probably because the genre is delivering a very specific product, so well-tested in eleven sequels that the only real challenge is not to ruin the formula. “I don’t know if it’s the tits or the murder,” my father once remarked, noticing I was renting a new Friday film every day. I’m still not sure, though I’m developing a hypothesis—but more on that later. (more…)

You know how even Bush haters will admit that his one undisputed good deed was getting all that AIDS prevention funding to Africa? But, boy, do they have it all wrong. More than anything, Bush’s efforts show how little anyone really cares about saving Africans. It’s the same with the Melindas, Bonos, Geldofs and all the other UN Mother Teresas out there. To them, the potential social costs of really fighting the epidemic and having all its uncomfortable details out in the open are just not worth it. Let me explain: (more…)

At its root, Fallout 3 is about cleansing the world of life, stealing and hoarding. This makes it a real innovator in the world of role-playing gaming. The last innate human drive unfulfilled was simple raw power, and as the video game evolves, it evolves to look like the kind of power that was adaptable to the evolving human species. Whether it’s Nazis or Lovecraftian horrors, you can safely de-humanize tribes of enemies, then annihilate and profit from them. Our modern civilization is such a bland purgatory in contrast to what our savage desires really lust for, that we have no option but to invent gaming worlds where this behavior seems plausible. (more…)