The premise involves players assuming the role of tentacle monsters passing themselves off as human (or just hiding really well in plain sight) with the goal of having sex with shojou-style Japanese schoolgirls.
Soda Pop started a Kickstarter campaign to bring the game to the masses. However, some folks found the concept too creepy. And when folks find a concept too creepy, they will invariably bitch about it. In this case, an op-ed on Insert Credit written by Brandon Sheffield went up and quickly hit the geek baiting echo chamber of Kotaku. Kickstarter canceled the campaign shortly after their article went up. Once the Kickstarter campaign was canceled, the creator of Tentacle Bento was invited to “discuss” the game with Sheffield via email and was basically dismissed as an individual abetting sexual assault against Japanese schoolgirls.
Somebody has to take the contrary position, and I'm the most contrarian person I know.
In the interests of disclosure, I should point out that I saw a demo for Tentacle Bento at Sakura-con in Seattle about a month or so back. I did not have an opportunity to play the game in detail, nor have I received a copy of the game for promotional or review purposes. I just hate seeing creatives getting bullied in the press because they made some people uncomfortable.
I will resist, for now, the terrible urge to play the “it's just a game” card. We'll just put that at the back of my hand. I will, however, start by asserting that both Sheffield and John Cadice are incorrect in using the word “satire” to describe Tentacle Bento. It is more accurate to describe the game as a spoof rather than satire.
Films like Southland Tales and books like Primary Colors could rightly be described as satire, since they are not merely making fun of something but using humor to convey a larger and somewhat more subversive message. Spoofs, on the other hand, are the province of films such The Naked Gun and Scary Movie franchises, along with many of the works of Mel Brooks and magazines such as Mad and National Lampoon. They are pure entertainment that distorts tropes and cliches from more “serious” works and plays them for laughs. Satire can certainly have elements of the spoof, such as the thinly veiled references to Bill Clinton in Primary Colors, and some of the best spoofs have wickedly satirical edges on them, like the merchandising theme of Spaceballs that skewers George Lucas so elegantly.
Ultimately, it comes down to what you're hoping to accomplish. If Soda Pop Miniatures was looking to address the apparent rise of statutory rape and sexual violence against Japanese schoolgirls, then I would have hard time disagreeing that they failed. If, on the other hand, they are poking fun at a very weird subsection of Japanese erotica that lends itself well to the broad and sometimes coarse humor of the spoof, then there is little question in my mind they've done that quite handily.
From the cards that I saw, which looked to be pretty much a full deck, there was absolutely nothing overt, graphic, or pornographic in the artwork presented. Much like a good RPG, the real action is in one's mind. If a player is imagining in his or her mind a horrible and traumatizing sexual assault, that's entirely the product of that person's imagination. There is nothing in the rules that explicitly says, “You can only describe the action in your mind as rape.” If there had been a directive like that in the rules, even I would have found myself profoundly unsympathetic to Soda Pop Miniatures.
Since we have established that this is a spoof, and that there is nothing explicitly indicating rape, a player is perfectly free to use the cards to create a scenario in their minds that suits their particular sensibilities.
This is the sandbox of metagaming and, depending on the players, it can be as innocent as puppies and kittens playing under rainbows, or it can be so raunchy that Larry Flynt would find himself embarrassed and offended. I know how metagaming can take a turn for the risque, and I also know how much fun it can be.
A few years back, my regular gaming group had picked up a copy of SPANC, published by Steve Jackson Games. There is such an absurd amount of furry cheesecake on the cards and the box art, albeit very well drawn by Phil Foglio, that we couldn't advance a turn without making some sort of joke that was loaded with innuendo or describing the action in properly over-the-top sexualized fashion. However close to that boundary between "PG-13" and "R" SPANC might be on its own, we went for the hard R in the metagame.
I would also point out that two of the players were gay men, which goes against the usual stereotype of “horny straight male gaming fanboy,” and they were getting into the metagame just as much as the straight players were.
I'm quite certain that my group would have an absolute field day with Tentacle Bento, and not a single one of them would be thinking, “Gee, maybe we're contributing to the moral decline of Western civilization” without a very large set of irony tags involved. My point is while there may be people out there who are going to have difficulty with the premise of the game, there are others who are going to take that premise and bend it into a pretzel for their own enjoyment. Whatever humor is present will be amplified and magnified until it is satisfying to the players, and whatever humor is not present will be made by the players.
Since the idea that Tentacle Bento is somehow promoting sexual violence fails the laugh test on a couple of obvious levels, let's play around with the scenario a bit.
For example, Sheffield solemnly trots out a statistic from Amnesty International stating one in three women gets raped, with the incidence being possibly higher due to under-reporting. Would his moral outrage be present if the scenario had been different in the gender of the “victim”? Purportedly, according to U.S. Justice Department statistics, 4% of men are rape victims. If the game had gone the yaoi route and was showing presumably male tentacle monsters raping schoolboys, would there be an equal degree of outrage?
My guess would be “no.”
If the sample provided by the attendees at Sakura-Con is any example, there would be a noticeable demographic shift from male to female. Heck, let's turn it around even more, having a presumably female tentacle monster raping Japanese schoolboys? Is it that somehow more palatable? If that scenario caused a giggle just now, that's perfectly all right, because it's no less absurd than a tentacle monster raping Japanese schoolgirls. If, on the other hand, your first thought was “women can't rape men!”, then you need to hang your head in shame as you contemplate the degree of your gross ignorance.
It should be clearly noted that Soda Pop Miniatures and John Cadice have stated that they are not advocating nor attempting to trivialize sexual assault in any form. That the whole point of Tentacle Bento is to mock a particular segment of erotica that they find creepy. If they can do that through the mechanics of a game, and make a bit of coin in the process, more power to them. The sub-genre may always be creepy to them, and to others, but I think they've found a novel way of coming to an understanding about the sub-genre.
Think of all the tentacle monster hentai movies, computer games, eroge, manga, and doujinshi that are out there right this very instant. Are we really going to brand Tentacle Bento as the straw that broke the camel's back? So much of that material is out right now, one card game cannot conceivably make that much of a difference. I strongly doubt that Tentacle Bento being released upon the world will cause a rash of sexual assaults across the globe where people are dressing in strange Lovecraftian-inspired costumes with half a dozen dildoes rigged up expressly for the purpose of molesting Japanese schoolgirls. Even if there was such a strangely specific crime wave, could we directly point to Tentacle Bento and proclaim it to be the sole contributing cause? Correlation does not equate to causation, folks, a point which has escaped many a social crusader.
I am not going to get into the ethical implications of why Kickstarter killed the campaign.
I won't say I agree or disagree with the decision, but rather wish they'd have handled things differently. I am not going to try to curl people's hair by going into the arguably disturbing question of “rape fantasies” and whether having them absolves either perpetrator or victim. I'm not going to drag out long and torturous theses demonstrating that Rule 34 existed, in one form or another, long before there was an Internet or 4chan. I'm going to play the last card in my hand. It is just a game, and one that is not even available for purchase yet.
Buy it or don't.
This is a perfect moment in a free market system. You can choose to buy the product. You can choose not to buy the product. There are going to be people who go, “Ewww!” There are going to be people who go, “Squeee!” Most of us are going to go, “Meh.” And that is perfectly fine. It doesn't mean we're indifferent to real suffering. It doesn't mean we're all secretly perverts who get off by writing ever more elaborate fan scripts for Urotsukidoji. It just means that we're not going to get worked up by a card game.
- Axel Cushing
