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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."
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 joystick waggling games went out of fashion in the days of the zx specturm and commodore 64.
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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.
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They need to go play Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The writing in that game was excellent, including the sex scene.
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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).
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.
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.
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You consider hentai games to be "sexy" and mature?
Golly. That stuff is more puerile than any USA porn ever could be.
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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.
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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
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.
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I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."