Slashdot Mirror
Will Sex In Games Ever Be Sexy?
The Guardian Gamesblog has an editorial up discussing the pitiful state that sexuality is in when it comes to games. Titles like "Singles: Flirt up your Life" and "The Guy Game" are not sexy...they're just embarrassing. From the article: "Historically, you can understand the reasons behind the industry's adolescent handling of adult themes: a younger audience, a male-dominated development environment and, of course, basic pixilated visuals which only ever really allowed a nudge, nudge, wink, wink, 'Confessions of a Bitmapped Bikini Lady' approach to portraying sex."
A distinct lack of discussion here. This could even be the first post.
Well written dialogue can be very successful at drawing the user in and creating a suspension of disbelief. It can overcome cartoony or 3d polygonal looking graphics and having to use a keyboard and mouse.
Example
Man: "I put on my robe and wizard hat....uh oh going limp!"
Woman: "HAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!"
well, if they develop this a little further.
how much you want to bet some geek is gonna come up with a way to control RTSs and FPSs with the thing? then it REALLY will be about "how you use it".
Well joystick waggling games went out of fashion in the days of the zx specturm and commodore 64.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Lotsa sex in Second Life. Basically there is financial competition to produce the sexiest clothing, poses, "accessories", and animations. Since you can make anything, there are some pretty advanced genitalia out there. Second Life allows you to tack anything anywhere on your avatar, including the Barbie- and Ken-like flat nether regions.
Not that I get involved in such things.
In order to have a game which contains good sex, you need to have an audience who knows what good sex is.
Unfortunately, judging by the popular porn promoted by most gamers and netiziens, most people don't have a fucking clue,
It's fine if an 18 year old doesn't know what good sex is, but a 30 year old adult? Give me a fucking break.
99% of porn on the net and on the videos is complete utter crap: Same formula, different girl, staged sex, fake orgasms-- all ending with a goddamn cumshot. Why the hell would you pull out of a great orgasm to cum on the girls face??? BOOOOOORRRRRING!
The audience of this porn obviously doesn't have a fucking clue what 'hot sex' is, and doesn't tire out from bad crap porn.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Plenty of nudity in god of war, even nonhuman nudity. woot! In addition to that, there's a sex minigame, were you jump on the bed of the two naked chicks and press buttons in time just like the combat system minigames and strangely hear only one of the women moan offscreen....
From the post at the bottom of the article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley really made me think about the kind of characters that can make it work for me. Probably one of the best scenes I can remember from the games I've played is from Max Payne 2, there's a sex scene with Max and Mona that's told using the panel-and-narrator style and that did more for me than anything in GTA or Mafia or Bloodlines.
The same can be said for films, for example when I watched the Incredibles I WANTED them to succeed, but I couldn't care less about the Final Fantasy characters even after 2 hours. Final Flight of the Osiris could be another good example, if I think about how much I enjoyed seeing naked cg swordfighting compared to seeing cg sentinels taking down a hovercraft. It was a cool fight at the start, don't get me wrong, but when I watch that short all I really wanna see is the chase.
I guess the key to making it real enough for our minds to believe in it, is to keep it from being TOO real. Strange thought.
A discussion about sex on Slashdot? I guess you missed the title of website.
But anyway, my thoughts...
Sex is a very visceral and a very physically intimate thing. While emotions have been conveyed well before in video games, for the most part it isn't conveyed as well in movies or books for example. This is because of the whole thing about video games being interactive art. I don't doubt a sex scene could be good in a video game. I've had a couple ideas myself. Let's take for granted that we're able to make models and graphics that are exciting sexually. Not too hard right? *smirk* And let's say everything else(music, audio, etc.) isn't done bad either. That still leave one big thing: the game has to be *fun* to interactive with.
Good ideas are there, the problem is the examples given in story caption; they're bad games. The people who make these games are appealing to lowest common denominator. They're making for these "sexy" games for cheap as possible, using the idea that people will play through a mediocre game on the chance of seeing (.)(.). You need someone with talent, or at least someone who has good ideas, and the knowledge how to implement those ideas well. But at the end of the day, it will always cheaper to make some 3D models with big (.)(.) and make a "mash X to make the girl orgasm" game than to hire someone with the talent, inspiration, and drive to push for an innovative way to have sex in the game.
Not that I can blame them. But personally I'd rather be playing with some real (.)(.) than playing with my joystick...Life is a far better video game when comes to sex.
-Shawn "If the Name Don't Rhyme It Ain't Mine" Conn
They need to go play Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The writing in that game was excellent, including the sex scene.
Comment of the year
I get the feeling this fellow has never played Lolita Mode 8: Daycare of Pleasure.
I can't mod the parent post up, so I'll expand on his comment a little bit.
Hgames (hentai games), are a huge industry in Japan. The range of sexual themes covered by these games is extremely diverse... everything from the standard smut, to bondage, bestiality, scat/piss, big-breasts (big as in beach-ball big.. there's a name for this fetish, I don't know what it is), and rape.
The article author doesn't know what he's talking about. This industry has been vibrant and successful in japan for a long time. The games aren't coy about their subject matter, either. They're unapologetically explicit.
-Laxitive
(and before I submit: this is a pre-emptive stfu to anybody thinking of making some cheesy joke about my handle... er.. nickname).
Would that be purple tentical rape?
The one game I can name in this genre that was any good was Michael Ninn's Latex: The Game.
It was interesting... sort of a dumbed-down (but not completely trivial) combination of Myst, Pink Floyd's The Wall, and a porn flick (it included FMV clips from the porn movie, Michael Ninn's Latex).
What was cool about it was that it immersed you in a surreal world, inside the mind of a lunatic. There was an otherworldly quality to it that by far exceeded what one would expect from a game based on a porn flick.
I count it as the only truly sexy (and not braindead) "adult" game.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
The brain is the largest erogenous organ in the body. And thats both literal and figurative, given most human brains weighs in at several pounds. The developers, if they're so keen on using interactive media as a conduit for the sex industry, have to realize that games appeal to our brains first.
Unless its the rez vibrator pack. That thing appeals to a different organ entirely.
I like to keep my masturbation and gaming seperate. I have a perfectly good internet connection. A google image search costs a lot less than a videogame, and you don't have to use both hands.
I wasn't a fanboy when Sega was around, and by god, I'm not one now.
Stories about sexual tension usually have a lot more depth and layers of meaning to them than stories about sex alone. You can even have very sexy stories that don't actually have any explicit sex at all. More commonly an "artistic" story will have a lot of sexual tension followed by a little bit of sex, as opposed to porn which has a little (if any) sexual tension up front followed by a lot of sex.
There's also always the "less is more" philosophy. It's often the stories with the least actual sex in them, and sometimes the least sexual tension, at least as intended by the author, that ends up with hordes of obsessed fans writing slash about them.
So i expect the sex in video games will be sexy as soon as the developers and/or marketing departments realize it isn't about sex and body parts but about well developed characters and the social interactions between them which create sexual tension.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
You just have to (possibly with a help of a friend) beat a round the first time through. Next time around, you are guaranteed at least a few minutes of girls-gone-wild boobies.
You consider hentai games to be "sexy" and mature?
Golly. That stuff is more puerile than any USA porn ever could be.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
I think a lot of people are confusing the idea of a simple sex/porn videogame with the idea of an actual legitimate game trying to deal with sexuality in an interesting/appropriate/mature manner. People have pointed out that google image search is easier than trying to play a porn game, or that porn itself doesn't deal with sex appropriately anyways; but the point of the article (albeit not a particularly profound one) was that a game like GTA, an M-rated RPG, or whatever hypothetical game you could think of, could potentially deal with relationships and sexual themes in such a way that would lend to the realism, interactivity and emotional aspect of the game.
I hate to give it any credit, because the game bugs the hell out of me (try being a game tester at EA for a little while), but the Sims 2 is a good example of a game where you feel like the characters are somewhat emotionally bonded with each other, and can feel jealousy when a Sim flirts with another Sim that they were fond of, and that sort of thing. The whole thing is kind of forced, with point values for how much of a friend someone is, etc., but it gets the job done. The "sex" (making woohoo) is done in a cartoony, pg-13 kind of way, but it fits the game well and isnt just a tacked on feature. Plus, it wouldnt be a reach to remove the pixel blurring and a few tweaks to make it a little more mature-themed.
Now if you built an actual game around that, instead of an eating/shitting/sleeping simulator, I might actually go buy it. Not that the Sims isnt already the most popular game in the universe.
The uncanny valley is bogus. It was research done for robot appearances that culminated in very life-like manequins. Yes, with better graphics poorly designed models, textures, and lighting can combine to make one scarey looking face. However, I don't think this "uncanny valley" is as uncrossable with todays graphics as is purported.
When I played Half-Life 2 on my medium-low end PC, the human characters were pretty dang believable at times. Of course Valve paid great attention to facial expressions, just like the Golum character played by Andy Serkis in LotR. This contrasts with the characters in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (those models could only smile with their lips and scowl with their eyebrows - they didn't utilize the entire face in a natural manner).
With films on the big screen, we usually spot out CGI elements, but when the entire film is CGI we just take it all in (much more immersive).
For games to deal with sex in a mature way, game developers need to realize that less is more. If you show everything it is no longer sexy, only stimulating. It stops being eroticism, and becomes porn. There is a reason that today's most artsy, cutting edge directors aren't doing porn films. There is a reason that Victoria's Secret keeps making money when you can get naked for free!
I am surprised by how many comments were basically suggesting "make Porn Game 346." There are plenty of those in Japan. I think the only way they could deal with sex in a mature way would be either to just use cutscenes that portray it in a artistic way. Or make a minigame out of it without showing everything. I haven't seen that part of God of War, but I am sure there are numerous tasteful ways of some kind of minigame that wouldn't deaden the emotional response. No matter how sex is portrayed it would have to be done in such a way that your girlfriend could be in the room and she would think it was romantic.
They'll never see you coming!
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Hm. I remember some time back - when captchas were starting to be used in anger - some
Looks like my estimate of the gullibility of the surfing public was way too low, and they just need to dangle a PSP in front of people's eyes to get them to bust captchas for free.
T&K.
Political language
They're about as sexy and mature as porn is, which makes sense, because they're porn games.
-Laxitive
Maybe because games are supposed to be entertaining. If I wanted sexual realism, I'd go to a bar and get rejected; titties on demand is far more entertaining.
Dammit, hit submit before I finished saying what I wanted to say.
What the hell is "that stuff" supposed to be?
There are a lot of pretty good natured h-games. Of course, if you've only kept your eye out for the disturbing stuff, then I think that says more about you than it does about h-games.
-Laxitive
"Will ? games ever be ?y ?" is a bad analogy, it's like saying "Will violent games ever be lethal?", or "Will sport games ever be equivalent to excersize?" (I'm not talking about excersize machines). The real question here is "Will dating games get me laid?"
I used to think that there was a lot of sex in Second Life too, given the freedom of total nudity and unconstrained behaviour in Mature sims and the large number of sex-related items on sale. But apparently there is extremely little in practice.
... 10 to 1 you'll fail.
It all seems to be just wannabe sexuality. People are afraid to undress even! Go to a Mature beach sim like Paradise and try getting anyone interested in nude beach games, or in strip poker or something like that (let alone an orgy!)
Perhaps it's the US cultural inhibitions, who knows. The fact of the matter is, despite all the accoutrements, there seems to be pretty much no direct sexuality in Second Life at all, outside of covert cyboring pairs as happens in all online worlds, games, forums, and chat channels.
its already been done in japan. thanks to all those "groups" out here against anything indecent or immoral, the genre will never mature out here like it has out there.
Does anyone remember a "game" called MacPlaymate?
It was a game with a naked woman and a number of "toys" with a self evident objective. This was all the rage at our University Macintosh lab for about 2 days, and then never to be seen again.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Maybe there is something wrong with me but I find this game a bit titillating. I still haven't been able to win, but I'll keep trying.
Orgasm girl
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
I think one of the problems of sex in video games is the uncanny valley. The beach volley games like DOA look kinda spooky in my opinion, and not really sexy. Feel the Magic XX/XY worked around this problem successfully by having a very stylized female. Basically, they leave it to your imagination, and it works. Opening her top actually is kinda sexy.
Still, I think in many games, sex simply has no place. Mario and Peach would be very uncomfortable, and having the Halo guy get it on would really pull you out of the game.
Either way, sex can't really be used to sell games (BMX XXX anyone?), because you don't have to play games to see nude people. You get that on the Internet for free, without having to play a crappy game. The game needs to be good in the first place to make you play it. Sex can possibly enhance a good game, but it can't make a good game.
Leather goddesses of phobos.
I dunno, I thought the girl-on-girl lesbian action in The Sims 2 was pretty sexy, especially in their bikinis. Not that I'll ever admit to making them do that.
I think that the problem with Sex in videogames is that the storylines and character development are, in general, not mature enough or explored in enough depth to allow for sex in games. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful of games with storylines, character development, and interaction that would be really deep enough to be able to include sex (off the top of my head: Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII could have gone there if they would have put a bit more into the dynamics between cloud and tifa/aries, Star Ocean 3 could have integrated it well I think with a bit more development).
The problem, I think, is that developers don't see much of a market for storylines that involve such deep running, mature themes. Before sex could be well included in a game, you need to have characters the player cares about, who have history, and who develop a relationship in the game.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Judging from the way "h-games" sell in their home country, Japan, I guess they are the correct way to do it. Games not focusing on sex itself, but building up to it by actually forming relationships and the end of the game being sex.
Business Voyeur
I'm 19 too, and you got some good advice. A little alcohol will help. Just to brag, I f-ed a 29 year old in her own bathroom last night after a couple Yagger bombs. I think if a chick is drunk enough she doesn't much care, she just wants the D. Hope my post gets modded for being useful. Fuck it, I'm still hung over....
Yeah, if you want "good" H games, reading reviews on Something Awful isn't the way to find them.
Then again, the ones that can actually be called "sexy" don't really count as games (Well, NONE of them really count as games). You can jam your spacebar down with a penny and in most of them, you can go out for lunch and come back to at least a default ending.
I will likely get flamed for this but "actual real life graphic sex" isn't really all that "sexy" either. The flirting, seduction, and foreplay are truly more "sexy" in every way.
MORTAR COMBAT!
e.g. Kana Little Sister, and Crescendo (incidentally both by D.O.). Wonderful stories, art and characters. And, yes, tasteful "scenes".
Oh, and there are English versions of both games, for those that are interested.
Ha. Second life has nothing to this game. Seriously. It's the first game where the first day I play I get anally attacked multiple times.
http://www.sociolotron.com/
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
Idea: type in the wrong word, screw over a spammer, and potentially get a PSP anyway (riiight).
Thanks!
you want a sexy game check out these SCREENSHOTS
Adult Anime is animated sex as well, and that sells and is popular, good storyline or no good storyline.Sex is used in movies quite often, when it would be natural, and in some cases plot specific, for characters to engage in sex. We're not necessarily talking about porn, soft porn, or Basic Instinct here.
:Literature, movies, paintings etc., imho.
The problem is that there is a an aversion by western and specifically American publishers to include any sort of overt sex; and this has to be because they're afraid of the ESRB rating hit, or the backlash from 'activists', it can't be sales since nothing sells more than sex.
The european Gothic II for example,has a 'sex scene' if you decide to use the services of a prostitute.Bad CGI, but it's there, and it fits with that specific game moment.If one were to go by the marketing campaigns,a large part of Sims 2 seems to be getting the characters to 'hook up'.
So sex and sexuality is used to 'market' our games, but they just aren't actually *in* them.
Something like Singles or Playboy Mansion tries to build the game around the sexual premise, but then shows PG13 scenes, so why bother with a game who's main marketing feature seems to be nudity and sex, when there's really no nudity or sex?
I think that the gaming industry needs to grow up and start taking itself as seriously as Hollywood. We know that certain movies aren't for kids, and so too certain games aren't for kids. Mature the stories, mature the plots.
We have enough graphics at this point, time to move on to elements of storytelling, plots and situations that exist naturally in other entertaiment media
-Gel214th
After reading an article in Wired.com about the state of virtual sex games, I checked out the game Virtually Jenna. The demo "Looked" quite intriguing.
Whole games built around girls being tentacle-raped doesn't sound very mature on any level.