By John Walker on May 27th, 2008 at 10:03 am.
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.
27/05/2008 at 10:46 Larington says:
Made me chuckle a few times. Nice lecture.
27/05/2008 at 10:51 KindredPhantom says:
A really enjoyable and interesting insight into sex and videogames, i enjoyed it.
27/05/2008 at 10:51 Lightbulb says:
Worth watching, mostly agree.
27/05/2008 at 10:58 Joe says:
I think that the intimacy he says games need to head towards is already starting to be catered for. Half-life 2 is the best example, with Gordon and Alyx having built up a strong relationship over the original game and it’s episodes, and sex is only referred to briefly and often humorously. It’s a start, at least.
27/05/2008 at 10:59 Seniath says:
So my RSS feed for your blog wasn’t lying to me, just getting confused then eh? :P
27/05/2008 at 11:01 Phil says:
I remember the Guardian pointing out at the height of the Hot Coffee media circus that sex was one of the only things you could do it San Andreas that was actually about making a NPC feel good, as opposed to dead. The other was dancing, which was all about leading up to sex.
It was strange Katana based decapitation was frowned on but essentially fine, crude depictions of consensual cotus was enough to cause Hillary Clinton to weep hot tears of rage.
This Film is Not Yet Rated makes a similar point about America’s (and by extension Britain’s) relative happiness with violence but horror around images of sex in mainstream media.
That said, Fahrenheit’s semi-random Zombie shagging near the end is an effective counter argument to ever, ever dealing with sex in games again (though that was possibly because the games ending was so truncated.)
Nomad Soul seemed to get things about right, relatively mature, important to the plot and, crucially, even respectful, with the main character criticising the player if he attempted to get in on the wrong side of the bed.
27/05/2008 at 11:11 John Walker says:
Heh, yeah Seniath. The WP pages for both blogs are next to each other in my bookmarks, and they look so damned similar.
At least it didn’t happen the other way around : )
Phil: While the DDR sex in Fahrenheit was possibly not the most sensible way to go about executing the act, I think the build up to it at least demonstrated some maturity. It’s break-up sex, and honest about it. It only happens if you both drink the right amount, and if you remind her why she used to love you – guitar, conversation, kindness, etc. Yes – you can see the code behind it too easily, but I like the honesty and sadness around the whole scene.
Edit: oh, unless you mean with the cop, in which case: oh dear yes.
27/05/2008 at 11:17 darkripper says:
Sex in a videogame? it’s impossible.
27/05/2008 at 11:37 Rook says:
You missed a sex scene that happens earlier with the black guy and his girlfriend. It was terrrrrrible.
27/05/2008 at 11:42 Kieron Gillen says:
Phil: “The other was dancing, which was all about leading up to sex.”
AND IN THE GAME!
KG
27/05/2008 at 11:51 Phil says:
@John – The scene I’m refering to is the one at the end, in the train carriage, with the ninja hobos looking on, when the male and female characters, who barely know each other, skip about seventy pages of character development and joylessly jump each other’s bones despite the fact she knows he’s DEAD.
Sod the Internet coming alive for little reason to serve as the last boss – for me the Zombie sex was the point when plot logic was taken outside and shot.
I never got the fun break-up sex mini-game, games imitating life unfortunately.
27/05/2008 at 11:51 Kast says:
Well work watching. Though I have to admit to not being able to recall a film that couldn’t do without a sex scene.
We all need a little intimacy, it’d be nice to see more in games.
27/05/2008 at 12:25 Dinger says:
Cute flash presentation. I disagree entirely with the “way forward” and the false teleology.
If we look to movies, we see the same thing, lots of silly exploitational sex, often of the “teencore” variety, and occasionally propagated by those same cinephiles who now want to deny that videogames can ever be the art form you want them to be.
The “way forward” is not to look at movies for inspiration. That’s the “current regime.” GTA III and IV’s content is not that different from urban crime movies, except that there’s a lot less boobies and better music.
And false teleology: it’s a copout to say this is an art form in its infancy. Computer-based games are in their fifth decade. You want videogames to be an art? Fine, go out and assert it, and those who claim otherwise can be damned. Yes, as the new kid, games get blamed for society’s ills. Ridicule those crackpots as extremists. There are fewer of them every year. Censorship is just a challenge to work around. Are you going to let it ruin you, like Mae West, or kill them, like Marlene Dietrich?
Waiting patiently and doing what the Man says doesn’t build acceptance. Go out there, do your art, and ignore those who would shackle you, whether other developers bent on making a buck from exploitation pieces or the threatened elites of mass culture gushing opprobrium at the genre.
Go read some Frankfurt school, then watch They Live, a John Carpenter film condemned like so many others for its violence (well, maybe only for the interminable wrestling scene), and whose Marxist subtext is rarely appreciated. The last scene — the only one featuring boobies, by the way — points the direction for games to take if they want to be considered art.
Oh, and Roadrunner wasn’t made to be shown on television Saturday mornings. It just happened that way. (well, maybe the awful Depatie-Freleng ones after WB shut down the studio, but they only make a fraction of the 46 or so RR cartoons)
27/05/2008 at 12:41 cannon fodder says:
@Kast
Basic Instinct
27/05/2008 at 13:52 Rayna says:
great presentation:) hopefully once he’s in the industry he’ll be able to practice what he preaches!
27/05/2008 at 14:14 Smee says:
I always liked Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force’s rather innocent and charming approach to relationships. Quietly developing an attraction and flirting with her throughout the game was a pleasing addition to the core shooting action. No sex too, just adult conversation. Shame there weren’t any lesbians in the sequel.
27/05/2008 at 14:47 upa-upa says:
I’ve never felt ‘They coul duse sex scene here’ about any game I’ve ever played
however there’s a genere for sex scenes – games with sex scenes only (or mostly) – and thumbs up for that. :D
27/05/2008 at 15:20 Rook says:
Basically, can anyone think of a good gameplay mechanic for sex? Because I really can’t. And if this is the case you’re basically saying games need more cutscenes, which I don’t think is true at all.
Relationships, emotions, sexuality. All of these things I can get on board with and you can really run wild with the gameplay there. But sex itself, I can do without.
27/05/2008 at 15:24 dhex says:
(well, maybe only for the interminable wrestling scene)
you mean “the amazing wrestling scene” right?
games should probably stick to shooting for intimacy and relationships; maybe we can clone chris avallone to write them?
27/05/2008 at 15:38 Flubb says:
Let’s not beat around the bush here: the only two reasons for sex in either videogames or film is titillation and voyerism.
Anything else is prentious wording for the above reasons.
27/05/2008 at 15:46 Rook says:
“games should probably stick to shooting for intimacy and relationships”
Partly, as I had the ending to MGS3 in my head, but I kinda misinterpreted the “shooting” bit there. Made me lol.
27/05/2008 at 15:47 mrrobsa says:
@Phil – Re:Fahrenheit
I must be some kind of virtual casanova (oh the irony) as I think I got to cyber-bonk three times over the course of the game. I will admit to being charmed by the game, and I thought the analogue stick thrust action was a bit too much and made me laugh quite a bit, but overall I thought it handled sex well, and I was quite proud to play a game that wasn’t afraid to be mature or have a bit of an edge.
For the record though, yes, the litter-strewn underground train carriage sex was mind-meltingly stupid.
27/05/2008 at 15:49 Phil says:
Flubb – Gotta say you’re utterly wrong – look at the sex in Irreversible, it’s there to shock, scare and scar the viewer. In games, look at Leisure Suit Larry, where its played almost entirely for laughs.
Sex is ultimately just an action, its reason for being there is whatever the creator, in whatever media, intends it to be.
@mrrobsa – It was charming game that initially I utterly enjoyed, though a charming game that had third act problems the size of Birmingham.
27/05/2008 at 15:52 Jochen Scheisse says:
He who thinks media are simple, consumes too many simple media or stays on a simple level of interpretation. Which is fine if you enjoy that.
27/05/2008 at 15:57 Dinger says:
See, a great and gloriously flawed work of art such as They Live polarizes even its critics on its merits.
Gameplay mechanic for sex? Randomly assign controls to do positive and negative things, and change the assignments intermittently, but at an increasing rate. Hitting the right controls will have the avatar say seductive things, and do pleasing things to both parties. Hitting the wrong controls will make the avatar blurt out the name of the wrong partner, inadvertently criticize the partner’s physique, age or sexual performance, or evoke a shriek of pain or bored comments (“Hey, you there, when you’re done there, how about giving me some loving?”)
After between 20 seconds and 4 hours of fumbling around the controllers, one or both parties is unable to continue, and, there’s a completely random chance of affection, tears, apologies or insults.
Really, some things just don’t translate to the simulated world.
Okay, I haven’t done it for a while, and I swear I won’t do it again for at least year. But when considering sex-and-videogames, gameplay over graphics, and the nature of art, I invite you all to consider Huxley on the Cinema of the Future:
27/05/2008 at 16:18 Flubb says:
@Phil: Practically every male I talked to when the LSL’s started coming out was interested in seeing naked women, regardless of how frustrated they’d be in that enterprise.
If sex was just an action, then why do we see so little defecation in games and films? Sex is intended to raise ratings and viewers.
27/05/2008 at 16:27 wcaypahwat says:
Honestly, we need more scenes like that one in The Darkness. Hell, I wasn’t even playing it and it still touched me.
27/05/2008 at 16:34 Phil says:
@Flubb – Raising ratings and getting viewers is certainly the main motivation for the inclusion sexual content by many creators. Though you claimed;
“the only two reasons for sex in either videogames or film is titillation and voyerism.”
That’s simply not true. What you claim actually dovetails into the arguements of censors who would ban any realistic depiction of sex as simply pornographic, and hence worthless and bannable.
Sexual content should be a judged on the intention of the creators, in exactly the same way violence is; hence This Is England is rated lower than Hostel 2, despite both featuring gore and violent imagery. But until recently, show a erect cock in your film and you were banned (and if you forgive the pun) without hope of release. Things are now slowly changing, but the emphasis is on slow.
The frankly bizarre press over reaction to the relatively chaste and entirely plot justified sex scene in Mass Effect is a good example of this.
27/05/2008 at 16:45 Cooper says:
I’m glad Fahrenheit got brought up. I found the scene before the break-up-sex one of the best of the game, it worked in all manner of ways, getting the balance of good things to appropriate from cinema and bringing to the scene what games and computer programs can add to that. The actual sex, though, was just plain weird; whereas the rest of the scene played out fairly naturalistic, not despite of but because of the ineraction / game, the sex scene suddenly made me realise I was playing a game, something I had forgotten up to that point.
There was a piece in the ever wordy but increasingly content-less escapist magazine recently on this subject and the same was said in the comments in regards to the need to look somewhat to movies, but not entirely, and mentioning fahrenheit (again, before it descended into surreal abandon) and HL as examples of intimacy and relationships done very well.
Surely, as with movies and all things pop-culture, there’s loads and loads of sexual titilation for cheap thrills and laffs, as well as a few sincere attempts at ‘getting it right’, which, to a greater or lesser extent, do or do not work. Video games are no longer in their infancy. Adolescence, maybe, and they can be as ‘mature’ in regards to these issues as others.
Rather than co-opting ideas and techniques from film, game mechanics need to overcome the simulated, rendered nature of games (which deny the efficacy of facial expression and empathy actors can mobilise), and utilise the things they can provide that film or other media can’t, in regards to interaction and emergence. It’s pleasing to see some people have the skill out there to get this right. More, please.
27/05/2008 at 16:50 Graham C says:
Its great essay, but unfortunately it is probably preaching to the converted.
I did ejoy the image of the DS printing money.
27/05/2008 at 17:01 Razor says:
@KaST
>Though I have to admit to not being able to recall a film that couldn’t do without a sex scene.
The Shawshank Redemption.
I know, I am evil >=>
Oh yeah, great video, too.
27/05/2008 at 17:01 Flubb says:
@Phil: You’ll have to convince me that the inclusion of sex into media does *not* serve either voyeuristic or titillatory purposes. I can’t see how either of those leads into pornography and debates about censorship, as there is a world of difference between the two. Michael Winterbottom might think he’s exploring sexual dynamics through ’9 songs’, but the legions of downloaders on Bittorent are watching it for another reason.
Bottom line is that sex sells, and that’s pretty much its only function in (modern) media.
Must away to look for more bad puns :)
27/05/2008 at 17:43 Ryan says:
Once games official admit to themselves that they are in fact art, anything is possible. Sex is a part of the human experience and so it’s only relevant that it would makes its way into a game; not to sell, but to reveal truth.
Ryan
lessons in brevity
27/05/2008 at 17:46 Rook says:
I don’t really buy this games are art arguement, at least any more than I do for tiddlywinks or football.
27/05/2008 at 18:01 dhex says:
well, in a strange way “art” means “legitimate” if not actually “good” – this has nothing to do with reality, but such is the nature of art. or “art.” or something.
personally, i’m a big fan of competency. i don’t really care if the games i’m interested in are art, or just a smokescreen by the global elite, or whatever, so long as it’s done competently.
i don’t particularly think anything explicitly graphic can be done competently by this industry, due to a number of constraints. but personal intimacy and emotional bonds? that’s a far more reasonable goal.
See, a great and gloriously flawed work of art such as They Live polarizes even its critics on its merits.
there were flaws? where? the only flaw is that it’s too perfect.
27/05/2008 at 18:01 Phil says:
@Flubb – Sex certainly sells, but it’s not all it does and to claim otherwise strays close to Mary Whitehouse territory, where it is considered without artistic merit and simply pandering to people basic instincts (like er.. Basic Instinct does). Both Titillation and Voyeurism are related to arousal whilst sex on screen (either in games or more commonly films) can be anything but.
But you set what sounds like a challenge; Sex without voyeuristic or titillatory purposes eh? Fair enough;
Sex as a source of horror/shock – Irreversible, Deliverance, Cannibal Holocaust, 120 Day of Salo, Pulp Fiction
Sex in these movies is expressly designed to be too repulsive to be titillating to an average viewer. Voyeurism implies detachment; these movies are designed to cause a strong emotional reaction. You’re not meant to passively viewing it, you’re meant to be shocked, even appalled. In Salo’s case the director expected a large portion of the audience to simply walk out.
And who cares what a portion of audience uses the media for? It’s the intent behind it that’s the key thing – you can’t control how people will engage with it. I’m sure some Furries have uses for the Care Bears movie the original writers and director never thought of :)
27/05/2008 at 18:17 eyemessiah says:
The question of whether or not games are art seems to me to be an increasingly irrelevant taxonomic problem, and I don’t think there is any danger inherent in skipping over it entirely.
I’d like to see more realistic sexuality (not necessarily sex acts themselves – maybe this is an important distinction?) in games simply because I would like games to tell me more grown-up stories.
@Flubb – Sexuality is often titillating, in real life & in entertainment. Its really nothing to worry about, either for you or for game designers!
27/05/2008 at 18:27 Nubtamer says:
WIN.
27/05/2008 at 18:37 Gap Gen says:
It was worth watching this for the video links that came up after it.
27/05/2008 at 21:09 vaca says:
What is with the horribly high pitching added to the voice? Annoying as all hell.
27/05/2008 at 21:13 Pidesco says:
Sex in games isn’t the problem, it’s just a symptom of the greater issue, which is that game narratives are generally poorly written, mindless drivel, that couldn’t pass for good writing in any other medium. Furthermore, a lot of the times when games manage to have better writing than average they still don’t make their stories stronger on account of games being games, and just largely make the narratives develop in a vacuum, in complete independence from the actual gameplay.
27/05/2008 at 22:46 Kadayi says:
The actual relationship stuff in the Witcher (not the shagging games) was kind of interesting, esp as it centered around your decisions regarding the welfare of the orphaned child. You in effect forming a family unit with whichever of the 2 principal leading ladies you chose to pursue a deeper relationship with.
27/05/2008 at 23:12 Arathain says:
There’s a really serious problem with this piece that goes a long way towards eroding some well thought out content. Throughout the entire thing women were only displayed in the context of being sex objects, and mentioned not at all. How can we possibly even discuss a fair treatment of sexuality without dealing with these ghastly objectifying female stereotypes just as directly as we deal with the male ones? Heck, how can we deal with any issue of sexuality at all while failing to include half the world’s sexual participants in the discussion?
Disappointing.
27/05/2008 at 23:52 Quirk says:
Sex scenes need not be gratuitous, if they shed light on the characters involved and the relationship between them. It’s fairly trivial to conjure up distinguished literary examples.
Games are largely not, however, possessed of the narrative richness of a book or movie. Most games draw childlike pictures in black and white – you’re fighting for the good guys, the other side is composed of bad people who do bad things. In such simplified contexts, it’s going to be hard to make sex into anything but titillation. It shouldn’t be a revelation that you need characterisation first.
I can think of one game that I thought fully justified its excursion into “adult” territory, and that’s Masq, which RPS linked to a little while ago. However, Masq is fundamentally about narrative in a way that no mainstream games I’ve seen are.
28/05/2008 at 01:28 The Unshaven says:
I think that some of the best explorations of intimacy in games have come from Planescape: Torment and Star Control 2.
Anyone else remember Star Control 2? The sex-easter-egg was great, because it was funny and it involved too adults *playing together.* They were having *fun.* And that’s absent from a great deal of attempts to represent sex in any media.
Torment certainly went for the Intimacy angle with *all* of the PCs, rather than those you might boink. These people *mattered* to you because of how you dealt with them over time, and that’s what gave the ending such impact.
I think that handling emotional intimacy is a thing that games can do in different (potentially deeper) ways than cinema, because YOU care about the NPCs, rather than seeing the world through a protagonist who cares.
The fatal downside of sex-in-games is that it focuses too much on the mechanical element of sex. Such as Fahrenheit’s rhythm-based thrust-focused minigame…
I support all of Fahrenheit’s horrors because it was innovative and tried new things. Many of these things were hideous aberrations in the eyes of gods and men, but we wouldn’t know that if some nutter hadn’t tried.
- The Unshaven
28/05/2008 at 11:34 Kommissar Nicko says:
I’m going to agree with Flubb, but go further.
Even having wracked my brain, I cannot come up with a movie that would have been unworkable without a sex scene (at least none that I’ve seen, and I’m no film connoisseur). Furthermore, I cannot come up with a book that would have been lacking without a sex scene. Keep in mind that I do not qualify in these statements films or books or whatever that are about sex (like, for example, Shortbus, which I have not seen, but I know a bit about).
As a writer, I see no function in describing the act of sex, nor do I see a purpose in its depiction if you have a narrative to attend to. In writing, it’s like including a scene wherein a character takes a massive shit, describing the texture, the aroma, et cetera. Does the reader know what taking a shit will be like? Yes. Does the reader know what sex is like? Yes. (Usually.) Do you need to describe to the reader what the shit was like? No. Do you need to describe to the reader what the sex was like? No. (Usually.) The same is true in games: all of these things are acts that can easily be summed up or glossed-over in a sentence (or a few frames, or a Fallout-style fading-out-then-in), but it is the effect of these acts that are what is important.
What is most important is the outcome of the event: Does it go well? Poorly? Is it interrupted? Does it ruin the relationship, or strengthen? Unless the actual character of the act itself has bearing on the events of the narrative, there is really no purpose to its inclusion. This applies not just to film, but to literature, and to games.
The take-away is that the relationship is important, not the actual act itself, though the relationship can culminate in the act. To me, the pinnacle of this expression is in the Sims: both sex and shitting take the same amount of narrative “time,” but the effects of the former are far-reaching, though the act itself is not explicit.
28/05/2008 at 11:42 Flubb says:
I think conclusions are going to revolve around two ideas:
1. Videos are/are not art and
2. Sex as mechanics vs Sex as metaphysical
Sex isn’t just titillatory, but the ways in which it’s used in 99% of the cases is. You can always come up with exceptions (de Sade) and people (practically any libertine), and while I haven’t watched Salo, what I’ve read about it in the past (and a quick pickup through Wikipedia) he’s presenting ideas that contribute exactly what to your every day life? Every sex act is an act of degradation? The death of sex and eroticism through commercialisation? Now transfer that to the average Xbox gamers living room and see if their eyes glaze over.
Go ahead and tell a good story, but unless your story is specifically about sex and the consequences on humans, unlike Quirk, I cannot think of a single novel or film which required it, or would be degraded by its absence.* The legions of sex-less classics show that it’s possible ;)
* I expect someone to take up that challenge :)
28/05/2008 at 14:24 Quirk says:
I’m not suggesting, by the way, that we need six pages of grunting and elaborate phallic metaphors. However, not describing sexual situations at all amounts to a deliberate self-restriction. It’s much like trying to write dialogue that in the mouth of a real example of your character would contain swearing without using any. It can be done, it can be convincing, but its elaborate circumlocution has more to do with social delicacy than good writing. That we’re all familiar with writing overburdened with such social delicacy thanks to the public morality of the Victorian era doesn’t really excuse attempting to reproduce it in the modern age.
Now for an example – Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene. Having set up a main protagonist possessed of such powerful sexual repression, even revulsion, trying to avoid describing the act when it takes place would have been deliberately artificial. Greene does not spend more than a paragraph on the act itself, but disconnecting from the character at that point would have flawed the prose rather than improved it.
Raymond Chandler’s sex scenes are likewise for the most part brief, and not at all titillating; but their existence throws unexplored aspects of Marlowe’s character at various points into relief – the rare casual encounter that only accentuates his loneliness, the scenes that start as though they will become sex scenes and turn into rejection of one sort or another, and Marlowe’s own dalliance with and rejection of commitment in The Long Goodbye.
And Nicko, while going to the toilet is a routine action, sex in stories rarely is. If the character goes to the bathroom and finds himself in the throes of food poisoning, describing his ordeal becomes immersive rather than gratuitous. And even then, food poisoning is unlikely to provide as important a plot point (unless it had some deliberate cause) as the change in relationship between two characters brought on by their having sex.
However, while withdrawing from the character’s head as he is reaching a heightened emotional state can be jarring, depending on how detached the author has been from the character up until that point, attempting to describe the scene in too much detail is even more likely to lose the reader. For all the meaning we attach to it, sex is faintly ridiculous, and particularly so to British sensibilities. Giving the reader time to think about this is undesirable.
28/05/2008 at 16:06 dhex says:
As a writer, I see no function in describing the act of sex, nor do I see a purpose in its depiction if you have a narrative to attend to.
naked lunch?
28/05/2008 at 16:17 Kieron Gillen says:
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.
KG
28/05/2008 at 17:18 The Shed says:
@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.
28/05/2008 at 17:25 dhex says:
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!)
28/05/2008 at 17:55 Phil says:
@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 :)
28/05/2008 at 19:13 The Shed says:
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*.
28/05/2008 at 19:28 James T says:
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!).
28/05/2008 at 19:39 James T says:
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’?
28/05/2008 at 20:20 The Shed says:
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 ;)
28/05/2008 at 20:33 ronin says:
@ 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.
29/05/2008 at 17:06 Bobsy says:
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.
01/06/2008 at 19:43 Chris Keegan says:
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.
04/06/2008 at 19:40 Captain Angry says:
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…
05/01/2009 at 23:11 Tory says:
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”?
29/05/2010 at 14:43 Medyumlar says:
As a writer, I see no function in describing the act of sex, nor do I see a purpose in its depiction if you have a narrative to attend to.
29/05/2010 at 14:53 Tom OBedlam says:
As a writer, how do you feel about describing an act of violence or a conversation? Do you see a purpose in its depiction if its part of the narrative?
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