I’ve been poking at the Scott Adams game format recently, and came across something that seemed completely out of the blue in Mystery Fun House (a comedic James Bond parody along the lines of Get Smart). Specifically, there are two NPCs in the game—the ticket seller and the mermaid—and you can RAPE either of them. This produces the message “OK Wheeee” and no other effect.
This seems so utterly out of left field given the genre and style of the games that my first thought is it has to be an error. In Adventureland, you can notoriously SCREW BEAR to solve a puzzle, but the intended answer is SCREAM—the parser only looks at the first three or four letters of the verb (depending on the game) to save memory, and it completely ignores any noun that comes after an intransitive verb.
Is there some more innocent verb that could be intended here (starting with those four letters)? Or is this something that’s been discussed elsewhere? It’s really not a topic I’d expected to run into in a spy comedy game, and I haven’t seen anything about it online, which reinforces the idea that this is some bizarre error.
English seems to be surprisingly short on verbs beginning “rap” (Scott Adams’ games would ignore the “e”). So unless the player was rapping them or rappeling them, I’m afraid it’s exactly what you thought.
There’s actually a field in the header that specifies how many letters should be considered when parsing; it’s usually set to 3, but is 4 for this specific game. So it can’t be either of those verbs, either.
The only synonym for this verb in the game code is KISS, which is even more baffling. I’d think an author wanting to deliberately touch on a subject like that would include more words…
Worlds beginning with the 4 letters in question in Norvig's list
- rape
- raped
- rapes
- rapesex
- rapeseed
- raper
- rapeing
- rapesco
- rapel
- rapeslut
- rapedwhite
- rapedvodka
- rapet
- rapestories
- rapees
- rapelje
Worlds beginning with the 4 letters in Yet Another Word List (YAWL), mentioned at the bottom of Norvig's page
rape
rapeable
raped
raper
rapers
rapes
rapeseed
rapeseeds
For verbs beginning with those letters, the WordNet list has just
{ [ rape1, noun.act:rape1,+ ] [ spoil, noun.possession:spoil,+ noun.act:spoil,+ noun.act:spoliation,+ noun.act:spoilation,+ ] [ despoil, noun.act:despoilment,+ noun.act:despoliation,+ ] violate1, [ plunder1, noun.act:plundering,+ ] destroy,@ frames: 8 (destroy and strip of its possession; “The soldiers raped the beautiful country”) }
{ [ rape, noun.act:rape,+ noun.person:raper,+ ] [ ravish, noun.act:ravishment,+ noun.person:ravisher,+ ] [ violate1, noun.act:violation2,+ noun.person:violator,+ ] [ assault3, adj.all:offensive3^assaultive,+ ] [ dishonor2, noun.state:dishonor,+ ] dishonour2, [ outrage, noun.act:outrage1,+ ] verb.competition:assault,@ frames: 9 (force (someone) to have sex against their will; “The woman was raped on her way home at night”) }
The only synonym for this verb in the game code is KISS
Presumably the only synonym you’ve found so far.
It’s possible it’s an easter egg in bad taste, but it sounds more like a general response that’s been applied to a bunch of verbs without considering the context.
Have you checked to see if it’s limited to certain ports/versions of the game?
Hm. I hadn’t thought of that—I haven’t actually read any of the Bond novels—but that does seem unfortunately possible.
The fact that it was removed in later versions of the game is appreciated, regardless. It’s true that casual murder of NPCs is common in early adventures, but even that usually has some sort of reason behind it.
I’m having flashbacks to when I was in a national tour of The Fantasticks…
'It Depends on What you Pay'
The last song in the first act is instrumental and called “The Rape Ballet / Happy Ending” which as staged is an instrumental madcap dance / silent melodrama where scoundrels try to abduct the only female character in the show and are fended off by the love-interest. This is all a grand scheme by the children’s fathers who want them to get married and have decided the best way to make that happen is to pretend to feud so by reverse-psychology of course the forbidden neighbors have to fall in love like Romeo and Juliet. The finale of this subterfuge is they hire a theatrical company to play a band of rogues to pretend to abduct the girl and let the boy win to bond them and so the fathers have a reason to mend the fence and let them get married.
The musical bends itself over backwards trying to rationalize “yes “rape” is a horrible term because this is serious drama!” The beginning of “It Depends on What You Pay” goes
[EL GALLO, spoken]
The cost, señor, depends on the quality of the “rape.”
[BELLOMY, spoken]
No.
[EL GALLO, spoken]
Forgive me, the attempted “rape.” The abduction, the seizure, the raid, the chase! In your case, I think I would recommend a “First Class.”
[BELLOMY, spoken]
You mean we get a choice?
[EL GALLO, spoken]
Yes, of course! And with regular union rates, it depends on what you pay.
(sung)
Pay!
Pay!
Pay!
Those are updated lyrics,
But in the original, he’s not heroically riffing the word “pay” he’s singing “rape”.
An abduction that’s emphatic
An abduction that’s polite
An abduction done with Indians
A truly charming sight
Lyrics originally
You can get the rape fantastic
You can get the rape polite
You can get a rape with Indians
A truly charming site…
We had the original lyrics and cut like 50 usages of the word “rape” but left it in the song where it otherwise wouldn’t make sense to change it. I understand what the joke is, but it’s a weirdly troublesome thing in an otherwise family friendly musical.
The whole entire script has been overhauled for modern audiences and the new song is called “Abductions.”
Tangent: the word “rape” meaning “abduct” or “abduction” is actually the original use, from Latin rapere “seize, take away”. It only developed its modern meaning in the last century or so, which is why e.g. various depictions of “The Rape of Persephone” all show a kidnapping instead of a sexual assault. But nowadays it very much means the other thing, so changing those lyrics is a good call…
Right! Just because a term is common place language 50 years ago years ago doesn’t necessarily mean it’s eternal and unchangeable now as opinions and awareness evolve.
Canola oil I think is made from rapeseed and used to be called rapeseed oil but they don’t do that anymore! Just like in the 70s there was a line of weight loss bars called “Ayds”.
I think, for future games, having no response to that word at all is good. It’s part of why I quit IF for 5 years. There are two games where you play evil people (Vespers and Varicella) that came with Frotz on the iPad. In Vespers, I had gotten stuck and was trying to figure out what the author wanted me to do. I typed ‘rape’ to see if it would make the game progress, and it had a really gross response, showing that the author had at least intended players to think about it. I hated the way I felt knowing I had chosen to type something bad and that the game had acknowledged it; I felt like I had done something wrong (and I still do!). The same thing happened later in that game with eating dead bodies, which also disturbed me. Then I played Varicella, where rape is a major part of the storyline, and that made me feel so sick to my stomach that I decided IF was evil and stopped playing until several years later.
Since then, I’ve encountered a few IF where you have to rape to progress, and it’s part of the reason I just don’t like to play or review sexual IF at all anymore. Those earlier games were bad enough with just having a response.
I recognize that I was the one at fault here; someone could easily play without typing in those commands. But I didn’t feel more impressed with or more engaged with the games because they recognized the commands. It just made me feel sick. So I think it would be better to not code anything for the word ‘rape’ at all. I think a similar reasoning is why Inform 7 stopped recognizing profanity as a standard verb a long time ago; it’s better to just completely ignore something than give attention to it (when it comes to programming).
Brian, I’ll discuss your post in private, but not tonight, because I’m seriously annoyed by the heavy-handed censorship against myself. (I was posting this in reply to the deletion of my post above, when Brian posted his excellent insight)
So I feel that sadly other IF fellows perhaps don’t deserve reading my comment to Brian’s interesting and thought-provoking post, so is best kept private between us.
Playing IF since I was 11, I’ve had similar experiences. I’m pretty sensitive in general; as a child I was also perfectionistic in my moralism. I’ve always had a big sense of inherent guilt when acting against my conscience. Profanity was definitely crossing a line for me. Not just a socially defined one, but an inward one, for a long time.
I get it the feeling that “IF is evil.” If you’re young and idealistic and insecure about your ability to face the world, the typical vibe that vaguely, collectively speaks out of the voice of the parser seems treacherous – also alluring in exactly the same way as bad teenagers are interesting to younger children.
I think a similar reasoning is why Inform 7 stopped recognizing profanity as a standard verb a long time ago;
I didn’t know Inform has dropped the swear words! Apparently, now real adventure games don’t use such language! Some of my first experiences of expressing swear words were when I typed them into IF games, my curiosity getting the better of my scruples.
That’s kind of the point. Even with best intentions language evolves and changes to mean different things over time.
While some might derisively call it “PC” or “woke” and not understand why we can’t still call canola oil “rapeseed oil” because it doesn’t bother them personally, words do carry connotations, and an abuse victim has very different perceptions of what otherwise might not bother other people.
It’s one thing to use specific language with someone you know well, it’s quite another thing to present it publicly in a forum or a game where you don’t specifically know everyone in your audience.
Because the term itself can be triggering that’s why there are more sensitive phrasings that are more publicly acceptable. And no company wants their product to share a name with a SA term or a debilitating disease.
Partially that, partially the compiler needed special features built in to hide these verbs from the documentation, because it was very important to chide players who say “bother” but equally important to prevent authors from inadvertently seeing the word “bother” while looking at the index.
