[San Francisco, August 19. Image via Getty]

SAN FRANCISCO - AUGUST 19: Children on the yellow team celebrate winning the world's largest game of Candyland August 19, 2009 in San Francisco, California. San Francisco's famed Lombard Street, the city's most crooked street, was transfomed into the world's largest game of Candyland to honor the 60th birthday of the popular children's board game. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

While some on the Jezebel staff disdained such paper prescience, I was a wholehearted believer in the powers of the cootie-catcher - seen in the South Park clip above left from the 9th season episode "Marjorine"- the name game, and especially MASH. I've compiled a little gallery of games like this below — it's also a pretty good summation of my grade-school hopes and dreams. Observe:

1. MASH: MASH, my favorite, is kind of complicated. First you write MASH on top of a sheet of paper. Below that, draw a box. Around the box, write categories of things you are curious about in your future. At my school, these were almost always boys we would marry, jobs we would have, cars we would drive, and, of course, the colors of our inevitable wedding dresses. For each category, you pick three good outcomes. My top three boys, you'll notice, are Scotty (the boy I liked in grade school, who once promised to fight another boy for "the friendship of me" after I wore my super-trendy red-and-black-striped minidress-and-bike-shorts combo to school), Johnny Depp (duh), and Michael Stipe (shut up). Then your friends get to pick one bad outcome for each category. For boys, that would be Steve, who had this habit of licking the desks when he thought no one was looking, and whose butt-crack I accidentally grabbed once during math (long story), forcing me to wash my hands one million times. Then you shut your eyes and make tick marks in the box until someone tells you to stop. Take the number of tick marks, start with the M, progress clockwise through the options, and cross one out when you reach the number. Keep going until you have just one item in each category — this is your fortune. In the example below, it was revealed that I would marry Michael Stipe (shut up), that my wedding dress would be off-white (zzz), and that I would ride a dog to my job as a cat wrangler (seems like a bad idea). Oh, the MASH part stands for Mansion Apartment Shack House. I forgot to do that part this time because it always struck me as the most boring.


2. The Name Comparison Game: [If anyone had a better name for this game, we'd love to hear it. None of us can remember what we called it.]You thought MASH was complicated? Check this out. Write your name and your crush's name. Starting with the first letter of your first name, count the frequency of each letter and write the numbers in a line. Example: there are 2 A's in "ANNA NORTH SCOTTY JONES" so I wrote a 2 first. There are 4 N's, so I wrote a 4, etc. Now add the first two numbers and write the result below the second number. Add the second and third number and write the result below the third. Keep going until you have another line that is one number shorter than the previous. If you get a 2-digit number, write only the second digit. Keep doing this until you have a line with just two numbers — that is the percent chance that you and your crush will be together forever. If you don't get it, don't feel bad, it took Anna H. two phone calls to explain this to me, and number 3 offers a way simpler variant.


3. The "True Love" Game: [Thanks to Hortense for this one!]
Write your name and your crush's name. Count how many times each of the letters in the word "TRUE" appears in both names. Add those numbers up. Now count how many times each of the letters in the word "LOVE" appears. Add those numbers up. Write the first number next to the second number, and use THAT as your foolproof percent-likelihood-of-everlasting-love. This method gives me and Scotty only a 44% chance at being together forever, which seems more accurate since I haven't spoken to him in about sixteen years (and 3 months, 13 days, 6 hours . . .)


4. The Cootie-Catcher: As seen on South Park, this is a fortune-telling game of medium complexity. It involves a lot of paper-folding, which fit right in with the huge origami craze that took my school by storm in about second grade. Here's a great set of instructions for how to make and use a cootie-catcher. The South Park kids give a good demonstration of how to play. The most important thing is to include a balance of good fortunes like "You will marry Scotty!" and bad fortunes like "Steve likes you" or "You will be homeless" (equally bad in my mind at the time).


5. Lemon: Write down five girls' names, five things you can do to a lemon (i.e. lick, bite, slice), five boys' names (or other girls' names), five body parts, and five locations (i.e. my childhood favorite, "closet"). Don't let your friends see what order you write them in. Then ask your friends to put the numbers 1 through 5 in random order. Select the item in each column that corresponds to each number, then combine them to form a Mad-Lib type sentence. In this example, I picked the sequence 13452 (I cheated a little). This yielded the sentence "Anna sliced David's dick in bed," which handily reveals the basically sadistic nature of this game. Another interesting thing about Lemon is it doesn't exactly tell the future — except insofar as the time for playing it is well before any of the players have licked, let alone "peeled," anyone's balls. It's sort of a bridge between innocence and experience, between the does-he-love-me chastity of the name games and the sexual experimentation of a later favorite, Seven Minutes in Heaven. We didn't have the word "tween" when I was one, but now that we do, I can say this is definitely a game for tweens.

I was sort of embarrassed at how unquestioningly I believed in these games, even in the face of obvious problems like the fact that each MASH yields a different fortune every time, or that the name comparison game gives a different percentage depending on whose name you write first. Anna H., however, isn't embarrassed at all — she looks upon her cootie-catching days with nostalgia, because she fears girls aren't playing these games anymore. Are kids today entrusting their futures to the fickle flickering screen of a computer instead of a steadfast sheet of paper? Did you play games like this? Can you think of any others? Did boys ever join in the fun? And would you be glad or sorry to see them go the way of that weird hoop-and-stick toy the old-time youngsters liked to play with?

In an article on Slate, Leigh Alexander writes that Quinn, who is working with the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, is unlikely to get RapeLay banned since it was never sold in U.S. stores and has already been removed from Amazon and eBay. Hacked versions of the game's English translation are easily found on the Internet, but it's essentially impossible to police the transfer of the pirated software.

Alexander downloaded one of these illegal copies of RapeLay, in which a man stalks and rapes women in a subway station. She says playing the game resulted in "hours of getting depressed about the fate of humankind." She writes:

While the moral outrage from the New York City Council and Web sites like Jezebel and Shakesville is obviously well-placed, there's little hope that legislation or activism can stem the perversion. Not only is RapeLay rooted in a social illness that's embedded in Japanese society, it's just one game in a niche industry that's more closely related to the porn business than to the video game world.

The concept for RapeLay is actually inspired by Japan's current problem with chikan, or subway perverts. According to a 2004 study, 64 percent of Tokyo women reported that they've been groped on a train. The country has a high conviction rate for chikan, but it's easy for predators to hide on a crowded train and Japanese women are often too ashamed to report the crime.

RapeLay is part of a larger genre of sex-themed Japanese video games known as eroge. The games are usually sold in pornography stores, not with other video games. Eroge is popular in Japan, but Alexander says most games in the genre are not violent, but rather feature, "high-school dating stories, standard soap-opera melodrama that prioritizes narrative, and plenty of oddball pap starring cat girls and alien maids."

The Japanese government places no restriction on the themes of the games, but they are subject to censorship laws, so even in violent sex scenes genitalia will be blurred. As the blurring is removed in the pirated games, English language versions are actually more graphic than the games sold in Japan. Few manufacturers attempt to sell legal versions of eroge in the U.S., and websites that sell Japanese imports will often change the ages of underage characters to 18. No matter how disturbing these games may be, technically, the versions sold in the U.S. are not illegal.

And You Thought Grand Theft Auto Was Bad [Slate]

Earlier: Amazon Drops Rape Simulation Video Game

The rape simulation game involves players chasing a mother on the subway and violently raping her, and then tracking down and raping her two daughters described as virgin schoolgirls. The game includes even more horrific details according to online game reviews, such as the option get other men to join in the attacks, having to force the women to get abortions if they get pregnant, and what a review (NSFW) from Something Awful says are "tears that glisten and move in the little girl's eyes."

Following a report from the Belfast Telegraph that Amazon was selling the English version of the game, the company has removed it from the site. Amazon has not commented on the item or said why it was being sold through their website. The screen shot below from Google's cache shows the Amazon page for the game before it was taken down.

The game is produced by the Japanese company Illusion, which makes other 3D adult video games. According to the Illusion Wikipedia page, company policy says that, "games are not intended to be sold or used outside of Japan, and official support is only given in Japanese and for use in Japan." As if somehow the game being sold only in Japan makes it any less disgusting.

British MP Keith Vaz says he is planning to raise the issue in Parliament. "It is intolerable that anyone would purchase a game that simulates the criminal offence of rape," said Vaz. "To know that this widely available through a major online retailer is utterly shocking, I do not see how this can be allowed." Last year, when Vaz brought up rape simulation video games during a discussion on a bill about film ratings, he was criticized by other MPs who said such games didn't exist and gamers who commented online that he didn't know what he was talking about.

Though the game is no longer available on Amazon, the English version of the game is still being sold on here on eBay, here on Overstock.com, and on many other websites.

[Image via Game SMS]

Amazon Drops Rape Simulation Game [The Belfast Telegraph]
Rapelay Review [Something Awful] (NSFW)

1. "Well, I thought it was funny."

2. "Liars, hysterectomy didn't improve sex life!"

3."Revenge is living well, without you."

4. "Maybe you had to be there."

5. "Secret of life: marry an Italian."

a) Joan Rivers b) Roy Blount Jr. c) Nora Ephron d) Stephen Colbert e) Joyce Carol Oates *

As in so many things, what's revealing is less the words than the spirit. Personally, I'm torn between, "Hey, what fresh hell is this?" ;"Butter is my one true love"; and "Life story: ur doin it rong."

*1d, 2a, 3e, 4b, 5c.

People's Memoirs. Six Words. Surprising Results. [USA Today]

Parents are understandably up in arms over the game, which, after a launch last month, has, at the time of this writing, 204,714 "registered Bimbos." Bill Hibbard, a member of the parents' rights group ParentKind, tells the Guardian, "It is one thing if a child recognises it as a silly and stupid game. But the danger is that a nine-year-old fails to appreciate the irony and sees the bimbo as a cool role model. Then the game becomes a hazard and a menace. Children's innocence should be protected as far as possible. It depends on the background and mindset of the child but the danger is that after playing the game some will then aspire to have breast operations and take diet pills."

Miss Bimbo, at first glance, is free for registrants, but when players run out of virtual bimbo money, they are given the option to buy Bimbo text messages which cost £1.50 ($2.99) per message and give players extra dollars to spend on their Bimbos. A French man has already sued Miss Bimbo's Gallic sister site after his daughter ran up a text message bill of over £100 ($199).

As for the creators of Miss Bimbo, well, the game's 23-year-old creator Nicolas Jacquart tells the Times of London, "The game is structured in such a way that it simply mirrors real life in a tongue-in-cheek way. It is not a bad influence for young children. They learn to take care of their bimbos." He continues: "The missions and goals for the bimbos are morally sound and teach children about the real world. If they eat too much chocolate in the game, it is bad for their bimbos' bodies and their happiness levels compared to if they eat fruit and vegetables, which reinforces positive healthy eating messages.The breast operations are just one part of the game and we are not encouraging young girls to have them." Maybe we should teach Jacquart a lesson through the patented Jezebel justice system. Perhaps some time cleaning bed pans on an eating disorder ward would do the trick?

Alarm As Dolls Get Breast Implants In 'Miss Bimbo' Game [CNN]
Internet Miss Bimbo Game For Girls Attacked By Parents [Guardian]
Miss Bimbo Website Promotes Extreme Diets And Surgery To 9-Year-Olds [Times of London]

We've taken a lot of stick over the years for our gaming obssession, apparently purely because we have tits and a womb. Girls think we're odd and boys think they can beat us with their joystick tied behind their back.

To which we say, suck it!

"It's official - women who play video games have sex more often! Gametart, the UK's largest online games rental company, carried out the survey throughout January to see how the recent influx of the likes of Pink PSPs and DS Lites would affect gamers' sex lives across the country.

The results were surprising. Of our sample of 200 women, those who played video games on average had sex 4.3 times a week while those who didn't play games only had sex just 3.2 times a week."

Hah! Society has finally realized that a girl with a vibrating PS2 console in her hand is sexy!

It's just a shame our ex-boyfriend didn't agree.