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Why Do Videogames Struggle With Sex?
brumgrunt writes "Why do videogames still treat sex in such a two dimensional way? Why do they snigger at it, or treat it as a reward? Den Of Geek has been taking a look." I always figured it was some combination of games being made by our inner adolescent, marketed to the outer ones, and getting banned whenever they take sex seriously.
I always figured that videogames treat sex two dimensionally because much of video games cater to fantasy escapism as its main draw. It's really no different from any other fantasy escapism outlet. If you look at high fantasy books of the last couple of decades, you'll see the exact same amount of treatment of sex and impossibly proportioned women. Same thing with comic books. On the women's side, it's no different from romance novels (with the impossibly built shirtless men on the covers), soap operas (although to a lesser degree) and all sorts of other similar stuff. They appeal to the idea in us of the quick cathartic thrill that we can fantasize ourselves into, and very few people fantasize about marriage, children and getting a mortgage.
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it's not like video games treat murder or money or physics or politics with reverence, respect, or precision either. why should a game be expected to treat sex as somehow immune from gamification? if it's included, it *should* be simplified in function and integrated into the gaming framework, just like every other complex human thing that gets reduced to either a goal, task, tool, or reward in a game.
i could live a little longer in this prison
More like its difficult to portray sex as being at all interesting in a video game. Violence has blood and gore and explosions, and explosions of violence and gore. Not to mention laser beams, occasionally attached to sharks or giant robots.
Sex is at least two naked people getting it on. Watching it for a short time can be pretty compelling, but you're not likely to get very much good game play out of it.
Consider sex in movies. They all seem to have it to a certain degree, but honestly, if you give the sex anything more than a few scenes, the movie tends to turn into crap.
What he is writing here is directly what happens in real life - you choose your words or actions badly and even one bad choice ends up to you not having sex with the girl.
If I walked up to a guy and said "Nice shoes, wanna fuck?" -- there's a chance he'll say yes, despite this being one of the worst ways to go about it. As to actions, many hollywood movies have been made (How to lose a guy in 7 days, anyone?) about how sometimes doing everything wrong still leads to the desired outcome. The truth is... Sex happens because we have hormones and chemicals and stuff in our brains (and *cough* elsewhere) and sometimes they're the ones doing the talking -- and what comes out of our mouth is totally irrelevant. As to love or no love, emotional attachment or not... Being that you're not a woman, you don't have some extra chemicals besides the ones I mentioned above working against you. It's near impossible for a woman past a certain age to have sex and not develop an emotional attachment. Ever wonder why we want to cuddle or be clingy after sex (or octopus you during climax?) -- BRAIN CHEMICALS! Believe me, if we could shut it off, or take a pill to let us have no strings attached sex like guys, the world would be a far sluttier place. I'm totally serious about this... don't laugh.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I wonder why religions even have made sex to look like a bad thing.
Historically, sex out of wedlock HAS been a very bad thing. Venereal diseases, unwanted pregnancies, death and sickness (really....the list of famous people who died of venereal disease at a young age is surprisingly long). Of course that's not really a problem anymore, but that's only been true for the last 60 years or so. For the thousands of years before that, religion was right on in their recommendations. Religion moves slowly to deal with new developments, especially on relatively minor issues (seriously....pick up any holy book and count the number of paragraphs talking about sex. It's a small proportion. Usually significantly less than 1%).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."