CNN news 2010-04-05 加文本

2010-04-05 cnn

A video game so vile and disgusting that it makes your stomach turn. Players actually groping, stalking, even raping women and little girls because they think it's fun. The game is made in Japan, but women's groups around the world are outraged.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LAH (voice-over): The heart of Japan's electronics district, the world's games of tomorrow on sale today. On shelves in mainstream stores, plenty of what's known here as Hentai(变态，就是网上俗称的H-Game) games. Almost all feature girlish-looking characters. Some are violent, depicting rape, torture, and bondage in detail.

It didn't take long to find the game where the object is revenge. Find and rape the woman who fired the player from his imaginary job. Most of this game we cannot show you.

Hentai games are not new for Japan. This country has long produced products the rest of the world would call pornographic, but before the internet shrunk the world, it’s stayed here. A quick web search generates hundreds of Japanese games. Once a game goes on sale in Tokyo, it's digitized and shared everywhere.

This one, called "Rapelay", begins with a teenage girl on a subway platform. With a click of your mouse, you can grope her and lift her skirt. You, the player, stalk her, her sister, and her mother, following them on the train.

LAH (on-camera): What follows is a series of graphic interactive scenes that we can't show you. Players can corner the women to rape them again and again, and it goes on from there.

(voice-over): The game infuriated women's rights groups.

TAINA BIEN-AIME, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, EQUALITY NOW: These sort of games that normalize extreme sexual violence against women and girls have really no place in our communities.

LAH: International outrage led the Japanese developer to pull the "Rapelay" game from stores last year, but that didn't stop it spread. In fact, the controversy took it viral. That's how Lucy Kibble and Jim Gardner (ph) in England heard about and downloaded the game as they told me over Skype.

LUCY KIBBLE, BRITISH GAMER: It's a controversial subject, and I wanted to try it just to see what it was all about.

LAH: That global availability is why international women's rights groups say Japan needs to regulate game makers better, stopping creation of certain content.

BIEN-AIME: What we are calling for, though, is that the Japanese government banned all games that promote and simulate sexual violence, sexual torture, stalking, and rape against women and girls. And there are plenty of games like that.

LAH (on-camera): How sensitive is Japan to this issue? Despite weeks of repeated calls to the government, not a single government official would speak to cnn on camera. They wouldn't even make a statement on paper.

Over the phone, one official who would not allow us to use her name said that the government realizes these games are a problem, and it is checking to see whether self-policing by the gaming industry is enough.