Now, I’m no wimpled puritan preaching everlasting hellfire for fornicators. Actually, I have – disturbingly to some, it’s turned out on occasion – very liberal views about sex. But whenever I see a game rated “Mature” for sexual content, I can’t help but cringe in dreadful anticipation. It’s not so much that I object to sex in games on principle, but rather that – just now, at least – it’s all so, well, immature.
Mass Effect 2 is a great example. BioWare’s obviously trying hard to pretend this gaming stuff is all serious business, and they’ve mostly succeeded. But halfway through, the game trips and falls over a monument of retarded adolescent sexuality so clumsy and tawdry and outrageously ludicrous it does nothing so much as undermine its attempts at sincerity everywhere else. I mean, it’s only in a video game – and perhaps a 13-year old’s hormone-powered toilet fantasies – that two or three completely superficial conversations lead to a meaningful relationship. Oh, and that’s the kind of “meaningful” relationship that apparently begins and ends with a bit of decidedly uncomfortable looking interstellar kissy kissy where both participants remain fully clothed. Unless that’s how they do it in the future. Which they probably won’t.
I’m not even going to mention the preposterous relationship mechanics in Dragon Age: Origins. Oh, but I just did. And “mechanics” is probably the right word – it’s about as divorced from actual, meaty reality as it possibly could be. Memo to BioWare: you’re doing it wrong.
A recent article on Cracked.com (5 Reasons it’s Still Not Cool to Admit You’re a Gamer) denounces this sorry state of things, with the writer quite rightly pointing out that a “Mature” rating on a game box really means it “appeals specifically to males who have never actually had a relationship with a female”. More pertinently, perhaps, it’s absurd and insulting to everyone else. Because meanwhile, back in reality, the average gamer is in their 30s, and has probably actually had real proper sex and stuff.
And this just in, developers all over the planet, something like 25-40% of your market are female. So what’s with the vapid female characters featuring mostly boobs and nothing much else? And I’m not just talking about games like Dead or Alive – I could probably count the number of intellectually defensible female game characters on one hand. Maybe that’s the point, ho ho ho.
For the most part, it seems, they’re just there to look at and work into ridiculously contrived sex scenes because apparently there isn’t enough free porn out there already. Which, I’ll remind you, isn’t doing much for 25-40% of the market.
It’s a curious double standard that the overwhelming majority of gamers will quickly indict increasing efforts to dumb down gaming with worthless shovelware of the PONIES IV: MORE PONIES variety, but happily tolerate the frequently unequivocal and juvenile stupidity of so-called “mature” titles. Next time you want to have a rage about tabloids taking games at face value, you might also want to look at what you’ve been playing lately.
For all attempts to legitimise the maturity of the medium elsewhere, it’s a sad fact that most sexual content in games today amounts to nothing much more than the opening scenes of any 1970s porno. Ironically enough, by hawking this sort of shallow rubbish, developers are only perpetuating the otherwise objectionable stereotype that gamers are a bunch of teenage mouthbreathing ectomorphs who’ve never spoken to a real woman that isn’t their mom. And why does anyone actually want that?
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