Sex in Videogames, or Lack Thereof

What’s the difference between sexuality in video games and sexuality in real life? Not very much. What I mean is that although you’ll see more ass on screen than during the Democratic Convention, the whole topic is still a big social phobia in general. Video games mirror our own social fears of exposing younger people to any form of sex or sexual themes, mostly in lieu of violence that is somehow much more acceptable.
It’s rather confusing that nearly every strong female protagonist (or antagonist, really) is measured not only by the power of her arsenal, but her comparative lack of clothing. The best example of this is the Dead or Alive series of fighters. Every female fighter in the game is cartoonishly top heavy, and even moreso the game gives players the option of turning the bounce function off or on. While off, the fighters fight as normal, focusing mostly on the technique and strategy of defeating the opponent. While on, the women’s breasts bounce with a physics engine of their own, leading most players to wonder if it’s designed to be an innovative feature, or a way of playing dirty with distractions.
Oddly enough, these same characters were redrawn as something along the lines of Sports Illustrated’s swim suit edition and parents were up in arms about the videogame magazine showing borderline pornography. What’s the difference between the game and the magazine versions? The images were designed to be like photographs with a few of the women in mildly suggestive poses, more like pin-up girls than actual pornographic material like Playboy. Alternatively, I doubt the parents were exposed to the game before or after buying it. Parents can easily enough pick up a magazine and flip through the pages than figure out how to not only start the console but to actually have the motivation to play the game that their child is so drawn into.
The game makes a joke out of playing with the programming. It’s comical how the woman can be relatively still and their breasts are still bouncing like they were in a zero gravity chamber. But the people who play the games and are old enough to know what true pornography is probably looked at the magazine pictures as an interesting piece of art, since the art was very well developed and the pictures were actually really pretty to look at.
Other games, however, take the idea of sex and expand on it as part of the game’s mechanics. In this day and age, no retail level videogame store will sell Adult Only titles. Adult Only can refer to either excessive sexual themes or extreme depictions of violence. Publishers will bend over backwards to push the limits of what the ratings board will let them get away with without sliding into that Adults Only category. Manhunt 2 was originally intended to be much more visceral in how it portrayed the murders in the game. The violence level was pushed to the breaking point in both its brutality as well as its realism. The ratings board recommended that they make changes in order to drop their rating from Adults Only, to Mature with a warning label.
Rockstar had this same dilemma when they were developing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Luckily, they had the foresight to disable the coding for the notorious Hot Coffee mini-game before they released it as a Mature title. The game had garnered enough mutterings from conservatives due in part from the violence, but mainly because you get the option to date a few women throughout the story. If the date ends favorably, CJ is invited into their house for a cup of coffee along with suggestive invitations from the women.
Consequently, some kid was playing around in the coding of one of the versions and found this disabled mini-game coding. Through contorting oneself and jumping through enough hoops, he’d developed a way to unlock this mini-game, which allows the player to play an interactive mini-game of CJ having sex with his given girlfriend at the time. Suddenly there was a massive backlash about how Rockstar was at fault for creating such a game and going so far as to leave this length of coding (which was never meant to be accessed by the general public) available for the customers. Parents went into hysterics about the horrible game and how it was even worse now than before because it was somehow finally accepted that killing cops was part of a game, but sex is completely over the line.
How this mini-game is somehow unacceptable while few people whined about the ability for the player to pick up a prostitute off the street, take her to a secluded area to have sex with her – which includes the car shaking, the controller vibrating, simulated moans and groans – will forever escape me. On top of it, the more heartless of players finish the deed, climb out of the car, and proceed to murder the woman in order to get your money back, in addition to the complimentary health increase. This part is relatively acceptable, but the mini-game of two consenting adults performing an entirely natural and arguably healthy part of a relationship is so horrible that the entire company should be boycotted.
Yet a few years later, we get a new Grand Theft Auto clone in the way of Saints Row 2 for both the Xbox360 and the PlayStation 3. Focused more on violence and the gang lifestyle, the game does have a mini-game where at certain locations, you can take a prostitute into a truck stop bathroom to have sex with her. The goal behind this is to use both analog sticks to find the ‘sweet spot’ and pleasure the woman. There’s a number of levels and the higher the level you get to, the more of a reward you get.
Incidentally, my friend found this mini-game while standing on an apartment building and shooting the cops that came to find him. At a certain point, after about a dozen cop cars were immobilized in the parking lot, he grew bored and ventured down to figure out what to do next. The entire police force was stuck behind a building just waiting for him to come around which sent him running towards the truck stop. He had three wanted levels and decided to kill some time with this nice new mini-game. By the time the novelty wore off, the police had forgotten about him and he was free to do whatever he wanted.
I have to wonder if the whole thing revolves around our social idea of sex being acceptable as long as it’s hidden away. In the prostitute missions of GTA, or the bathroom game in Saints Row 2, nothing is shown aside from either a (rocking) parked car, or a bathroom door. True, some people had a problem with the fact that that was in a game, but for the most part people ignored it. The Hot Coffee scene, which was never intended to be played by the public, caused an uproar in the media and across the internet that some people bought the game before the company could release versions without the coding in the files.
I’m not advocating full blown sex simulators as freely accessible, but why is it that sexuality is so shunned in videogames almost more so than real life? We can see sexual themes, women dressed in nearly her underwear as a heroine, sexual innuendo in voiceovers and dialogue. It seems silly to me that people are so caught up on accepting sexual images without admitting the sexuality part behind it. I don’t know if the comfort level will change in terms of videogames or in terms of social acceptance first, but I do hope that we can come to some sort of cautious understanding that one cannot stand without the other. Just because it’s not plastered across a computer monitor or television set, doesn’t mean that it’s completely gone. It merely means that programmers will get more creative about how to introduce these themes to the public.