Video Gaming: Sex in Games

Do you remember when you had ‘the talk’? You know, about ‘that’? It was the one about when a mommy and a daddy love each other? I know birds and bees were in there somewhere.

Video Gaming: Sex in Gaming

For nearly as long as video games have been around, they have some tie-in with sex. This can be traced back as far as the seventies with arcade games and text based cyber sex. Mystique, a company noted for developing pornographic Atari games before its crash in the early 80’s, perfectly represents what sex meant to the video gaming community for nearly thirty years. The answer is titillation.

If you examine every game over the last forty years that contains sex, how many of them have simply been in it for the cheap thrills and over sexualized characters? How many strong female leads have we really had? How many have boasted their mature content as an actual selling point? Sex sells, and that fact is well known by game designers and marketing specialists alike.

The purpose of this hub is not to analyze sex in games and it is certainly not meant to promote sexual abstinence either. Sex is not something to be repressed and mature content is not something to be completely banned from the industry. Imagine, for a moment, if sex was banned from movies? How many beautiful titles would we lose? How many great pieces of true cinematography would cease to be?

Sex is not just about the physical act of sex; the key is sexuality. Sexuality has long been a tool in film and media for defining relationships and expressing the interpersonal emotions of a character. There is a difference between simply stating that Character A is in love with Character B and showing the context of their relationship grow over the course of time (If you haven’t read last week’s hub, take a look at the relationship between the main character and his love interest in Shadow of the Colossus). Intimacy is not something brought about by cheap sex appeal and cheap titillation will never be recognized as a serious art form.

So, where does that leave us? Do we completely ban sexuality and possibly lose this those few monumental moments of depth and this inherent part of who we are as people? Maybe we should simply run from these primal instincts and keep doing things as we’ve been.