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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.
In videogames, even ones that handle the subject deftly, sex is almost always a reward. Take the Mass Effect series, for example. Here, you can indulge in interspecies sexual relations, if you see fit, but to get to the point where a character is willing to bump uglies with you, you have to have followed the correct series of dialogue prompts. There's a veneer of freedom, but the relationship you're creating with the character you want to sleep with is a shallow one. Fail to perform one action, or choose incorrectly on one dialogue tree, and they'll lose interest in you. Sex becomes an achievement, a notch on the bedpost of your high score table, instead of being the physical expression of an emotional connection between two consenting individuals.
Not just with video games, but in general Well, it looks like the author thinks sex must only be some kind of expression of true love. 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. This seems to be more of a problem with the way US thinks about sex, while we here in Europe can just have it casually and not make a big deal out of it. Sure it might be shallow relationship, but so what, sex is fun, feels good and there really isn't any reason not to enjoy it.
I wonder why religions even have made sex to look like a bad thing. When you ask about it from someone who believes in god, the only responses usually are something like "because god said so", "that's just how it is" or "it's a special thing between a man and a woman". No actual answer. Sure, sex feels great with a person you love. But so does many other things, and you can also just have sex that feels physically great with no bigger emotions. It's nice to be close to someone, feel their skin and feel how you're inside them. Be it with love or not.
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.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
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
Orgasm's the reward - offspring are the dirty trick.