Can A Video Game Be Sexy?

Well, I suppose for a debut post, this isn’t a bad place to start.

So, sex in video games. This is a topic that has always been on my mind, one I’ve felt gets an awful lot of attention but doesn’t actually benefit from this attention in any meaningful way. I’ll avoid the whole ‘it’s fucked that you can blow off 36 individual parts of a person in Soldier of Fortune 2 but nipples are SATAN’ discussion for now though.

Can video games be sexy? Of course they can. Here’s the secret folks - no one drew Minerva Mink or designed Blood Rayne so that their character design reflects their deep, well-written character. Someone, somewhere, (probably a few someones, that shit gets expensive to produce) found the traits that they decided to gift these characters with sexy. Some artist discovered that he got tingly in the nethers when he looked at girls in leather and figured that maybe, just maybe, someone else would appreciate this.



Is it exploitative? Sure. Is it degrading? That’s debatable. Is it arousing? Sure, it could be. Why not? There’s an absurd idea floating about that people should be ashamed of what they’re aroused by. I grew up on cartoons and video games, and some of my earlier crushes were Terra Branford, Gadget and Zelda. Why not? They were a part of the things I enjoyed, they were important to me in the context of the hobbies I had and they were designed to appeal in some way to their audiences.

Human beings do not control whom or what they’re attracted to. Heterosexuals, homosexuals, asexuals, furries, pedophiles, foot fetishists... no one sits down and checks off what they want to find arousing (it would save me a LOT of money and effort if I was sexually fulfilled by Pepperidge Farm Goldfish). No one wakes up one day and says ‘I can’t wait to be a social pariah for my personal urges’. We just make do the best we can. ‘Whatever floats your boat’ indeed.

So when we talk about arousing moments in video games, the focus should be less on ‘can video games be arousing’ and more ‘what makes a scene arousing’. It’s the same with Hollywood, (and to be fair, in the context of realism, uploading some knuckle children into Cortana and hooking up with Emma Stone are both pretty damn unlikely for pretty much everyone) some sex scenes work really well and some... don’t. Two words: Showgirls, pool. To some degree, it’ll always be a personal preference thing, but design figures into it too.

So... what makes a good video game sex scene? To be honest, they haven’t really nailed that down yet. Personally, I remember Shepard and Tali’s love scene from Mass Effect 2 affecting me, but emotionally, not necessarily sexually. It wasn’t explicit, but neither was it awkward or poorly animated, likely thanks to the overeager cut-to-black.



On the other hand Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy’s sex scenes were more explicit and didn’t feel too shoehorned in, but didn’t really rev my motor. Maybe it was the uncanny valley, maybe it was the bad animation, who knows.

More recently, Far Cry 3 received some attention for having one of the first mainstream first person sex sequences, and while it wasn’t all that long or graphic, I found it to be more effective in conveying realistic sex than many games have in the past. The characters are climbing the far end of the uncanny valley, and while the scene itself was pretty out there, the sex wasn’t over the top.



It’s hard to talk about sex in games without discussing eroge, which for those who don’t know means Erotic Game, and originates in Japan. Often in the form of visual novels, these games are only marked as eroge if they feature graphic sexual content... regardless of how much there actually is. Now, these really don’t do sex any better than other media, and in fact probably do a far worse job in many cases, but one title I’ll mention briefly is the US produced, free-to-play Katawa Shoujo.

Now, regardless of your thoughts on the subject matter and quality, one thing that really stood out about the experience is how it flat-out nails the first-time sexual experience. Anyone who has had sex will immediately grimace, grin or squirm at (most of) the scenes, and to me, that makes them fantastic. All the poor communication, the lack of satisfaction, the uncertainty... they really captured it well, and I think it goes a long way towards its charm. Its relatable and grounded, not idealized and clean, which sex rarely is.



You often hear the argument that these scenes in games don’t need to be as explicit as they are, but I’d like to put forth the argument that as technology improves, we should be pushing to be more explicit. Why not? In Mass Effect, you watch friends and children die, make decisions that condemn lovers, comrades or entire races to horrific fates, and in the middle of all this madness, we should cut away from the one moment of love? Why?

Human sexuality has always been something of great interest and great importance to me. It’s always shocked me how something so important to life, something that is of such an interest to nearly all of us, has become such a knee-jerk taboo throughout much of the world. Film, literature and music have made strides, for better and for worse, in exploring these important matters for years now... it’s about time for gaming to be a bit less shy about doing the same.

What do you all think? Tell me about a scene in a game, sexual in nature, that made you feel something. What was the scene? What did you feel? Arousal? Warmth? Embarrassment?