HM1 is one of my favorite games, and its message did resonate with me through its gameplay. The thing is, the message the devs may be intending with the scene pretty much dissipates if the person playing happens to be female. This tells me that the game was designed with only the male player in mind.
See, I have several problems with this thinking. 1) How should the scene have been designed? Should it not be in the game at all? That brings up whether game designers are going to remove things in their games to court female players. 2) Plenty of women don't seem to mind watching Game of Thrones, which has plenty of near rape scenes (and one actual rape scene in the 1st season) in addition to alot of soft core porn. Why is rape suddenly so vile in a video-game? Was Game of Thrones not a book/show designed for women? 3) If a predominately female dev. group made a game where a female protagonist cuts a man's dick off, would we say that game "was not designed for men?" (not necessarily a bad thing by the way).
My problem is that people keep acting as if Devolver
should take their critiques of their work into account. Why would you want that? Would you advise Nintendo to design every Mario game around the critiques given by critics? One could argue they've done just this with all the hand holding they've put in recently.
Just because a game is entertainment doesn't mean you're supposed to enjoy every minute of it. I don't particularly enjoy the Saw movies; but I also don't jump up and down screaming that they're too violent. I understand what they are, and accept that they are not for me.
I understand where Cara Ellison is coming from. I remember when RE5's first trailer was shown, and it basically consisted on the (white) hero killing hordes of Africans (Capcom later changed many of the character's skin tones). I was put off by that trailer, and may not have bought the game if it had that in it. But at the same time I understood why there were black people in the game- it was in Africa. It didn't feel right to tell Capcom to change the skin tone because the game was set in a place where there are black people. Capcom changed the game because it was
designed to sell. It wasn't a piece of art. I think I might have respected Capcom more if they had just kept the people's skin darker, because to do so would be to say: "this is our piece of art, and who are you to design our art?". I still wouldn't have bought the game (just like I wouldn't buy a recording of "Birth of a Nation"), but I would have respected it as art, just as I respect Birth of a Nation as a piece of art.
For HM2, it appears that this rape scene is relevant to set the tone of the narrative. Its not gratuitous (and wouldn't be if they just did it for kicks considering the actions in the game). Unlike RE5, Hotline is more "artsy" than your typical AAA blockbuster. To me, people who try to pick and choose what's "acceptable" to put in a game according to what society is or isn't thinking are disrespecting the medium as an art form. Even if there were a game where the purpose
was to rape, it wouldn't strike me as "unacceptable" because in art, anything is acceptable to me. Anything should go in art. It must be unbound from societal norms because art itself reflects and sets societal norms. The moment you try to corral art into acceptable, and unacceptable, you lose the ability to learn something. Hotline is just one such piece of art.
EDIT:
To put it simply: If you were painting a tree, and another person came along and said "hey, that branch isn't correct!", would you listen to them? That to me is the fundemental question.