Some fear it. Some revel in it. Some find a way to do both. That in mind, what business does our awkward, pimply teenager of a medium have putting its foot down and making a statement about it? Well, everybody's got to start somewhere.
Gaming's start, however, has been rocky to say the least. Custer's Revenge springs to mind, as do the bawdy Leisure Suit Larry games. More recently, of course, there was GTA: San Andreas' infamous "Hot Coffee" scandal, in which everybody collectively spit out their proverbial coffee because a videogame dared to depict sex. And this was a videogame created specifically for adults, I might add. So games haven't exactly found their footing when it comes to doing the horizontal tango. Fortunately, a few developers are attempting to rewrite the rulebook. Admittedly, however, it's an uphill battle.
"It's weird," began Size Five Games' Dan Marshall, whose vagina-themed sidescroller Privates was recently refused from XBLA. "At the same time Privates was given an 'uh... better not' from Microsoft, I'd been playing a lot of Limbo. Amazing game. That little child's head comes right off at points, doesn't it? It's just one silly streamlined example but it felt like, boiled-down, this unsettling graphic violence to a young boy is fine and no one bats an eyelid, but cellular-level cartoon graphics inside a vagina are a dead-cert no-no. Weird."
Of course, Privates -- commissioned as an educational project with the help of the UK's Channel 4 -- is worlds different from San Andreas' over-the-top thug drama. Both, however, tackled sex and sexual themes head-on in highly visible spaces. Unsurprisingly, people noticed, and pitchforks and torches soon followed. So then, is that the line? Should we just stick to trashy porn games that conceal themselves in the Internet's seediest alleyways? Or has the gaming industry finally reached a point where this is a battle worth fighting? If you ask Lea Sch�nfelder, creator of sexuality-centric indie "game for adults" Ute, the answer's a no-brainer.
"Game developers should have the courage to deal with big topics like love, death and also sex in a multilayered sense. It is important that games are also noticed as serious and artistic medium. That it's not like that at the moment is also because of the game branch itself, [which] develops mainly products in which the player standardly kills, sex is almost completely taboo, and the player generally doesn't have to think very much. I hope and I think that this will change as we go along."
Marshall, however, couldn't disagree more. To him, it's all about context, and on that particular portion of its report card, he thinks gaming deserves a big, fat F .
"For most games, sex scenes are pretty superfluous: Heavy Rain somehow crowbarred some nookie in while one of the character's children was in mortal danger. It just rendered the whole thing instantly unbelievable and pulled me out of any immersion the game had going. She's lovely and all, but I've got more pressing concerns right now than getting my end away," he explained.
"In stuff like Mass Effect, where there's a nice build-up and reason for sexy-time it sticks out less, but it's still a little ham-fisted and rather unnecessary. I suppose it serves a purpose insofar as the developer not having much time to get the seriousness of a relationship across, having a sex scene sort of cements things a little bit so we can all move on. Put it this way: I can't think of a single game where the narrative would have been enhanced by a little rumpy-pumpy, can you?"
There's a rising tide of game developers, however, who would beg to differ. Titles like Atlus' shock summer hit Catherine lace the sensual swapping of genetic material into their very DNA, using it to explore themes like fidelity and the uncomfortable, un-ending growth spurt that is adulthood. Meanwhile, on perhaps the opposite end of the spectrum, there's PC mega-RPG The Witcher, a series that initially took flack for handing out titillating posed "sex cards" as Geralt won far too many, er, "battles" with his third sword. Developer CD Projekt, however, insists that it's not shooting itself in the foot or including gratuitous nudity for gratuitous nudity's sake. Even seemingly out-of-place "rumpy pumpy" serves a purpose.
"Erotic content and themes are an integral part of the world of The Witcher," explained lead writer Sebastian Stepien. "The characters in this world are passionate, they have desires, they experience grand love affairs and petty romances. Stripped of these, they would be a lot flatter, and the world would lose an important component -- the singular mood that distinguishes it from many other game worlds. Removing this content would effectively castrate both the aura of the game and the protagonist."
Sch�nfelder's Ute, meanwhile, does the reverse. It uses gaming's most potent aspect -- interactivity -- to further our understanding of sex in a social context. While Witcher's a game that just so happens to include sex, Ute's an exploration of sexual themes that just so happens to be a game.
"The different sex techniques describe the characteristics of the various men," said Sch�nfelder. "If Ute gets caught while having sex with another man, two men fall out of the game. This tells us that Ute can only have fun if she keeps it as a secret in front of the others and [doesn't tell] them the truth -- I think that would be the contradictory nature of fidelity, as you call it."
"In addition to that, the game also mentions a certain pressure that is applied on us in a sexual achievement-oriented society. Sleeping with as [many] men as possible every time to achieve a better high score gets somehow [mechanical] and tiring after a while."
Both approaches, of course, are entirely valid. At this point, then, it's simply a learning process. Gaming's still an incredibly young medium, and we need to figure out where sex fits and where it sticks out like a sore thumb. That does not, however, mean that everybody should just sit back and wait for one brave soul to get it "right" explained Stepien.
"I don't believe sex to be more of a taboo in games than it is in other related media. The problem, I think, is much deeper, and it's one where there will never be one answer, never be a single, universal truth that resolves everything. It all depends on one's individual approach to human sexuality."
And if that's all there was to it, it'd surely be mission impossible. But there's still the flipside of that argument to consider: There may not be a universal truth, but sex -- as a force that's profoundly affected us all -- is absolutely universal. As such, the only impossible thing here is ignoring sex entirely. So sure, sex in games may be awkward now, but sweeping it under the rug only makes things worse.
"If a game's story, if the conventions governing how a game world is represented admit the inclusion of erotic content and themes, I think it would seem artificial for them to be missing," Stepien concluded.
So then, back to my original point: Sex is weird. Which brings us to one last sex-borne dichotomy: Damned if we do, damned if we don't. But sex sure as hell isn't going anywhere, and neither are games. Perhaps, then, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Or maybe it'll be clumsy, uncomfortable, and painful for all involved. One thing's for sure, though: It definitely won't be boring.
Spy Guy says: We've come a long way since Custer's Revenge and "Hot Coffee," but how much longer will it be before the topic of sex in games is no longer snickered at? Perhaps that responsibility falls more to the developers than to us gamers.