So, last night on Formspring, someone asked me about the Penny Arcade controversy. I like Penny Arcade, but I confess I don’t read it regularly, because my life as a gamer is a shadow existence mostly built around Rock Band and occasional forays into Mario. So, I was unaware of the controversy, and had to be educated by Jesse. (Thanks, Jesse!) So, the timeline I’ve constructed is this.
1) Penny Arcade writes a comic where the joke is about contrasting the demands of a video game with the moral precepts of the real world. The comic involved the line, “raped to sleep by the dickwolves”. I personally found this joke hilarious, because I’ve played enough video games that I’ve also gone down the path of finding humor in the contrast between the game world and the real world. For those who don’t get it, the humor comes from the fact that video games raise the stakes a lot of the time by having the hero do things like rescue slaves from hell, but the goals often undermine these stakes by having you only save, say, five slaves. “Raped by dickwolves” didn’t bother me—-it’s obviously a play on the long history of imaginative tortures of hell that everyone from Dante to video game writers have come up with.
I did not think this was a “rape joke” in the classic sense of the term, which is a joke where the punch line expresses the idea that raping is awesome. The joke of the comic was that the moral universes painted in video games are often horrific in a way that contrasts with the light-hearted nature of gaming. That strikes me as a perfectly appropriate thing to make fun of, tame even.
2) Someone at Shakesville takes offense. I found the blog post an annoying rationalization for disliking humor in general, which the blogger admits she does. I find the “but rape is real!” argument against jokes of this nature to be a disingenuous one. Slavery is also real, as is murder and general violence. But there’s no way that the blogger would have gotten mad about jokes in those veins, but a joke about a form of torture that is supposed to sound over the top and mystical got her into offended mode.