There was a big hoohah in the news a few weeks ago about some British MP being really offended that 3rd party sellers on Amazon.com were selling copies of the (rather offensive) Rapelay computer game, where players rape women and girls, and, well that's the whole game. Horrific and distasteful and wholly unerotic stuff, imho.
That started a huge controversy, and the initial outcome was that one of the main videogame ratings bodies (EOCS) decided to ban games from having "rape" in the title, as well as banning games containing mostly rape. Hooray! This stopped Rapelay from being sold, and other knock-on positive effects are:
* Rape victims really suffer in Japan as it's not seen as a terrible crime, and the victims are not given much help, and are stigmatised. I read some articles citing government reports saying that although the official crime rate of rape appears low, estimates are that 10 times as many rapes are unreported. It's a really bad problem there. A lot of these games trivialise rape (e.g. "that was a surprise!" then they go about their normal life), and/or show women appearing to have really enjoyed it when it's over, so it's good to stop the positive reinforcement of rape that these games give.
* Rape has become a worn-out cliché of the adult-only erotic game genre in Japan, and there are often a lot of unavoidable rape scenes in games. I am thinking that maybe if makers are forced to stop using boring old rape scenes, they might be forced to dream up new pleasing erotic content using only consenting adults, and attract a bigger and more mainstream audience. I know that when a PC erogame proves popular enough to warrant a mainstream release, all sex scenes are removed for a home console version. I'm thinking that if erogames became less extreme in content they might appeal to more people, and if they clean themselves up they won't have such a bad reputation. So I'm thinking that in the long run, the industry could actually benefit from this action.
However, the controversy continued beyond the subject of rape and some online shops decided to stop selling certain games with other types of extreme sexual content, and it's all still a hot topic and various other things could stop being permitted by the two main ratings bodies.
One way that a few Japanese game companies have decided to react is to block all access to their official websites by all people outside of Japan. Instead, we get holding pages telling us to go away, or perhaps write to the Japanese government in support of erogames. Unfortunately, this action is even being taken by some companies which don't make or sell extreme pornographic games. This is highly annoying, as an official website is often the only (reliable) place to find information about games, and it appears to be nothing but an unhelpful xenophobic overreaction.
If you want to get round the blocks to Japanese websites, use this intermediate website to access them: http://www.ijapan.org/red/
