The idea of sex in video games scares ALOT of people but are we scared for the right reasons? Let’s be honest for a minute, the general population of gamers (as well as damn near everyone else) is obsessed with sex which means that it is almost certain to come up in a variety of contexts in games.

But what I really want to talk about is the awkwardness of it, and I'm not talking GTA 4 go get a hooker awkward, I mean mostly rpgs and the like that have you play the majority of a game with 1 or more specific characters and then lets you get it on with at least one of them.

I have not played any games in which sex seemed like the next logical step in a "relationship" between me (the player character) and the NPC/party member in question. For example let’s look at Heavy Rain. I felt that Heavy Rain was a well designed and fun game where -spoilers ahead. Skip the next paragraph if you don't want anything ruined- you control several characters over the course of the game. Two you control that interact are the main character Ethan a man who is very recently divorced and frighteningly depressed and the female reporter Madison. Usually this involves Ethan going out and hurting himself in some horrible way for plot reasons and Madison playing the part of the healer. When she finds him the first time he is looking particularly beaten up and she helps him recover. So skip ahead a bit in the game and bam - he says I might be a horrible person and I may be blacking out and killing children in particularly terrible ways. Her lack of reaction aside the true scare comes when in a scene or two later she comes to help him and still with the knowledge that he could be a serial killer and is damn creepy besides, she leans in to begin what is undoubtedly a creepy sexing. But why? They had no prior relationship, he openly admitted to possibly having multiple personalities, one of which likes to kill people and she takes her clothes off? The only saving grace to this whole scene is that you essentially get a WTF button and can nip the whole thing right then and there.
For another example let’s look at Dragon Age, another well designed and fun game with party members that wanna shag the hell out of you at your nearest convenience. The biggest culprit being Alistair. My first play through was as a male and I came to find all of the characters rather enjoyable, yes there were some awkward valley sex scene things but overall it seemed like you had to butter up most of your colleagues for them to jump into the tent with you. Then I began a female character and immediately noticed a drastic change in Alistair, the main male companion. After our first conversation he would hang off my every word and soon enough began to call me things like "dearest." About a quarter of the way through he came to tell me that he was hopelessly in love with me to which I thought "Is this about the lamppost comment?" (You may need to play the game for that one.) But it was such a surprise that we went from mild to moderate sexual tension to "I love you and only you ever ever ever." Now this isn't to say that I didn't tent the shit out of him but it felt so out of context at the time that he started to matter a little less to me as a character.

I suppose that we may never see a true rendering of video game relationships and I am not sure that we should because that may be even more creepy. However I would very much like to see a game where your party members don’t immediately want to kill or tent you at the drop of a hat.

That’s my opinion anyway, feel free to leave comments so we can discuss.