Developers Behind Game That Promotes Rape And Incest Defend It, But Pull It From Steam After It Was Banned In 3 Countries
Zerat Games, the developer behind No Mercy, a pornographic game that promotes rape and incest, pulled the game from Steam, but also defended making it and selling it.
If you are unfamiliar with the game, the game’s description on Steam states, “After catching your own stepmother betraying your father, you uncovered the true nature of women, especially her. But she’s no ordinary housewife: she’s hiding a dark secret that’s haunted her for years.”
In a lengthy post announcing that it was removing the game from Steam, the developers also revealed the game includes incest and rape and defends them being included.
First, the developer team painted themselves as victims claiming that people who made videos and and denounced the game did so with “false information about the content in the game.” The developers claim that “some did such extensive ‘research’ that they presented graphics from a completely different game … If this is what your attempts to act in good faith look like, we deeply believe that no one will ever suffer from being wrongfully accused by you.”
Next, they attempted to defend the game itself by playing the “It’s just fiction card.” They wrote, “Secondly, many people unfortunately confuse fiction with reality, attributing fabricated stories where people who play No Mercy then go out on the street and commit vile acts.”
While they might not be committing vile acts, there is increasing data that shows that consumption of pornography degrades the brain and specifically the part that houses executive functions like morality, willpower and impulse control.
Rachel Anne Barr, the co-Director of Georgetown University’s Department of Psychology wrote back in 2019, “orn use has been correlated with erosion of the prefrontal cortex — the region of the brain that houses executive functions like morality, willpower and impulse control. … Damage to the prefrontal cortex in adulthood is termed hypofrontality, which predisposes an individual to behave compulsively and make poor decisions.”
“It’s somewhat paradoxical that adult entertainment may revert our brain wiring to a more juvenile state,” she concluded. “The much greater irony is that while porn promises to satisfy and provide sexual gratification, it delivers the opposite.”
Barr also noted that “researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, found that higher porn use correlated with less brain activation in response to conventional pornographic imagery. This explains why users tend to graduate to more extreme and unconventional forms of porn. Pornhub analytics reveal that conventional sex is decreasingly interesting to users and is being replaced by themes like incest and violence.”
She also shared that there are a number of other negatives when it comes to people who watch pornography, “Porn consumers report greater depressive systems, lower quality of life and poorer mental health compared to those who don’t watch porn.”
So, it might be fiction, but it clearly affects you.
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Even on its face, as novelist Isaac Young points out, “fiction’s sole purpose is to CONVINCE. Its job is to seem real. Of course it’s going to affect you! Sometimes it’s overt, like picking up new words and phrases. Sometimes it’s subtle, like nodding along to a moral lesson in a tv show.”
He added his own anecdote, “Another example. People unconsciously assume the narrator’s position when consuming entertainment. One of the books in my high school English class convinced more than half the students (usually smart kids) that a sexual assault was okay because the narrator justified it.”
Nevertheless, the developers then defended the inclusion of rape and incest in the game by claiming they are popular kinks.
They stated, “Let's start with what shocked public opinion—incest. Real incest is something disgusting, and we fully agree with that. However, incest is also one of the most popular kinks worldwide when it comes to pornography, mainly because it typically portrays third parties, strangers, in no way related to the person watching it. Stepmom, stepson, stepdaughter are among the most frequently searched terms in pornography, which, for emotionally stable people, is just roleplay.”
As for rape, the developers stated, “Rape. Here also, no one wants anyone to get hurt. However, it's strongly connected with blackmail and male domination, which is also a fetish. If someone plays with their partner at home pretending to be a student and teacher who demands sexual acts in exchange for a grade, should we label them as sick and call them rapists, check their computer, and lock them in prison? I fully understand that for many people such things may be disgusting, but during sex, people should really do what they want, as long as they don't harm anyone.”
Consent is a bogus argument to determine whether something is moral or not. Karlo Broussard at Catholic Answers states, “Consider the absurd example of Armin Meiwes, who butchered and ate a willing victim who responded to his internet ad. That someone says ‘yes’ doesn’t make cannibalism morally permissible.”
He later added, “To say that consent by itself makes a behavior morally permissible is like saying a police officer’s commands have normative force just because they’re commands. But we know that a police officer’s commands are meaningful only inasmuch as he is allowed to make such commands given his position of authority. Similarly, our consent has moral significance only inasmuch as the behaviors that we authorize are already morally permissible given some moral framework.”
Regardless, the developers went on to claim that if there was not an outcry surrounding the game, many people would not have heard about it.
They reasoned, “Please consider—would anyone who wasn't looking for such content hear about this game if it weren't for hundreds of articles, petitions, and statements from content creators? After all, if someone believed that this game shouldn't be available in their country, they could have handled it quietly; they could have reported the matter to the authorities. Meanwhile, websites used the trending topic for clicks, organizations placed links to fundraisers under petitions, and content creators made videos that garnered more views. The result of all this was that the game suddenly went from around 1,000 visits to 100 times more in those days.”
Ironically, it then noted that the game was “blocked in 3 countries—Australia, Canada, and the UK.” It then shared “we’ve made the decision to withdraw No Mercy from Steam.”
While there might have been less people playing the game without the outcry, the outcry also ensured the game was blocked in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom and clearly swayed the developers to remove it from Steam altogether reducing the chances of people having access to it in the long run.
It’s a good thing that the game was pulled from Steam, it never should have been made in the first place and was clearly made to have players engage in sin.
This is just like with the game Hatred back years ago people wanted banned because "it was to violent". Or how the Religious Right wanted to ban GTA in the 2000's for the same reason.
The Right is supposed to be about Freedom, ALL censorship is bad, including this.
Even though the game is garbage, I'm against its censorship. They shouldn't have removed it, but it really depends if they live in an authoritarian hellhole like the UK, who can arrest them under the feminist misogyny laws.