This is worth a watch. It’s a short lecture by Daniel Floyd on the subject of sex in videogames, made as a Flash video for a Media Theory class at Savannah College of Art and Design, openly inspired by Zero Punctuation.
He doesn’t make any stunning revelations, but does sum up the subject efficiently and coherently, and reiterates the key point that if games are to explore sex in an effective way, they need to learn to also portray relationships and intimacy. Thanks to Nicholas for the tip.
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@Dinger & mrrobsa: Good job at making me giggle. That sex game mechanic sounds goddamn intense.
Nice vid, does well at summing things up. It’s doubtful whether anyone aside from gamers will take it seriously though. Also, the high-pitched voice thing was indeed pointless and annoying.
“I don’t really buy this games are art arguement, at least any more than I do for tiddlywinks or football.”
Not all games are ‘art’, in the same way that not all movies or books are ‘art’. For games it’s a slightly different ball game, as they are primarily interactive entertainment; and this entertainment-based interaction is what sets games aside from the usual pile of what is considered ‘art’. (@rook, quirk, etc:)I feel that games cannot be compared to books or movies, in the same way that movies cannot be compared to books or games, and books cannot be compared to movies or games. Prefer whichever one you want, but I believe they should not be critically compared (most importantly as art forms). All these mediums use completely different techniques and formats to get their point accross- be it midnless action, thematic exploration, or sex.
You can get mindless thriller books/ you can get rich, thoughtful books. You can get mindless thriller movies/ you can get rich, thoughtful movies. You can get mindless thriller games/ you can get rich, thoughtful games- but they are all displayed in different ways, and to different extents. The repeated comparison of movies and books to games here (I feel) just doesn’t work; these mediums are just so different. An arguable majority of games (/books/ movies) are simply for relaxing entertainment, but there is no small number of games that are also much deeper and smarter (as usual, I can’t keep Ico or Shadow of the Colossus far from mind)- they just may not use the same means as these other mediums to get their point accross. Quirk keeps talking about paragraphs and such (to a fairly good point), but in terms of games and film, what constitutes as a paragraph? You could simply say a “scene” or “action”, but we won’t have the same adjectives or adverbs involved, or the same narrative style; the whole event comes down to fundamentally different descriptive ideas. I love these mediums hugely, but to say any one of them is or isn’t art over another is simplistic. Sex as a theme can be thrown in; but it depends on the medium for how it can/ should be explored.
EDIT: I do have to admit though that many games don’t use the techniques that could be effective in games at all. Setting saside “deeper” games from many action games, it takes a profound developer to really use “techniques effective in games” to their full impact and extent. Farenheit was effective at different points throughout, but the huge scope of the game made it a bit unstable. GTA IV is a good example of removing the stigma of “black vs white” that Quirk talked about- nobody really seems to be the ‘bad-guy’, you simply have to make the decision between (often hard to destinguish) shades of gray.
I’m tempted to argue the opposite: I can’t think of a work of art that couldn’t be improved by a bit more fucking.
lolita?
(yuck!)
@Flubb, Quirk and Nicko –
Ultimately, I think this comes down to both our national obsession with sex and the perception of games as a medium.
Popular art (games as well as films as both are assessed in the same way) currently suffers from a strangely hypocritical relationship with sex and violence, games especially as they are so widely considered a childish pursuit. Both sex and violence are rightly monitored and regulated, though one far more harshly than the other because of the legacy of cultural hang-ups (Puritanism, Victorian Reserve, Fifties Repression, The Moral Majority, take your pick.) Sexual content is no more ‘damaging’ to viewer than violence, most psychological studies concur on this, yet one is deemed largely fine and other smeared with the catch all term pornography and banned.
Violence in gaming is embedded into its DNA and accepted without question, though sex is largely greeted with school boy jeering or indignation – which is one of the things I think holds back the medium as a whole.
The use of sex as a narrative device is essential to thousands of narratives (film, games, books, photo montage, comics etc) that have intrinsic worth. Salo, for example, and to address a point Flubb raises, has a huge amount to say on the banality of evil and the complicity of Italian society in the horrors of Fascism. The film itself was a powerful expression of Italian national despair and resolve never to allow it to happen again. It needs the sexual content to have the impact to make its point. Imagine an interactive experience with the similar power – we currently barely emulate Die Hard.
Anyway, to take up Flubb’s challenge;
Books, not about sex, that wouldn’t work without graphic depictions of sex (off the top of my head) – Will Self’s Great Apes (the transformation sequences would be incomprehensible), Lady Chatterley’s Lover would lose almost all its impact and, for geek points, huge swathes of Alan Moore’s Promethea, which lucidly extols of the principles of magic through characters having sex.
Oh, a book that features the visiting the bathroom as an essential element of the plot (told from the perspective of a tape worm): – Irving Welsh’s Filth
@KG – Counter examples – Grumpy Old Men? The Life of Pi? A RPS team review :)
Perfectly true about Sex being kicked in to an infinitely greater extent than violence, and both having the same effect on our brains. US television deals with violence in quite a content manner, HBO and the like showing a variety of fairly grim shows, but anything- anything- vaguely sexual is instantly stamped out and ridiculed (often with a side-order of controversy). Games are in the same boat as USA television in this respect.
Also, i think I hugely overcomplicated things in my last post. When we say “games as an art form”, we do not mean ALL GAMES as art. We mean (again, only some) games developing their own artistic styles. Just like other mediums, not all of it will be considered art. It’s just that games are seen only as entertainment *sad face*.
Where Flubb and Commissar slip is the implication that ’sex in fiction’ = sex SCENES in fiction. Excepting cases of narratively necessary sex-scenes, your Irreversible-s and the like — and hey, let’s ignore them for the sake of argument, because they’re practically a red herring seeing as they’re so rare — the implication of sex is all that’s needed (and, usually, all that’s used) to further ‘understand’ an on-screen relationship or character. Does that mean that sex is being left out of these productions, because it’s not shown, or not shown all the way through? Not at all, the sex is there, the filmmaker is just following the rules of storytelling — throw out the chaff. If a sex scene does actually say something about a character that can’t be told elsewhere, then the filmmaker will leave it in and be correct to do so (eg, Bonnie & Clyde, where their ’scenes’ are cut short as Clyde’s crippling self-consciousness prevents him ever consummating their fling.
To this day I haven’t seen Warren Beatty naked, and god knows I’ve tried!!!!) As a storyteller, you tell exactly as much as you need to tell, and how far into the bedroom that goes is an artificial concern.But technical limitations and requirements, and prioritisation impact on the art of game-making in a completely different way to pure writing or filmmaking. In film, there’s a technical impediment against making ‘action’ titles, whatever the cinemas’ release schedules may indicate — we see a surfeit of action films because the films restricted by tighter budgets don’t tend to make it to our screens, whereas the broad, splashy blockbusters with the big PR budgets do. In game development, there’s a technical inclination towards action: it’s a lot less time-consuming to make a generic, reskinnable soldier who’ll shoot you on sight and whose only verbiage is to throw taunts or indulge in radio chatter than it is to write, record and animate a sufficient number of ‘paths’ for many distinct characters that’ll make them meaningful to interact with on a non-hostile basis without turning vast swathes of your game into a mere movie that requires you pressing the return key to advance. I don’t intend that as a value-judgment on action games vs character-heavy RPGs per se, but I think it’s a reasonable explanation for games’ strong tendency to inhabit a narratively ‘light’ genre where sex will most often seem out of place, and thus be neglected. Even in cases where ’sex’ theoretically would fit comfortably into a given game’s story, it’s much more lucrative gameplay-wise to have characters bond through comradeship in the heat of battle (eg, Alyx and Gordon), than to have them do something so utterly gameplay-proof as fucking. Filmmakers don’t have to make calculations like that, because films unfold for you — games have to be played.
The ‘discomfort’ between games and sex is akin to that of a drunken friend (that’ll be the US Senate then! …along with everyone else who’s poisoned the well, countless game-makers included) seeing you on a first date, assuming the girl across the table’s already your girlfriend, and peppering you both with a stream of single-entendre innuendo — the potential for sex was always there, you both knew it, and being adults, you didn’t make a big deal about it, but now that it’s been blown up into an artificial ‘thing’ by this idiot gatecrasher holding onto the wrong end of the stick, it’s suddenly a lot harder to sweep that undue attention about something that’s touchy, but not actually very important, back under the rug. I suppose this is pretty much the case for all media in our ’sexually nervous’ cultures, it’s just amplified in gaming because of the entrenched assumptions attached to games, multiplied by the huge number of people playing them — contrast English-language comics, which suffer under the same assumptions of kiddie-focus, but evade broader-level media outcry in regards to sex because no-one reads them anymore (Sorry Kieron! Incidentally, that IFX issue with McKelvie was pretty neat-o, wasn’t i–
Oh sweet Lord, your Wikipedia photo! Hide your shame, KG!).
Incidentally, regarding the ‘art thing’, I’ve yet to encounter any kind of rhetorical downside in using Scott McCloud’s definition of ‘art’ (I’m sure he didn’t originate it, but he introduced me to it in his book ‘Understanding Comics’, which most of us geeks have probably read — if not, do so, it’s about a lot more than comics): art is anything you do which isn’t directly tied to self-maintenance/sustenance or the continuation of the species. The guy tapping his foot at the bus-stop? It’s a vestigial form of dance. Humming tunelessly? Song. The semiconscious pen scrawling you do when you’re on the phone?… It’s art, it’s all art. Taking a dump? That’s not art, unless you do it in a can and exhibit and sell it as a piece of art, like that one guy, then it’s art. This immediately scythes free all the worthless “that’s not art” bullshit, and lets us get on with the much livelier question of ‘is it any good’?
I guess supporting James T’s argument would be the In-Betweeners: Will’s sex scene is most definately in there- because it says a whole lot about his personality.
Although that definition of art is a fairly loose one, it has to be said. It still gives games chance ;)
@ Rook If games aren’t art, then it must stand that you don’t think that movies or books are art, either.
Is this correct? They are nearly identical mediums.
I’m tempted to argue the opposite: I can’t think of a work of art that couldn’t be improved by a bit more fucking.
ET: The Extra Terrestrial?
But seriousfacetime: my first experience of sex in a game? Baldur’s Gate 2. After pursuing a relationship with one of the characters for a long time eventually the option became available to have sex, or not to. As it turned out having sex meant she’d break the relationship off the next morning so in order to keep her close you’d have to pointedly not do so, at least until the expansion where you can get her pregnant. Okay I’ve made it all sound super-crude but those relationships in BG2 hit a pretty high level of intimacy in all cases before sex ever gets on the menu. And of course, there was no special, er, visuals for it, just the same 5-second cutscene you got whenever you stopped for the night.
Your missing the point. Its the very reason we all go around killing each other, is to release a bit of pent up tension. If they put loads a sex and naughtiness all over the place we would stop killing each other, stay indoors with the “pixel misses” the war would be lost, there would be no crime rate and the whole games industry would literally go tits up!
I say no to nooky in games.
I suppose it is a compelling argument. I can totally get behind the author on the “video games as a storytelling art form” angle, but if you ask me sexuality just isn’t necessary in most games.
Yes, sex is an important part of any coming-of-age tale but I don’t think I would be willing to spend money to play “The Breakfast Club: The Game” or even “Boyz in the Hood: Online.” Those are great movies but it comes to video games I enjoy a larger than life story that I can’t experience just by walking out of my home, interacting with people in real life.
Going along those lines, I’m the one who sighs and rolls his eyes when I’m watching an action/adventure movie and–despite the end of the world going on–the two main characters begin to develop a budding romance from their first meeting, and inevitably end up taking a convenient 15 minute break from the apocalypse to knock boots–as if there aren’t more important things going on.
With all due respect to Hollywood, if aliens are invading the planet, zombies rising from the grave, or a terrorist is holding the world ransom with an arsenal of nuclear weapons, getting laid “one last time” is not very high on my list of priorities. They shouldn’t try to shoehorn it into video games for that “extra spice” either.
If you back me into a corner, I guess I’ll admit that sexuality is perfectly at home in games like The Sims or any other kind of sociality simulation, and the role playing purist in me would argue that you should be able to “do anything you want” in an RPG, but in 99% of stories out there it simply isn’t crucial to the progression of the plot, and stinks of unneeded taboo or shock value.
PS: Your original artwork was good, but don’t get crazy with the image-search-o-matic method of video making. Proficiency with Google image search ≠ Yahtzee.
It saddens me to see this outbreak of “clever” people putting random web images to song lyrics and other text on youtube and other media outlets and calling it a good video.
“The script said ‘piece of cake’ so I flashed up the cake symbol from Portal, LOL” “You’re so talented!! LOL 5 STARS!”
I guess I’m just gettin to old for this…
Very poignant and interesting stuff. And I found the presentation to be very witty as well. Does anyone know where I can get a copy of Daniel Floyd’s essay on “Sex in Video games”?