My Word! Edmund, an entirely unpleasant experience.

I recently had occasion to sit in a dank, dark room and play one of those "electronically televised games". I say, chaps, a bit balmy on the crumpet, and I had a spot of the blue devils afterward. I hadn't been so befuddled since I caught my friend the broomsquire in a nasty jar with a clergyman's daughter. Unless you want to hear a lot of rubbish, I suggest you cut it to the snuggery.

Well, enough of that. The jist of it is, Edmund is a game where you rape. This ain't your mom's Japanese Rape Simulator, though. This is an 8-bit, side-scrolling, black-and-gray trip into the darkness of men's souls. This game is not meant to be fun, nor to be enjoyed on any level. In this way, its not a game; it is a video game's attempt at narrative art, plain and simple. But does it succeed?


Video games have a weird history with the topic of rape, much more so than any other medium. In films or books that depict rape, the outcome is virtually undeniable as some kind tragedy. Such commentary may sound a little banal and obvious, but it isn't necessarily the case when it comes to video games. In 1982, the release of Atari's "Custer's Revenge" allowed players to play as General Custer as he traverses a small patch of dessert, evading enemies and obstacles in order to get to the other side of the screen where he, you guessed it, rapes a Native American woman. According to the instruction manual, "it’s time for video games and their adult players to come out of the closet, away from the kids, and deal with ADULT fantasies". Now, the most troubling component of this is the idea that game is intended to address a "fantasy", in this case an adult one, that the game allows the player to live out. In video games, instead of being a tragic circumstance, rape suddenly became a sexually gratifying goal or reward. Therein lies most people's contention with violently sexual video games; when one side says, "It's not real, its just fantasy", the other side says, "Why do you have a fantasy where you want to rape people, and why should you be allowed to act it out?"

Video games deal with its subject matter inherently different from other mediums, solely because the player has agency. There IS a difference between seeing violence depicted on a screen and being the agent of said violence. That being said, most people don't even like depictions of rape, much less being able to press the button that allows rape to happen. The interesting thing about video games, however, is that when it tries to be a simulacrum for real action, the player generally develops a sense of apathy or desensitization to the act as it plays out in the game. Will a player who plays a game in which the goal is sexual violence become desensitized to sexual violence, or worse, find it sexually gratifying? On a philosophical level, what happens to someone whose actions lead to rape, even if said rape is completely relegated to the realm of imagination and has no consequences in the real world?

This is, I believe, the central question surrounding Edmund. But is exploring a controversial subject in a medium reason enough to make a game that forces players into depravity?


You start out as Edmund, hitching a taxi into the city until he comes across a suitable enough victim. Besides running and jumping, Edmund has one action, and every single tap of the "bitch-slap button" sends your soul one circle deeper into the fires of the inferno, until finally you recoil in horror as you see what your actions have delivered straight into Edmund's hands. Once the deed is done, you take control of the taxi-driver (whose name I actually forget), and, pistol in hand, hunt down Edmund through the city and eventually corner him in your own apartment. At this point, the game gives you a choice, a moral one, yet, the game ends abruptly either way.

The game is frustratingly linear, however. Another commentator reflected on the fact that since you only have this one action to perform, as a player, you are compelled to do so, to "progress", if you will, in the game. This is wrong; you can always turn it off. The point of the game is not choice (or your limited options within the realm of choice), but rape, and its consequences. The gut reaction to something like this is, of course, "its horrible, oh my god, who would make a game like this?" To truly understand the game and its conclusions in an objective and critical way, however, only a systematic analysis of its components will suffice.

Edmund purposefully differentiates itself from other games that glorify rape or present it in a sexually gratifying manner. The graphics of the game are intentionally simple and bleak. The sounds of the cityscape are foreboding, and the screams of your victim do not fall in line with one who is in the throes of pleasure, rather, they are intended to induce a gut wrenching horror at how simply you were able to commit such an atrocity. Which begs the ultimate question when considering a video game: how does the game play?

Nothing about playing Edmund is fun. Not in the "I can't believe someone made this" kind of way, but as far as the physical act of playing is concerned. The controls are suffocatingly stale. Walking and jumping are made to be a chore. Despite the fact that the game tries to get you to chase Edmund, nothing really stands in your path aside from a few pits and obstacles you must jump over. The path is incredibly slow and frustrating, yet nothing really presents a challenge to the player: there are no bottomless pits, no enemies, no puzzles to solve, just the long, bile inducing trek after Edmund. Even during the secret, "bonus" level, where Edmund must go through the fields of Vietnam killing innocent people, your machine gun is primarily used to cut down tall grass so as to reveal deadly landmines, and even if you successfully hop over each one, the ending provides no answers and no catharsis for what you've just committed. The game is taxing to maneuver, but it serves only to reiterate the question, "Why are you playing this?"

Ultimately, this game forces you to grapple with the consequences of your actions. Eschewing fun or a narrative, Edmund's sole purpose is to ask the player what ramifications emerge when we assume that our actions have no meaning in a real world context. The game makes you feel guilt and horror at your own performance in a way that almost every other game asks you to ignore in order to get you to keep playing. In this way, Edmund is a pertinent comment on the medium of video games that, by subverting traditional gaming tropes, provides a statement as to where video games might be headed, and what that might mean, on an emotional and psychological level, to the gamers of the future.

The game can be found here: http://www.paul-greasley.com/Edmund/edmund.zip. It is the complete game, free-ware, and obviously NSFW.