I generally prefer constructive criticism. It’s not that I don’t like pieces that bash on awful games, on gaming or that I don’t love Jim Sterling’s over-the-top sarcasm, but what really gets me going are articles that deal with new possibilities, problem resolution or try to take a new approach towards an old subject and, thus, end up enriching my own point of view. It's in this spirit that I’ll take on the following subject, and that’s why I’ll try to avoid giving examples of how things have been done badly.

Many times now we have delved into how sex scenes in games just have a wrong feeling to them, or how insensitive or out of place they seem regarding the overall narrative. We all know that adding a sex scene for its own sake, just because all the cool kids are doing it, adds nothing to the overall experience. I have reflected upon how to improve this, and have come to two possibilities that could be explored in the future.

The first one deals with a better understanding of narrative and its particular relationship with this medium. Narrative deals with the telling of a fact (factual or fictional), or how we get from point A to point B. Good narrative usually has a beginning, a middle and an ending. When done right, narrative can convey emotions or reflections (you know, stories that “make you think”) on its readers, viewers or, in our case, players. Also, good narrative can be measured by how its elements and technique relate to each other to enhance the overall experience AND the core idea.

Let me give you a brief cinematic example with some spoilers. In the movie Zombieland, we learn through exposition that Tallahassee hates zombies because they took away his puppy. Immediately after that, we get at least one snarky smirk by seeing a short musical montage of this tough guy pampering a puppy dog. We laugh, we find it funny and we go on. Later in the movie, we learn that what he actually meant by “puppy” was his own son. The same montage is displayed, now with sadder music and a child instead of a dog. The scene works past the cliché of the tragic badass because it got us emotionally involved in the funny version. We laughed, and now it’s awful. Immediately after that, Tallahassee wipes his tears with dollar bills, and we laugh again (harder, as a contrast with the gloomy atmosphere prior to that), because the movie is a comedy. Pacing, music, editing, a sort of Chekhov’s gun and character development work together to have us more emotionally engaged with the movie without losing track of it.



Now, a sex scene should be one of these elements in the overarching plot. It should work with it and not just try to fit in. Be it used for character development, plot development, to help the pacing, convey emotion, create red herrings, it can’t just be there for the sake of it. Movies and books have learned how to do this, more or less, with rather hit and miss results. There are some great sex scenes out there, and if you’re interested in seeing one, I recommend you grab a copy of Silk, by Alessandro Baricco. It’s a really short book, and has a pretty explicit sex scene that does not try to exploit cheap arousal. I won’t spoil it any further.

Now, the thing is, video games are not books, nor films. They should try to experiment and develop their own language, rather than borrowing from other media. Sex is a great place to start analyzing this, because for it to work well, it should work on many levels. But let’s start with the basics, shall we?

For sex to work we should already be engaged with the characters and their relationship. We should care that it happens. The way we traditionally engage with characters is through empathy, a sort of emotional identification. Traditional media conveys empathy in many ways but mostly by giving their characters traits that we can relate to (be it through identification with our "self" or "alter ego"). Stereotypes are shortcuts for us, as novices in a fiction, to more easily identify with this or that character’s trait. This way you can end up with one-dimensional characters or, with some character development, the characters could evolve into something richer and more fulfilling.

With videogames things are different. With videogames, we can relate to a blue pixelated shooting robot, to a metaphorical emo-ish time-manipulating avatar, to a bunch of little balls of goo or even, god forbid, if Tetris had even a remote semblance of narrative, we could even relate to falling blocks. Why is that so easy in videogames? Because we don’t need to identify with a character’s traits: we’re already playing their role.

In videogames identification is a given (much exploited in the SNES era RPG silent-character archetypes) and it’s character development that causes dissonance. Even today, with more complex narratives and characters, we spend most of the game time on our own, manipulating the silent character that reacts to our every whim. It’s plot and character development that interrupt this sort of one-sided trance. Even with dialog trees to give us a sense of interacting with the plot, momentum is broken by interrupting gameplay. The whole formula is reversed.

I don’t mean that games should settle for underdeveloped writing just because of this. On the contrary, I think games should strive for a new kind of writing, a writing suited for the medium, a writing that enhances the medium, not one that has to cope with it. Not only this, I think developers should be encouraged to try new narrative dynamics (yes, that final “s” makes that a plural) that are unique to the medium, gaming dynamics that could tell a great deal of the story on their own.

The second possibility (yes, it took me quite long to get here, remember the second paragraph?) deals with not just adding sex scenes, but having gameplay revolve around sex. I don't mean for sex or arousal to be the puprouse of the gaming experience, but to consider the use of sex as an element that can convey something else. Some years ago, I started to write a book called something like “The boy with the mutant penis”. It had no plot, and no character development. It was a compilation of surreal sex scenes that, in juxtaposition, were meant to convey the boredom, emptiness and apathy of its main character through repetition and exhaustion of its topic. Clichéd as it might have been, I only quote it as a personal example of how sex can be used to convey other things.



I think the first possibility I gave was more suited to big budget titles, and that indie developers have a better chance to nail the second down. Yet, the best example to date that I can come up with may be Silent Hill 2. It doesn’t even have a single sex scene (well, apart from that dry-humping one), but right now no one can deny that sexuality is one of its main themes and it loves to dwell on it with more subtle (why do I have to stick my entire hand down that gross toilet hole?) and deliberately grotesque (why is Phallic Head raping those double-jointed mannequin legs?) results. The genius of it is that, while sexuality is almost omnipresent, the game uses it to enhance the complexity and the compelling level of its narrative. It does not go around saying “Hey! We have sex in here!”, but at first we suspect it’s there and then we know it’s there. And, oh boy, it's there!