Some thoughts on Edmund

There is little I could say to lead into what I'm about to write, so I won't bother. The game Edmund made me feel disgusting. That really is all there is to say on the topic, but two sentences does not make an article so I will push past my discomfort and tell you guys more about all of this. Edmund is a game centered on one simple mechanic: rape.

The act of rape has been approached in games before, but none of them did it in such an emotionally affecting way. The game is linear in nature, allowing you no options but to proceed with the narrative or to quit. The player is immediately deposited on a street with only the ability to move, jump, and hit things. There is a woman sitting on a bench waiting for a bus slightly to the right of the starting area and because it is your only real action you strike her. Once you have beaten her until she can't move you proceed to rape her. This isn't something that you can just do and accept as part of the narrative due to a stroke of genius on the part of the designer; you have to hold down the button to actively rape her. This passes the responsibility from the game to the player themselves, effectively making you the rapist. This is what gives the game its ability to be so affecting in a way that no other has.

I think that this game is an important stepping stone for all of gaming, not just for the topic that it brings up but more for the sense of repulsion that it conveys uniformly amongst players. I found this single 8 bit game made by one guy over the course of a few weeks to be more emotionally powerful than the AAA title Modern Warfare 2 which cost millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to complete. I think this is telling of what the future of games will bring to the table: that small games can bring emotion into the art form rather than major developers creating controversy to increase sales of a game. I also think that this is great for games because it creates such an emotional impact. This is important for the development of the medium as a whole in that there can be meaningful experiences that don't involve power trips and shooting people in the face.