Localization Editor Withdraws Name Rather Than Give Up "KKK" Joke

Akiba's Beat Game Over Screen

On XSEED's official forum, localization editor Tom Lipschultz posted a list of changes made in the English version of game Akiba's Beat. In addition to things like changing names of characters to reflect puns in the original Japanese, there was one joke that Lipschultz was changed that he felt was a bridge too far-- changing a background sign that read "KKK Witches" in the original Japanese version :

The original was a parody of "NKK switches," a Japanese light switch manufacturer based out of Akihabara. I personally felt "KKK witches" was pretty funny for its shock value, but when I mentioned it to my coworkers, they... were not as amused. 

Yeah, I can't imagine why a white guy going "LOL it says KKK roflcopter" would be a bad look or anything. Instead of pausing for a moment of self-reflection as to why the name of a domestic terrorist group was funny to him, or why a background joke might be worth changing, Lipschultz decided to double down.

 ...[XSEED was] insistent upon the name being changed. And of course, I fought this as best as I could, since I saw the forceful change of this as an act of censorship...

Yes, according to Lipschultz, changing a joke to avoid name-dropping the Ku Klux Klan is exactly the same thing as actively suppressing art! He was the lone brave white guy sticking up for the original intent. Like, what if the original Japanese developer really wanted to make the minor background company sign joke as some sort of statement about the USA right-wing hate group responsible for lynching about 3,500 black men over the course of its existence, right? Lipschultz continues:

In the end, however, it was Acquire themselves who voluntarily changed it to "ACQ witches"... [XSEED emailed the original Japanese developers] to let them know that the KKK is a well-known abbreviation for a hate group in America, and asking them if the name "KKK witches" had any specific meaning in Akiba's Beat... Acquire simply changed the sign text and sent us a new build. 

Oh. So since the original developers of the game made the change, this must mean they were cool with it. If the intent was to make some sort of political statement, they would have kept it. Censorship implies there's some sort of involuntary act, and Lipschultz himself said the original developers made this decision themselves. So that's why Lipschultz... asked for his name to be removed from the credits? Yep, he confirms it himself.

It is due to this change, and specifically due to my initial misconception that we'd directly asked the devs to change it, that I asked to have my name removed from the credits of Akiba's Beat... I feel it's a good symbolic gesture on my part, showing my commitment to my principles on this matter... I'm perfectly fine with being the "ninja localizer" of XSEED, fighting the good anti-censorship fight from the shadows. 

Yes, this is the hill Lipschultz chose to die on. This also means that per XSEED company policy, he will no longer be credited on any future work he does for the company, and he took this stand being fully aware of this company policy.

It turns out that Lipschultz has many misconceptions, from what censorship is, to what it means to be funny to what it means for something to be "very Japan". Not content to dig a hole for himself on the forums of the company he works for, Lipschultz took to the comments section of a Kotaku article about his decision in what I'm sure he thought was a noble and well-reasoned attempt to defend himself. Here, let's watch him go and dig himself deeper:

[The KKK acronym] doesn’t make me chuckle on its own, but in the context of appearing on a sign in a busy part of Tokyo, where the business in question obviously had NO IDEA what it meant? That’s pretty funny, if you’ve ever been to Japan. “Engrish” exists as a concept for a reason, and a sign that says “KKK witches” is so out there, so WRONG, that it appearing on a sign is definitely worthy of at LEAST a chuckle, for the absurdity alone. 

I guess the idea is, I believe it would be funny to the game’s target audience, those being Japanophiles. Because it really is very “Japan.”

You see, a KKK reference is funny because... racism! Non-native speakers being ridiculed for not understanding a language is funny because, um... also racism? People that like Japanese pop culture think racism is funny too? I guess?

Honestly, I'm surprised Lipschultz still has a job considering he seems to have no grasp of optics, humor, or what localization is supposed to be. Posting on the Neogaf boards, Lipschultz once had this to say in his defense of anime boobs and fan-service:

Even if you consider content in a game to be perverted and classless... let the classless perverts have it! They deserve to enjoy their games just as much as the rest of us. And to say that it "taints" the game for the rest of us is no different than saying having someone of a different race, or sexual orientation, taints the neighborhood.

Yes, just like his withdrawing his name from the credits of Akiba's Beat and all future XSEED games he works on was his attempted to channel Evelyn Beatrice Hall (no, REALLY, he said so right here), standing up for sexualized female characters created by men, for men, is like speaking out against discrimination of marginalized people. That's totally not gross at all!

I think the best way to explain translation vs transliteration is by using a musical analogy. When a violin repeats what a piano just has played, it can't make the exact same sounds. It can only approximate the same chords.The violin can, however, recognizably make the same "music" as a piano, but only when it's faithful to the logic and limitations of the violin as it is to the logic and limitations of the piano.

Languages are like that, too. Each has their own "sound" and their own logic.The process of rendering ideas from language to language is really more like a transposition than a translation-- translation implies that there are word-for-word equivalents that exist from one language boundary to another. That's like saying piano sounds exactly like the violin!

And the idea of word-for-word equivalents of a story, of a language's underlying feeling strikes me as false to the nature of story telling.The best a translator can do is hope for is to come close as possible not to the text's literal meaning-- it's nearly impossible to drag a sentence's meaning across one language barrier to another completely 100 percent intact. What is more important in preserving, intent... even at the expense of making four strings do the same notes as 88 keys (i.e.English from Japanese). A translator should work to preserve a story's essence, the total feeling of the complexities.Literal translations, as outlined in today's earlier piece on Persona 5, are stilted, awkward and can seem more like transcribing than translation,

When the original game developer of Akiba's Beat was contacted about what the KKK initials of the "off brand" light switch maker sign meant for a US audience, they changed the joke because they intended to just make a silly company name reference, not name-drop a US domestic terrorist group.

Basically, what Lipschultz has done is mixed up the right of people to not be suppressed by the government or societal coercion with the tension that is part and parcel of the act of translation. Instead of pausing and reflecting on why a minor joke with unintentional racist overtones was something he saw as so essential he'd be willing to throw away credit for his work, Lipschultz decided that not keeping "KKK witches" was the molehill to die on.

Are Hardcore Gamers The New Right Wing Conservatives?

Description: Stephen Colbert, dressed in a business suit &
seated at a desk, raising a pitchfork. the caption reads "Unleash
Nerd Fury!"

 In the mid-to-late 90s up to the the early 2000s, there was a lot of sound and fury and fear about censoring video games, worries about the resultant effect on free speech and the possibility of strangling video games as an art-form before it even left the cradle. There were Congressional hearings on video game violence, pundits bloviating in newspapers, magazines and online, and reactionary conservatives seemingly pinning blame for video games on everything from the Columbine massacre to the collapse of the nuclear family. But for all the sturm und drang, all the worries about legislators attempting to legislate morality... nothing really came of it. As the Houston Chronicle's Jeff Rouner outlines in "Have Gamers Become The New Religious Right?":

However, though there was a lot of talk about official censorship there was never really any serious chance it would happen in America. Video games were declared free speech by the Supreme Court in 2005 in a 7 – 2 decision, and Nintendo had given up their dream of completely family-friendly entertainment by 1994. Mature content became a badge of honor to the gamer community. It was proof that the medium couldn’t be stopped by moralistic thugs determined to protect us from ourselves.

So what happened?

Journalists like Leigh Alexander and Mattie Bryce as well as YouTubers like Anita Sarkeesian began looking at game content, both narrative and mechanical, and examining what that content said about us. It was not, as a lot of gamers like to claim, a call to censor or ban that content. It was just looking at it in a more thoughtful and nuanced way. With games now protected by all the power of the First Amendment, you would think that discussion over them could flourish more freely since they were in no danger of being taken away. 

That’s not what happened, though. Organized retaliation against the concept of conversation and dialogue in the form of 4chan ops and GamerGate happened instead. Sarkeesian’s videos were constantly flagged on YouTube in an attempt to take them down and online campaigns to have various journalists discredited or fired became a new way of life for anyone who dared deconstructing games from a social justice perspective... Criticism of the status quo, no matter how mild, is felt like an attack on a person’s morality. Religious people in the ‘80s who were comfortable with traditional gender roles took the idea of someone else rejecting those roles as a judgment. Likewise, players who are perfectly happy with a white, male-centric, violent, heteronormative status quo in gaming feel judged for that happiness when marginalized people and their allies speak up about how it affects them.

How bad has it gotten? A couple worked together for a year on a game called "That Dragon, Cancer" as a way to help process and explore their grief as well as the boundaries of games as an interactive medium. And hardcore gamers howled with outrage. Over a game a couple made born from their experiences of watching their infant son wrestle with cancer.

Unfortunately, Feminist Frequency gave the game a good review, and so of course the horde has descended on Steam to flood the forums with cries of “feels-marketing” and saying the Greens immoral for not donating profits to cancer research. Bear in mind, none of these people have actually played That Dragon, Cancer. They just hate it because a bunch of other people they normally pick on all got together and said it made them feel something.

So readers, I ask you: what are moderate gamers to do? Sound off in the comments below.

Not OK: Hateful Man-Babies Target Zoe Quinn. Again.

Image via shutterstock

 Zoe Quinn, the indie lead developer behind the emotionally moving interaction fiction game Depression Quest recently released for free on Steam, as well as Narrative Designer for FRAMED, is being targeted by an unruly mob of misogynist anti-feminists (both overtly and under the guise of being concerned with journalistic integrity) again.

She was first targeted last year when her attempt to get Depression Quest approved via Steam's Greenlight program was cancelled after she was the target of a harassment campaign from a message board. The harassment bled from online into her offline world when her private phone number was published, leading to harassing and obscene phone calls. 

She resubmitted Depression Quest to the Steam Greenlight program a second time, and this time, despite the harassment from reddit, twitter, 4chan, and down-voting campaigns on Steam itself, Depression Quest was approved and released on Steam last week.

Now the same brigade of angry dudebro gamers are claiming Quinn is corrupt, or corrupting Kotaku, or setting back women developers? Quinn tweeted about her parents' phone number getting obscene phone calls. The sub-reddit r/Gaming has a post from its moderator calling out the egregious, harassing behavior of its members-- only to receive nearly 2,000 down-votes.Why? Thanks to a multi-part blog series by an angry ex-boyfriend that did nothing but air out relationship problems in public. Suddenly, men that would not bat an eye over sexual behavior were it done by a fellow dude are calling for an end to her career.

Quinn herself addressed the matter as much as it deserved in a blog entry on Monday:

I am not going to link to, or address anything having to do with the validity of the specific claims made by an angry ex-boyfriend with an ax to grind and a desire to use 4chan as his own personal army. This is not a “she-said” to his “he-said”. The idea that I am required to debunk a manifesto of my sexual past written by an openly malicious ex-boyfriend in order to continue participating in this industry is horrifying, and I won’t do it. It’s a personal matter that never should have been made public, and I don’t want to delve into personal shit, mine or anyone else’s, while saying that people’s love and sex lives are no one’s business. I’m not going to talk about it. I will never talk about it. It is not your goddamned business. 

What I *am* going to say is that the proliferation of nude pictures of me, death threats, vandalization, doxxing of my trans friends for having the audacity to converse with me publicly, harassment of friends and family and my friends’ family in addition to TOTALLY UNRELATED PEOPLE, sending my home address around, rape threats, memes about me being a whore, pressures to kill myself, slurs of every variety, fucking debates over what my genitals smell like, vultures trying to make money off of youtube videos about it, all of these things are inexcusable and will continue to happen to women until this culture changes. I’m certainly not the first. I wish I could be the last. 

Because I've had a small degree of success in a specific subculture, every aspect of my life is suddenly a matter of public concern. Suddenly it’s acceptable to share pictures of my breasts on social media to threaten and punish me. Suddenly I don’t have any right to privacy or basic dignity. Suddenly I don’t get to live out normal parts of life, like going through a bad and ugly breakup in private. I have forfeited this by being a blip in a small community, while those who delight in assailing me hide behind their keyboards and a culture that permits it, beyond reproach. 

My life and my body are not public property. No one’s life and body are public property.

And that's what it boils down to-- a bunch of sexist shook gamers acting like gatekeepers and hypocritically talking about ethics and integrity while trying to bring up a women's private life as a detriment to her career. Talking about fighting corruption while harassing her via reddit and twitter. Talking out of one side of their mouth about the truth while talking gossip and character assassination with the other.

This is unacceptable. It's unacceptable to happen to Zoe Quinn. It's unacceptable to happen to any women in the games industry. This happening to even one woman is one too many, and while Zoe Quinn isn't going anywhere, a number of bright, talented women writers in the gaming scene have been targeted, harassed and hounded-- Anita Sarkeesian, Samantha Allen, Courtney Stanton, Maddy Meyers, and Brianna Wu are the most recent that come to mind. Samantha Allen actually stopped writing about games because of the daily level of constant harassment. 

I covered a bit on the difference between the harassment men and women get in the games industry in "Mythbusting Ideas About Women In Games" that excerpted from Brianna Wu's article as well as linking to an example provided by Sarkeesian, but I want to quote from the end of my post "The Status Is Not Quo: Being A Geeky Woman Online & What Med Need To Do":

Women's hurt and fear for safety and the emotional toll for being harassed online have real, chilling impact on discourse.

This is unacceptable. And the burden of speaking out shouldn't continually fall to the women being harassed. So what can we do? Guys, we have to loudly speak out against this behavior. We have to support women in our creative and media spaces. We need to let other men know that this behavior is not okay, and we need to make it socially unacceptable. We need to listen to women's experiences-- really listen, and not just wait for our chance to say "not all men". We need to realize that online harassment isn't something that just happens-- it's a choice that is made, it is a crime that is done.

As Andy Kouri says in "Fake Geek Guys: A Message to Men About Sexual Harassment":

It is wholly and rightfully and crucially up to men in this society and especially in this subculture to speak out and watch out. To end the cycle of bullying, harassment and violence. To recognize the grotesque irony of degrading women over matters of heroic fictions whose lessons about fairness and decency we've supposedly been studying since we were just little boys, and to start putting those ideas into practice as grown-ass men.

It's not just a few bad apples, guys. It's a lot of bad apples. These are guys that think they represent gamers, that they say what other men are thinking. And we have to push back on this. If you care about safety, if you care about equality, you must push back on this. Staying silent in an attempt to be neutral isn't really being neutral. It just makes dissenting voices less common, and makes the misogynists think that they have your support.

Retro Repost: Penny Arcade, Game Culture & Rape

Note: This article was originally published as part of my time as an Associated Content Featured Contributor to the Video Games Section. Associated Content was later bought by Yahoo! and renamed Yahoo! Voices. Yahoo Voices shut down in July of 2014. This article is being republished here on The Code, backdated to its original date of publication to remain as a record of my writing.

Trigger warning: This article includes discussion of abuse, sexual assault, and rape, including rape as humor and rape as story elements in video games.

On August 11, 2010, the web comic Penny Arcade presented a comic strip titled "The Sixth Slave". According to the news post for that comic, it was based on a real quest in an MMORPG, and intended to lampoon the sort of punch-clock morality introduced by having to repeat the same instance of a quest over and over for new players. In the first panel, an armor-clad hero strides past a ragged slave, who calls out, "Hero! Please, take me with you! Release me from this Hell unending!". The second panel is a close-up of the slave's haggard face as he continues, saying, "Every morning, we are roused by savage blows. Every night, we are raped to sleep by the dickwolves!". In the final panel, the hero replies, "I only needed to save five slaves. Alright? Quest complete." As the slave protests with a "But..." the hero interjects, "Hey. Pal. Don't make this weird."

The reaction to the comic from fans, writers, and rape survivors touched off a firestorm of controversy, and apparently took the creators by surprise. Commenter Sydera in a discussion thread on the feminist blog Shakesville theorized that "...the reason this cartoon thought a rape joke would be funny is the pervasive use of 'rape' among WoW players to mean something other than rape."

Others pointed out that since rape isn't an explicit part of most video games and was only part of the set-up to the joke, something else equally over-the-top and horrible could have been substituted for being "raped to sleep by dickwolves" without losing the humor of the punchline. Others wondered if the joke would have been as funny if it were a child or a woman instead of a man making the pleas. But the most common criticism leveled at the comic was that using rape as the set-up to a punchline was part of larger problem of both male-centric gaming culture and society at large: jokes about rape inadvertently reinforce a social climate where real pain from rape survivors is minimized. Shaker Milli A, in a guest post on Shakesville, said that this is especially damaging"...because rape survivors exist among us, and after being victimized by rapists, they are re-victimized by a society that treats even real rape like a joke, forced to live in a culture that actually has a lot of rape jokes... because people don't take rape seriously."

The creators of Penny Arcade, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, seemed surprised and even angry at the criticism. Kahulik responded on Twitter, saying "I don't feel like we made a mistake... Some people seem to work really hard so that they can be mad. Life is too short." When it was pointed out that rape jokes have the potential for triggering severe traumatic responses in survivors, Krahulik replied with "[T]he idea that our cartoon could cause 'significant trauma' is bat s*** f***ing insane."

The pair released a follow-up comic two days after "The Sixth Slave" that featured the comic's two main characters, Tycho and Gabe, directly facing the viewer. In the first panel, Tycho says "Hello, this is Tycho Brahe, of Penny Arcade. We recently made a comic strip where an imaginary person was raped imaginarily by a mythological creature whose every limb was an erect phallus. Some found that idea disturbing." Gabe chimes in with "We want to state in clear language, without ambiguity or room for interpretation: We hate rapers, and all the rapes they do. Seriously, though. Rapists are really the worst." In the final panel, Tycho, Tycho says, "It's possible you read our cartoon, and became a rapist as a direct result. If you're raping someone right now, stop. Apologize. And leave. Go, and rape no more!" In the comic's related news post, Kahulik said "Did the [previous] comics about bestiality, suicide, murder, pedophilia, and torture not bother them? Or how about the fruit f***er? I mean, we have a character who is a literal rapist. What comic strip have they been reading all these years?"

Melissa McEwan responded by pointing out that "No, one rape joke does not 'cause' someone to go out and commit a rape. But a single rape joke does not exist in a void. It exists in a culture rife with jokes that treat as a punchline a heinous, terrifying crime that leaves most of its survivors forever changed in some material way." According to the Community Counseling Centers of Chicago, a third of rape survivors can develop post-traumatic stress disorder. McEwan further explained that "...rape jokes trigger (some) survivors of sexual violence... A survivor of sexual violence who experiences a trigger is experiencing the same thing as a soldier who experiences a trigger, potentially even including flashbacks... [and] post-traumatic stress disorder". This is why I have chosen to place a trigger warning at the beginning of the article.

A charitable interpretation of the official response from Penny Arcade is that Krahulik and Holkins were upset and defensive. There was hope that the many posts from gamers and bloggers along with emails containing critical responses from fans in the wake of the "Sixth Slave" comic could help the duo realize that the bigger problem wasn't that the inclusion of a rape joke was unnecessary and potentially offensive, but that the joke and their response were potentially triggering. In the months after the controversy, they had the time to educate themselves about post-traumatic stress disorder and trigger warnings. However, on October 8th, Krahulik posted the following introduction to his podcast about Dungeons and Dragons: "Trigger Warning for attempts to coerce laughter through foul language, Dungeons, Dice rolling, contempt for Hydra's bodily autonomy, [and] Dragons". Immediately following this post, Holkins posted an announcement for one of two new shirts on sale: a "Penny Arcade Dickwolves" shirt, done in the manner of a sports team logo. Shortly thereafter, Penny Arcade also added a Dickwolves pennant.

I personally feel that with a news post mocking trigger warning and PTSD victims, followed by the sale of a "Penny Arcade Dickwolves" T-shirt, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins progressed from being ignorant, insensitive and unintentionally offensive to outright deliberately cruel, all while trying to exploit the controversy and pain caused in the wake of the "Sixth Slave" comic and their response for a profit. Penny Arcade is a website that draws millions of views every single day. They run two separate video game conventions. MTV Online has called Krahulik and Holkins "...the closest the medium [of video games] has to leaders of a gamers' movement." They created the Child's Play charity originally to combat the negative stereotypes about people that play video games and have raised nearly 9 million USD for children's hospitals over 8 years. They were listed as part of the 2010 Time Magazine 100 people that "most affect our world". Yet they have offered the defense that the comic and the resultant merchandising is not supposed to be influential or taken seriously. Either they can influence their audience, or they can't.

When they published "The Sixth Slave", I was willing to give the duo the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to believe that Krahulik and Holkins were only being clueless out of ignorance, not being malicious on purpose. Of course, intent doesn't mitigate impact. If you're doing a funny dance for a bunch of people and you accidentally step on someone's foot, it's still going to hurt, even if you didn't mean to step on anyone's feet. When Penny Arcade published the follow-up comic after making several angry and defense responses, I could no longer willfully make an assumption of good faith. Mocking trigger warnings, and by extension PTSD, along with selling a Dickwolves t-shirt and pennant has led me to conclude that they are being malicious on purpose for their own satisfaction, and to make a quick buck.

The problem with using rape as part of punchline is that is adds more to the cultural waters where rape is not taken seriously. As mentioned before, recounting of rape can has the potential to trigger awful traumatic reactions in survivors. And the number of survivors of sexual violence is very large indeed. According to RAINN, 1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Despite the high percentage of women who are survivors of sexual violence, many people making rape jokes tend to think of rape as an abstract thing that is horrible and wrong but hasn't happened to them, nor to anyone they know. So they feel free to make jokes about a shocking subject, thinking that since they don't mean any harm, they won't be harming anyone. This adds to the pervasive attitude that rape is just some nebulous thing that happens to "other people" and a dismissive attitude has no real impact. That attitude, in turn, in turn leads to victims being less likely to tell someone who makes these jokes that they have been sexually assaulted.

According to RAINN, a little over 60 percent of incidents of sexual assault go unreported. This is partially attributed to the fact that prevalent attitudes regarding assault and rape make survivors reluctant to speak out. A critically-acclaimed video gives an example of this shame and silencing effect-- in Mass Effect 2, when Commander Shepard asks what the prison is like, one of the male prisoners answers makes lots of fidgeting and furtive glances and obliquely references the fact that other prisoners have stolen his clothes, his belongings and even his pride, and that he's been so afraid he hasn't showered in months. It is played for laughs. There is an entire category on TV Tropes about the use of prison rape as comedy. In the "Sixth Slave" comic strip, the slave begging to be saved from the fate of being "raped to sleep by the dickwolves" is a man. As a survivor of sexual assault myself, I can personally attest that constant jokes about male on male rape, casual use of rape jokes and rape as slang for losing (or winning) a video game by a wide margin have made me less likely to share my experiences, increased the level of humiliation and shame I have felt, as well as contributing to me feeling like an outsider at times in a community I wanted to belong to.

Krahulik wondered why this particular comic seemed to spark so much outrage when they have been doing offensive comics for years. Leaving aside the notion that people are allowed to chose what they devote their own mental energy to, as well as the fact that Penny Arcade is not an episodic strip with much in the way of continuity... the strip has been online since 1998. The number of people reading comics online has grown by leaps and bounds in the past 13 years. I personally think that the backlash might not be a matter of fans suddenly being upset with them, but instead reflect the first time that Krahulik and Holkins really couldn't ignore what they were being told.

The Dickwolves t-shirt doesn't turn gamers into rapists, but it does dismiss and trivialize a very real trauma. It can contribute to an atmosphere that can make victims of sexual assault-- of which women are the most likely-- feel unwelcome and ostracized from the gaming community, especially in light of the fact that there are two Penny Arcade conventions. An outfit isn't just something one uses to cover one's nakedness. As anyone giving job interview advice would tell you, your choice of outfit sends a message to the people around you. Many gamers or geeks will wear t-shirts that express a geeky side or love of video games. The Penny Arcade Dickwolves t-shirt looks like a team jersey of the kind typically worn by fans or supporters of their favorite sports team. So what sort of message are you sending when you wear a "team Dickwolves" shirt or display the Dickwolves pennant? I looked high and low for a "Sixth Slave" sports team t-shirt. Penny Arcade doesn't sell those.

One person who is, however, is producer and blogger Kirby Bits. Bits has responded by designing a shirt for the "Dickwolves Survivors Guild". The shirts are priced at a dollar over cost, Bits said, with 100 percent of the proceeds being donated to RAINN. When asked about his reasons for making the shirt, Bits said that "...the thing that motivated us into action was that if you're going to make a t-shirt... [the Dickwolves design] is about the laziest, most uncreative way to do that. And on top of that, they are literally profiting off of rape culture, which makes me sick to my stomach when I think about it for too long."

Even if you don't agree with the fact that placing rape and the trauma of rape survivors as part of a joke makes life worse, it is a demonstrated effect that these joke can trigger physical and severe mental trauma. Do you want to be a part of that? How can we, as members of the video game community, claim to be a part of the good that charities like Penny Arcade's Child's Play will do, but choose to ignore, dismiss or marginalize women gamers and survivors of sexual assault? Every single response from Penny Arcade-- a website that has proven to be enormously influential in both the effects it has on the video games industry and the audience it commands-- has sent the message that if you have been raped, if feel uncomfortable about rape jokes, or if you don't think that joking about rape is funny, then the video gaming community isn't really the place for you.

The official response from Penny Arcade to fans who emailed them, engaged them on twitter and pointed out the consequences of Penny Arcade's rape humor were mocked, insulted and ultimately ignored. The fact that Krahulik and Holkins now proudly sell t-shirts and pennants mocking the reaction and claiming allegiance via the "Penny Arcade Dickwolves" is a bitter irony when you consider that they used to sell a t-shirt with a drawing of geek icon Wil Wheaton emblazoned with the statement "Wil Says: Don't Be A Dick".

Sources:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/11/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/8/11/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/13/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/8/13/
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1984685,00.html
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2003/11/24#1069746601
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/08/rape-is-hilarious-part-53-in-ongoing.html
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/08/survivors-are-so-sensitive.html
http://danbruno.net/blog/2010/08/apologies-apologia/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/10/6/
http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assault-victims
http://www.rainn.org/statistics
http://www.c4chicago.org/taxonomy/term/35
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents
http://kirbybits.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/here-is-a-shirt-dickwolves-survivors-guild
http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2008/03/wil-says.html