Video Game Ethics 4 - Sex
In this podcast, I talk about the ethics of sex as handled by games. With added 'Hot Coffee' goodness.

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It's kind of tough to talk about video games, ethics, and sex, because I don't think humanity has completely defined what appropriate sexual ethics are.

I mean, sexual issues seem to wax and wane with each generation. For instance, in America, just thirty years ago, homosexuality was never referred to on TV or film.

In that thirty years, however, we have seen "Will & Grace", "The L Word", and even the Crying Game. So, morals swing a lot over time.

Rather than try to determine where games stand on the right or wrong of sex,let's look at where they stand on individual issues within the realm of "sex".

Before I get started, let me point out that I'm drawing a distinction here between sex in games, and sex games.

The first group is personified by games that you can buy on the shelves at any Best Buy or Electronic Boutique (Leisure Suit Larry, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto).

The second group is usually bought over the internet or downloaded (Hentai games, strip blackjack games, stuff like that).

Without trying to offend anyone, I'm going to call the first group "Normal" games (games that revolve around gameplay), and the second group "Hentai" games (games that revolve around sex).

I should point out that there are very few games out there that have courtship or sex, and of those few, they all feature a male courting a woman.

But while you may see a game where the male has to buy expensive presents, flowers, and candy for the female, you won't ever see a strong female lead striving to convince a male to love her. In this, at least, art imitates life.

Monogamy:

Of the entire range of "Normal" games, there are almost no games that support monogamy.

Whenever courting is represented in a video game, it is almost always a man courting a woman; and in all of those situations, the man is allowed to court as many women as he wishes.

Every episode of Leisure Suit Larry was about the player trying to have sex with as many girls as he could.

In Fable, a man can marry a woman in a grand ceremony, then walk to the nearest town and marry again.

In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there are six different women who are designated "girlfriends".

It is quite possible, and apparently pretty common, for people to co-mingle in "The Sims". They can even get married, although even that is limited to kissing and hugging. Also, the Sims condones poligamy by allowing the male to marry as many females as he wants.

Now, there are several games out there that have a woman as a goal ("Save the Princess" to receive a chaste kiss on the cheek), but in those games, there is never an alternative.

You can't get to the end of the game and say, "Actually, I think the evil witch is more my type."

And because there's no choice, it's not really monogamous (was Adam really monogamous with Eve, or was there just no other choice?).

In Hentai games, monogamy is not even a consideration. Most of the game is involved not with which woman you should sleep with, but rather details about how you sleep with them.

T&A:

Given how much it's been covered in the past, it's almost not worth mentioning that body styles in video games have grown unbelievable.

Every leading man has a 30-inch waist, washerboard abs, four foot wide shoulders, and rippling muscles.

Every leading lady fits a 36-24-36 DD format, and in some games, you can even set how much the breasts bounce when she moves.

This section is obviously tailored to the lowest common denominator, and it will not change. Why? You may ask? Because there's a lot more people in the lower common denominator than in any other group, and they spend money the same way anybody else does.

And, of course, it's even worse in the Hentai games.

The Act:

In Normal games, showing the act is very rare, and usually involves creative editing. GTA will show a car bounce up and down if you hire a prostitute.

Leisure Suit Larry will show some suggestive imagery, but put black "Censor bars" over the private parts of the couple. Probably my favorite example of this was in the first LSL, where the Censor bar was the exact same size as Larry, so it looked like the bar was bouncing on top of Larry's date.

A more common form is to fade to black, or show an exterior shot of the room, while you hear the moaning coming from inside.

Either way, games apparently don't think it's necessary to show much in this situation. Why, you may ask? Because it's got nothing to do with gameplay, and gameplay is king.

In Hentai games, you rarely see much of the act, because in most cases, it's just a series of images with lurid descriptions. However, in the games that show animated sex, they rarely shy away from showing any part of the act.

Now, no modern discussion about sex in video games would be complete without talking about the biggest news story in video games this past year, the Hot Coffee Mod.

It seems that, while developing the game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the guys at Rockstar thought it would be fun to make a minigame based on sex itself. However, the company decided to cut the minigame, because of censorship concerns. For all we know, this happens a lot in video games, but we never find out, because they always remove that code before shipping the game.

And, in fact, we probably never would have heard about this one, except that when they took out the minigame, they didn't completely remove it. And so, after some enterprising hackers got into the game, they unlocked the sex minigame, and created a mod so that everyone could play it.

Now, to be fair, there wasn't a whole lot to see there. It was basically a couple of sexless Barbie dolls bumping into each other, in time with a beat. The game was already rated T for Teen, so it was pretty much in line with what had been seen before. A lot of people compared it to the sex scene from "Team America: World Police" where two marrionettes bounce into each other humourously. It was, frankly, pretty tame.

The gaming world went nuts. Parents groups were up in arms. Walmart, KMart, Target, they all said they would be removing the game from their shelves. The ESRB decided to re-rate the game as "Adults Only", a rating which had previously only been used for Hentai and other porn-based games.

So this is probably the clearest indication we can get as to what the culture thinks of sex. Whereas it was entirely valid to suggest that a player can have sex with multiple partners, it was entirely off-limits to actually show two androgynous people engaging in consensual sex. Once again we get the message that the image of sex is bad, but the concept of sex is good, or at least, not worth mentioning.

Re-cap:

So, games seem to be physically and emotionally immature, either incapable or unwilling to commit to one relationship. Also, they seem somewhat chauvinistic in their portrayal of men pursuing women. However, they seem to be pretty prudish when it comes to nudity in the games.

That seems kind of odd, that they are okay with multiple partners, but unwilling to show naked people. But when you think about it, it's not that odd. Our censorship is based on images, not on content.

Next up - Gluttony and Envy
- posted by BrandG @ 9:47 PM