Boner Meetings: Sex and Gaming

I really need to get something out of the way before I talk about this subject. I am firmly on the “sex is great and we have zero issue with being sexually attracted to any part or whole of the physical body” camp — and so is my wife. We value each other as complex human beings at the same time as being physically attracted to each other.

We are sex positive in our household — that is to say it isn't just the straight guy in the house pervin’ out on anime titties or something. I'm one half of a pretty contemplative couple of people who care a lot about others being who they want to be. I don't spend much time talking about it publicly because there's enough dudes talking about how sex and boobs are great and its likely to seem like that. Legitimate sex positivity advocacy is probably better left to people with more nuance than I, to be true. “I sure do like fuckin' and my wife's huge titties” probably isn't going to generate legitimate progress for the acceptance of sexual relationships, sex workers, or just sex in general.

But it should at least help give context to the criticisms I have for sexuality in gaming.

There's a place for sex in games. Those who say otherwise either don't think of video games as art or aren't entirely genuine when they say they do. Art is human, and while sex isn't a universal desire across all of humanity (and it’s extremely important to respect those of us who don't carry that desire), sex is very human. What drives us to sex is feelings, as is the same thing that drives us to create. When we create, we wish to express our feelings in some meaningful way. We do everything in our lives based on how we feel — including whether or not we feel something is rational.

So why do so many people have an issue with sex in video games? What about it offends so many human people, many with the same urges as those who create these games or indeed any kind of art? Is it puritanical?

I've always found it very difficult to say “yes” to that. There are most certainly those who are simply intending to push beliefs of purity upon others, but it's hard for me to believe that's a true majority. There is just something about a large portion of video games' depictions sex that comes off as tasteless or sleazy. And when I say that, I don't mean “the sex shown is sleazy.” I do mean “the reason they are showing sex feels sleazy.” Something almost always feels uncomfortable about sex in video games. It feels as if I'm being ordered to get a boner. I think it's the same feeling I'd get if someone approached me on the street, pulled out a knife and said “get an erection. Now.”

I don't really ever want to experience that feeling and, fortunately, people do not say stuff like that to me in the street. However, I just feel weird when my avatar in a gaming world is speaking with a virtual woman and she spews out some ham-fisted “I wouldn't mind eating you, Snake” nonsense to me then Geralt and Yennifer have weird polygon rag doll sex on a unicorn because women exist in the game world to have sex with by fulfilling an utterly basic set of criteria that a big group of dudes had discussions about. Meetings were had by large collections of primarily straight, white, techbro guys about giving me a boner.

That just feels creepy.

I’m not speaking from a “dudes giving dudes boners” perspective, either. By now, you've likely heard of gay people. They exist and have as much right to get turned on as anyone else does. I’m saying a roundtable discussion on what amounts to “what gives male video game enthusiasts boners” is fucking weird. The correct response to that is “but boner meetings don’t happen, Peter. Meetings about how sexy a woman is in a game, exactly how thin her waist should be, whether her boobs should be 32Fs or 32Gs, what shape her butt should be, just how sexually adventurous we can get away with her being… oh shit I have a boner.”

It is doubtful anyone’s corporate agenda has a “Boner Meeting” at 11am next Monday. That doesn’t mean these discussions do not go on between the tech end, the creative end, the marketing end, and the management end. Because sex in games almost always has this weird forced quality to it, when I see a gaming sex scene, there is almost never enough context to avoid imagining a bunch of dudes in suit coats and cargo shorts holding laptops over their crotches standing in a circle exchanging suggestions for cup size.

"I'll compromise with her having only DDs if we can turn the jiggle physics up 200%. I need something supremely, verifiably bonerriffic to market here, Simmons!”

Video games are asking a lot more of you to “ accept this sex as sex.” It's like when someone draws Marge Simpson nude with her hair down. Some people love that kind of thing — and I'm not trying to take that from them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being turned on by something (well, most things). But it’s also hardly an individual artist’s vision for depicting sex in the vast majority of well-known video games. It’s difficult for me not to think about the context of its creation — like why, who made it, who its there for, etc. These things are important to think about as you're analyzing or criticizing something, but I am usually playing games for reasons other than to criticize them. I certainly love a good talk about what games could do better, and I'm clearly writing a critique about sex in gaming now. But do I have a legal pad on the table for notes while I try to enjoy a video game? No, I do not.

If video game sex breaks immersion, what is the point? Why include it — other than to market to people? When that little question loop happens, and it does fairly often as few gaming sex scenes seem truly necessary, I'm taken way out of the game because I'm thinking about marketing. I don't ever want to be thinking about marketing, nor do most healthy human beings.

Marketing to the USA in 2015, I believe, is everything puritanical people paint sex to be: dirty, sleazy, manipulative, destructive and often downright dishonest. The popular adage “sex sells” is actually very clever marketing itself. Hearing that makes seem as though it's sex that's doing all the shitty things marketing itself is actually doing, rather than simply being used as an aesthetic for the same bag of marketing tricks. The blame is shifted to sex, not the use or context of sex, and all those negative adjectives I listed a moment ago feel like they’re about sex. This idea that “sex sells” encourages people to blame a biological function for sleazy marketing. Sex doesn’t sell. Marketing sells.

I can’t guess if “dem titties” flying all over the place as the player get a 40-hit combo against their opponent makes many other people think of how disgusting modern marketing is. However, it does for me; disgusting marketing is all I can think of when I see this kind of thing in video games. It seems, to me, both really cynical and a massive underestimation of the player’s intelligence. It’s also most likely not the result of artists making art. Decisions like “how big and how bouncy” are not made by a single person with a grand vision and it’s naive to think they are — and getting angry at Hideo Kojima for poor representation of women in “his” games when most Japanese game publishing and developing corporate cultures eat, sleep and bleed “sex sells” is attacking a symptom rather than a disease.

It’s a similar concept to when boobs start flying out in a comedy movie. It basically never seems like it would have happened. It just feels like a cheap way of getting people to like something — something the big company behind it may not consider a safe bet.

What makes an acceptable depiction of sexuality in gaming for me? Well, for one, nuance. I don’t expect there to suddenly be game sex that doesn’t look like a borderline silly cartoon version of sex. I’m not asking for porn, either. In fact, I would rather not see porn when my agenda includes finding my adopted(ish) daughter and fighting for her life. Sex belongs in a game if you can answer “yes” to the following two questions:

1. Does the sex actually say anything about the characters, story, or world?
2. Does it seem like the sex would actually happen in the situation?

These two pieces of context are the most important ingredients. The sex could be the most gratuitous (or even the shittiest looking) polygon sex of all time and it would probably be acceptable if it ticked those two boxes. At very least, I wouldn't be thinking about marketing, sleazy executives, how bad corporate art has gotten in regards to such things, prejudices, and a slew of other factors I don't think about when my wife and I have sex. That shit is distracting as hell. But more often than not, you can’t even answer “yes” to one of those questions.

It is necessary for other aspects of a narrative-driven game to reveal something about the characters, story, and work within the context of the scene — and to feel authentic. Why is it not important for sex?