Rape Day

Some developer released a visual novel called Rape Day. The game is exactly what the title suggests: you click through images as a psychopath in a zombie apocalypse, making decisions about which women to assault and kill. It lasted about five minutes on Steam before getting removed.

Before that happened, the developer did some interviews. He’d grown up on horror novels, then psychological thrillers, then he got into stories told from the villain’s perspective—Mr. Brooks, Nightcrawler. He also liked porn. So he wanted to make something that smashed all of that together. Hence Rape Day.

The shitstorm was immediate and predictable. Should this even exist? Is it art or is it just an assault simulator? The developer pushed back on the moral panic angle—we’re fine with depictions of murder in fiction, he argued, but assault is still taboo. Why? If art gets to show terrible things, shouldn’t the medium not matter? Give it a hundred years and this’ll look like the outcry over Grand Theft Auto or the first nude scene on television.

He had a point about the inconsistency, sort of. But he was missing the obvious thing, which is that there’s actual distance between art that depicts something transgressive and a product whose entire appeal is transgression itself. A film or book or game can show rape and be saying something true about power, psychology, violence. Rape Day wasn’t interested in saying anything. It was just the thing itself. Shock value is not a thesis.

Steam deleted it. The developer went silent. Now Rape Day exists as this idea everyone’s heard of but almost nobody’s played. The controversy made it more famous as a concept—as a symbol of where we draw lines and what those lines actually mean—than it could ever have been as an actual game.