This post is about sex in video games. Not sexISM, but sex. Of course these two things can often not be separated. But in light of me having a shit week and #GamerGate blowing up on national new sources across the country, I thought I would change things up a bit by talking about some good old fashion human on human (or human on alien, as I will talk about shortly) sexual relations.
When it was revealed that two players could have sex in Bioware’s Mass Effect, people kind of lost their minds. Fox News, albeit not the bastion of forward thinking perspectives on sex, proclaimed that Mass Effect allowed players to engage in the a more realistic kind of sex than any medium before, and “hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of.” Another news anchor said that Mass Effect left “NOTHING to the imagination… in some parts of this you’ll see full digital nudity. Imagine!” [Oh yes, my faint lady heart just can’t handle such things!]. The discussion around this continues on as one would imagine: how can we expose kids to this stuff, what kind of violence and sexual tendencies will teens have upon playing this game, and don’t even get them started on the gender-bending aspects of the game. Games are ruining the youth and this addition of sex is just the latest problem!
But for anyone who played through the Mass Effect sex scenes, I’d venture to say you likely found it pretty lame. First, it’s not like you get to control the hip thrusts of you or your partner, you don’t get to use your joystick to play with a body part, really you don’t do anything. The sex scene is essentially nothing more than a sex scene on television. After you go through the procedures of wooing the person, you go to a cut scene that controls your and your partner’s actions. Compared to what they show daily on TV, even during primetime when those poor innocent children are watching, this sex scene is tame. It probably wouldn’t even qualify as softcore. It truly is something that would be acceptable on cable. So why are people so shocked?
Well, I think one reason is that video games are a different type of media than film or television based on how interactive it is. It makes you participate physically and viscerally, as well as emotionally and through your imagination (as TV and film rely on). We justify actions we do within games as things we would or could never do in real life: murder, fly, lead an army, etc. We get to play out what it would be like to do different actions and to be someone else. When we breach our sexual fantasies, this can be troublesome for people because the subject is so taboo. We have repressed our sexualities so much that even the hint that we could enjoy some sexual freedom and experimentation in a fantasy world is immediately deemed as devious. Sure, it’s ok to pretend to kill someone, but pretend to have oral sex? That’s seen as weird.
Another reason people are so shocked at sex in games, in addition to the interactivity of the medium, I believe is how the medium has primed us to think about sex. Sex in games now is often violent, it exploits women, it treats women as sexual objects to be raped and tortured, and is generally not reciprocated. Most sexual activity in games in the past is not about mutual sexual gratification, but rather it’s about one party taking advantage of the other.
Mass Effect changes this, of course, as do games like Sims and Fable. Sure you have to put in some time in those games to get people to sleep with you. However, sometimes people won’t. If I am playing a male character in fable, I can’t get a lesbian character to sleep with me. Those values are hard-coded into the game. With Sims, though, if you’re smooth enough you can bed just about anyone. What is interesting, though, is that while games seem totally willing to put in scenes where you save a woman from being raped or where you win a woman as a prize, you really don’t see many mutually gratifying sexual encounters.
That said, games really are sex-obsessed, just not in a way I would see is healthy or fun. Shadows of the Damned, for example, is 100% full of sexual innuendo. Everything is phallic shaped, named Johnson, and even the character graphics seem to imply a sexual stance. However, the closest the game gets to sex is when a demon nearly rapes your girlfriend.
So to recap: sex with two (or more!) willing partners is nearly absent from games, while sexual innuendo and forced sexual encounters abound. This is a huge problem, particularly if games are going to be seen as art, or if we are going to accept that the average age of a gamer is 35 and ½ of players are female. It feels like the problem is much bigger and more systemic than games simply needing to grow up, but that certainly is part of it as well. Thoughts?
2 thoughts on “Bow Chica Wow Wow: Video Games and the Humpity Bumpity”
Ambivalent about this. On the one hand, I don’t really want to see sex scenes in games, partly because many cut scenes aren’t skippable these days. It’s not as simple as changing channels because if I miss the end of the scene, I may miss something requiring my input, information, etc. I also wonder if we’d be importing unhealthy baggage, e.g. PiV being the primary act, a male cameraman. You are right that the only sexuality in games is unhealthy, but given how sexist and backward so many games are… I’m not sure it would be improved with full scenes. I’m not opposed though, as long as one can fully opt-out. Otherwise, it would turn me off of a game.
Responsible adults can decide to game responsibly. Whether the game has sex, violence or anything else objectionable it should be up to the adult to decide. If the gamer is a child then it is up to his/her parents or legal guardians. Personally though a game that places too much sex or violence in the wrong place in a video game will turn me off instead of on and they will not obtain a sale from me. The problem for developers and/or publishers is where is that line at for the gamer and society at large? It constantly evolves.