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."

Comments

You need an audience who knows what good sex is

[EnronHaliburton2004]

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.

Re:You need an audience who knows what good sex is

[JAHA]

Why the hell would you pull out of a great orgasm to cum on the girls face??? BOOOOOORRRRRING!

Umm...maybe because porn is a visual medium and you can't SEE someone having a great orgasm. Porn is not an instructional video. It's a way to excite you VISUALLY. This is the same reason you see flicking tongue's in porn during oral sex. Anybody with real experience knows that doesn't really work. But, apparently, it's visually enticing.

I'm not trying to argue that porn is amazing. But you don't seem to have a clue about how to make it better.

Re:You need an audience who knows what good sex is

[77Punker]

The porn industry isn't trying to portray great sex. Great sex isn't something you can convey in a movie. It's something you experience. It's not something you experience with a stranger or a vibrating Nintendo controller and a tissue. It's far to deep to explain in a videogame; they will never succeed at making sex much more than a story element.

Re:You need an audience who knows what good sex is

[iq in binary]

You know what, I just have to give you and huge fucking pat on the back. The kind that knocks the eyeballs out of your head and gives you a bloody nose.

Now, I don't necessarily pass your standard of sexually experienced being only 19; but I speak for many people (mostly women) when I say:

"What the fuck?"

Pornography in this day and age sets a standard for sexual intercourse that is enjoyed almost exclusively by men. Attention is focused on one thing and one thing only: male pleasure. The only foreplay you'll see in 9 out of 10 scenes is oral, usually being performed by the female party. Even taking your clothes off can be sensual if you do it right, pornographers can't even think try.

Practically no experimentation as far as position is concerned, there's a set of about 4 positions in Hollywood. Missionary, Doggy (with 2 or 3 variations, but ultimately the same), Cowgirl (2 variations) and Spoons (Laying on side, guy behind). Now, this may be fine for a one night stand; but real good sex usually entails a plethora of different positions. Hot sex doesn't just mean passionate and sweaty, it means pleasurable in many ways; requiring many different positions. For those who have read and used Kama Sutra, Scented Gardens or the plethora of other compilations; you'll know full well the hundreds of positions and the way they make the pleasure a different experience. Even more when there's more than 2 people, and yes, there are books that entail the kind of fun you can have in a party.

Women can be pleasured in a seemingly endless number of ways. They have more errogenous zones than men, and infinitely more nerve endings in relation to their sex organs. Just shifting a couple of inches, thrusting at an angle, repositioning their legs or even just offering multiple simultaneous stimuli (licking her ear while you're going at it, say) can make a world of difference. Never even see a hint of that in porn.

And the cumshot? PLEASE! Now I have met women that were actually turned on by it, they are few and VERY far between. It is disrespectful, childish and in my opinion somewhat psychotic. Not only that, no way in hell am I going to leave the paradise that is a woman's body when I'm close to climax unless I'm going to be making a re-entry ;)

The line between hot sex and porn is very defined. Hot sex is about intimacy, sweat, primitive grunts and moans but most importantly pleasure. Porn? It's about semen.

Re:You need an audience who knows what good sex is

[G-funk]

It could just be that different people like different things,and you perhaps just don't like watching what most porn-buying blokes do. If people didn't want to watch the standard porno formula, it wouldn't be the standard porno formula.

The problem with making "porno for women" or other such things is that porn is the most pirated material on earth, and if you want to make any money you need to go for the biggest market. And there's no such thing as porno for women. I know a lot of women who love porn, and none of them are into the same shit. The individual markets are too small to be very profitable. And nobody wants to make porn and only make a profit. They want to make an obscene profit. Thats why they get into porn.

Re:You need an audience who knows what good sex is

[AstrumPreliator]

I agree with most of what you said, but I'd like to point out that sex isn't purely physical. It isn't about the number of positions you are in during a session nor the amount of foreplay you do or how many different places you can stimulate at once. Don't get me wrong they're a part of the equation, but you need a bit more for great sex. You need an emotional and spiritual connection of some sort.

In response to your second to last paragraph, every man and woman is different. Get over being embarrassed in the bedroom and communicate with eachother. Everyone has a fetish or two and you can get pretty turned on fulfilling your partner's desires and I know they will enjoy it.

Besides, porn is just visual stimuli.

Re:You need an audience who knows what good sex is

[AstrumPreliator]

I disagree. If you and your partner agree to a polygamous relationship and you lay out some sturdy ground rules then you should be fine.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

[Blakey Rat]

They need to go play Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The writing in that game was excellent, including the sex scene.

Re:Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

[snorklewacker]

The bath scene. Hardly a sex scene ... it was all "off camera". Very PG. However, what was there was done exquisitely and tastefully, which was the thrust (ahem) of the article. I'm quite sure the artistic and writing talent behind that game could have gone on to show an even more erotic scene, but that would get the "AO" label slapped on it, Wal-Mart wouldn't carry it, and the console makers wouldn't publish it. Welcome to the repression of the "free" market.

Not that I think it would have been entirely appropriate to put such a scene in that particular game, but sheesh, I'm 32 years old, I think I could handle it. Games are still for kids. Come to think of it, just about every mass-marketed entertainment out there is -- if not for actual children, then ones that are mentally.

Sex vs. Sexual tension

[Daetrin]

Although there is some overlap and some exceptions, generally you have the straight (so to speak) approach to sex taken by porn and anything else intended as a masturbation fantasy, which is the kind of thing that is generally pretty embaressing in any other context. Those who are trying to include sex in a work they consider to have artistic merit usually focus on sexual tension rather than directly on the sex itself.

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.

Re:Dumbass

[snorklewacker]

You consider hentai games to be "sexy" and mature?

Golly. That stuff is more puerile than any USA porn ever could be.

confusing the issue

[kaptron]

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.

Re:It's only wannabe sexuality in Second Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it's the US cultural inhibitions, who knows.

More likely they're either afraid that you're a kid and they'll get arrested, or that they're a kid and mommy or daddy will come home and find out what they've been doing on the computer.