I’ve seen a lot of discussion recently about this Japanese fighting game. The fighters are young girls and the twist is that to make any damage permanent, you need to catch your opponent off-guard and take a picture up their skirts. Japanese and Western cultures differ in many ways, so I can’t profess to know what the creators’ intent is with this. Others seem more sure they know the answer, however, and are quick to either laugh or be outraged at the perversion that they feel is represented here.
But is it really that cut and dried? Consider an alternative explanation: In real-life fights, how many people get beaten to near-death? Fighting isn’t GBH, it’s a ritual of humiliation. The winner is the person who humiliated the loser. That’s why a “beat down” can mean no physical violence.
How do you express this humiliation in video game form? If you live in the ultra-violent West, you create Mortal Kombat and its infamous Fatalities. Perhaps if you live in Japan, without the fear of sexual deviancy created by paedophile scare stories and a dominant religion obsessed with “sex is evil” and the like, the act of taking a picture of your opponent’s knickers represents an act of successful humiliation, rather than an act of perversion.
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