I recently published a post on the violence we see in video games, but of course every Ying has a Yang, and too be honest I’m not sure which of the two is more controversial. You’ve probably already guessed what I’m talking about, because with violence, Sex soon follows. Sex appeal and sexual content in gaming has increased somewhat over the years, I remember interacting with the strippers from the original Duke Nukem so they would flash their nipple tassels at me. The first 3-dimensional Grand Theft Auto allowed the player to sleep with prostitutes for extra health, provided you had a vehicle and a remote location to carry out the car rocking deed. This would also prove to be a popular and well used feature over the coming GTA series.
Games like Fable allowed the character to get married and have children, and in some cases have multiple partners, multiple spouses, with multiple children. Bigamy in a video game! Sci-fi genres today have scantily clad women and the option to form sexual relationships; titles such as Mass Effect allow you to do this, with sexual cut scenes included. Games like The Sims, gave us the option to “WooHoo” or try for a baby during game play, although the cut scene or animation was more humorous rather than explicit.
Part of the reason why so many games have a sexual image or erotic content is the same reason why music videos, films, and health products have it, advertising. Attracting the consumer to make the all important impulse buy. It’s the same reason we watched Baywatch, and HollyOaks, terrible acting and storylines, full of beautiful women. Simple eye candy attracts us to either scorn or embrace the visuals.
Thanks to many household brands within the gaming industry we now have what’s known as fan art and fan made stories. Images, art, drawings, paintings, graphically created, authored, tailor made, plastered, soldered, writing, art and models. This of course is the lighter side of fan dedication; any Google search for explicit material, coupled with the title of a game will reveal the creative yet erotic minds that hide underneath the surface.
As time moves forward everything changes, the way we look, the way walk, talk and act change. Technology becomes more advanced, films develop better CGI and animations, games themselves produce more realistic graphics and frames per second. Laptops, desktops, and tablet PC’s become faster more powerful machines and we as a race become lazier, almost numb to the fact that not that long ago computers and internet didn’t even exists. What some of us also forget is that the classification system for the movie industry has also become less harsh as we the audience have become numb to disturbing images and sexually explicit visuals. The film Commando, an 80’s action film was rated 18+, however if it were released for distribution now it would be a 15+. The point I’m getting to is that the same can be said for games, or even more so for games as the images we see are graphically created and are widely considered not as realistic or as harrowing as images seen from a movie with real people. Sexual content in games is becoming just as common as is it within the television, and other media entities, and makes me wonder where the industry maybe moving.
I think it’s safe to say that sex and “sexed up” content will remain and increase within the gaming industry, and will in time produce 18+ rated games with sexual scenes of intercourse and other activities, just as there are in television and the movies. One thing I will say that is that managing content and preventing the younger audience from playing and viewing these explicit images will be very difficult in comparison to the film industry as classification for games are more complex than DVD’s and videos.