The Secret World: Sexual Assault By Any Other Name Is…

Funcom, the developer of The Secret World announced bad returns on the back of poor sales of the MMO. They’re taking on measures like “temporary layoffs” in order to reduce operating expenses. In my mind, couldn’t have happened to a nicer crowd.

You see, I gave TSW a try. I really wanted to like it: an MMO with a modern setting and the premise that players are members of rival clandestine organisations looking to control the world through their manipulations of occult forces? Awesome! It’s like Call of Cthulhu and Foucault’s Pendulum and the Illuminatus! Trilogy all rolled into one!

On the gameplay side, it sounded a little innovative. You don’t level, per se. Instead, as you gain experience, you get access to a skill tree, which you can chop and change to your liking and needs. Gun-toting combat wombat? Easy. Pistols-and-fists gun-fu? Got you covered. Chaos magic and shotguns? No sweat. And getting new skills is frequent and easy, so you’ll feel like there’s less of a grind.

And finally, the thing that tipped me over the edge: investigation missions that require some serious thinking. In the vein of Call of Cthulhu, these quests tell you there’s something to be found out and leave you to your own devices. Newspaper archives, libraries, town hall records, even the Internet are at your disposal. SOLD!

So off I went. A month after launch, there was a free-play weekend to attract new players. A great opportunity to give it a shot (especially since Funcom was asking $60 up front, and then $15 monthly subscription). I created a Dragon character, since their pitch was, “You may have heard of the butterfly effect. We were the ones who told the butterfly where and when to flap its wings.” A great philosophy that captured what I wanted out of the game.

The opening sequence was great. My character lay on her bed while a bee crawled inside her mouth. Over the course of some weeks, she developed magical abilities, then was violently abducted to Korea. Once there, I had a chat with a recruiter, then was taken upstairs into a hotel where the following happened to me:

So let me get this out of the way: I understand that the whole idea is that the Dragon need to open your mind, and their method is to use sex. I’m not an idiot, or unread, or a prude. This scene is one of the most problematic I’ve encountered in video games yet.

You may not get it from the lack of context in the video, but there is no consent by the player. The last agency I have over the character is approaching that door with the mostly-naked man covered in tattoos. At that point, the game takes over my actions and holds my down while a sex act is performed on my character.

Let this be clear. This is rape. It is not okay because “it’s a hot asian chick”. The game took my character, which is the only thing I control about this game and forced some very big changes on to it. I didn’t want to have to think about my character as a sexual being. It was going to cast magic spells, fight tentacle monsters and put the restless dead back in their graves. Sex was never on the cards; why should it be?

There was no pairing in which a sex act to which I did not consent made sense. Straight, gay, bi, male, female, other. Even if my character consented (which I’m unsure about, since she’d spent weeks with alien magic powers coursing through her, then got beaten and abducted, and left to wander around a Korean village in a state of mute disorientation), that consent was forced on her by the developer. I didn’t choose it, and that’s a very big decision that only I can make.

Adding to my outrage is the apparent lack of it on the Internet.

Rock Paper Shotgun had this to say:

And then the cunnilingus begins. No, seriously. (Off camera, but the expression on the player character’s face leaves little to the imagination.) Goodness me.

Seriously, “Goodness me” is all you’ve got? At least Joystiq was a little more incredulous:

She told me that, as part of my initiation, I would have to open my mind. The quickest route to enlightenment, apparently, is oral pleasure. I’m not kidding.

I think that giving me the slightest bit of interaction in the cutscene would have been enough. Just letting me go through a dialogue tree like this would have sufficed:

1. Choice: Accept hot chick’s advance <Go to 2> | Reject crazy girl <Go to 3>
2. Player: That’s good. Yes. My god it’s full of stars! <end scene>
3. Player: Wait, what? Get up! What are you doing?
   Woman in red: Your mind must be opened. The pleasure will mingle with the magic in your veins and you will know what to do.
   Choice: Ok, sounds good <Go to 2> | Still uncomfortable with this <Go to 4>
4. Player: Look, I’m not sure about this at all. We just met, and your friends hit me pretty hard, and I might have a concussion.
   Woman in red: Listen, it’s not that I find you particularly attractive either. I’ve simply come to accept my role in the destiny of others such as yourself. You belong to the Dragon now, but if you would deny your fate, then go. But do not believe that it will be so easy for you. <Go to 5>
5. Player is allowed to leave the room. Tattooed man hits player on the back of the head, triggering the vision. <end scene>

I was almost afraid to look at the official forum. I’ll let you decide for yourself whether 78 pages of back and forth between people with legitimate concerns and your typical game forum troll is worth your time. One thing to note: that thread was opened in March. The scene was leaked four months ago, caused a bit of a stir amongst people who were lining up to play the game, and no change was made. Artistic integrity is one thing, but if you’re out to make MMOs more cerebral with global conspiracies and investigations that make you think, then maybe you want to listen to fans who are able to draw a link between the words “non-consensual” and “rape” in their forum posts.

All this to say that I’m voting with my wallet. It hurts, because of all the good things I’ll be missing out on, but shit like this has got to stop. It’s maintaining the negative image of gamers as heteronormative, male-privileged teenagers with no sexual sensitivity. Oh fuck. I feel dirty using so many lefty-feminist words in one sentence, but there’s no other way to describe it. And this shit’s got to stop.