Romantic sex doesn't work in video games (NSFW-ish)

[Original_Name]

At least that's my opinion. Want to hear why? Too bad, I've already started typing...

(This topic is more-or-less NSFW, obviously)

I was thinking earlier today how Sega has sort of let me down. I've been way behind the times on video games for nearing on a decade now, and I just now got around to scoping out what the fuss is all about with the Yakuza games, which many gamers are so eager to insist are the spiritual successors to my beloved Shenmue. I came across alot of videos and articles addressing the intrigue of the "Hostess Bars" and the sex and seduction mini-games that they entail, and everything about it just seemed very... classless.

Sure, they're a step up from Kratos slinging a litter of slut-puppies over his oh-so-macho back without any words other than "I'm going to try and kill you with my penis and you're going to love it because male power fantasy" (okay, he doesn't actually say that, but he totally could), since there's at least some pretense of interacting with the let's-be-honest-here prostitutes (sorry, Japanese modesty) and laying down some illusion of familiarity with their individual personalities. So, again, I'll file Yakuza's approach to interactive sex under "classless" rather than "offensive" like I would God of War's, but when you're shorthanding sexual intercourse with button-mashing (or even -- strap yourselves in for the future, fellas! -- waggling your Wii-mote around) no one's really winning.

Obviously though, the sex in these series were always meant to be a little bit silly, and while the notion of throw-away sex has always made me uncomfortable, I'm willing to put aside my personal queasiness to analyze what I think video games can actually achieve in this controversial yet fundamentally vital (though woefully over-saturated) realm of subject matter.

Video games are fantastically effective, as a medium, at the whole "ogling" aspect of sex. I don't need to say it because you're already thinking it: Dead or Alive(/Xtreme Beach Volleyball). Want to reinforce overwhelmingly unrealistic standards of purely material sexual attractiveness? Boy, do video games ever have your back on this one. And, hell, by design they are very well suited for such a thing. Obviously, there's a massive ethical discussion to get into with it, but from a purely mechanical analysis of the capabilities of the medium, these are very fertile grounds for games.

Actual intercourse in and of itself in video games, whether it's totally meaningless kicks to regain a few health-points, or you're playing a painstakingly complete (totally 18 years old)woman-as-jungle-gym simulator coded by a small but dedicated little hentai hovel in Japan is... well, awkward. I don't need to explain to you why current gaming input methods fail to recreate anything beyond the most rudimentary sensational aspects of intercourse. This sort of interactivity is really just "ogling 2.0", replete with peripherals that you should probably hide very carefully if you're expecting company.

But what I really want to get into is why video games, by their nature, fail and will continue to fail at effectively addressing romantic sex.

I think, at present, the benchmark for romantic sex in a narrative-driven video game is probably the optional scene in Heavy Rain. Check it out if you're interested and in a dork-perv-enabled environment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAU31d7kUls

Okay, now I'm sure that the developers took alot of pride in the fact that they were actually trying to approach the topic of sex in a mature way without resorting to a non-interactive cutscene, so I'll give them that, but...

A three-button sequence to unclip the female character's bra? Fucking subtle, guys.

Sure, sure, the player is involved with the intrigue of a tense sexual situation, going step-by-step to actualize copulation, sensing in the scene the trope of passion and tension mounting to a point of inevitability. But as long as the game is attempting any sense of immersion in role-playing, our beloved medium is doomed to allow the player to get no closer to the action than a voyeur or a puppeteer of clinking marionettes. The most fundamental emotion which is so central to romantic sex is excluded by the nature of the medium: you cannot possibly provide the player with a feeling that he or she has committed something of particular personal importance to a loved one.

Even if your avatar looks and behaves just like you. Even if the game is an interactive biography of your life. Even if it's in first-person. Even if you're engaging in a real-time simulation with another human being. Even if you genuinely love that human being. Even if you "so totally would" in real life. It just doesn't work. There is nothing truly personal (on a level anymore vitally fundamental than paying a few bucks for the "Sexy Time" DLC) being committed. The cheap, over-ripe sex power fantasy thing works alright for the same reason that pulling someone's head off works -- the separation between the player and the avatar paired with the separation between reality and fantasy is intuitive. Video games can't reproduce the actual sensation of murder either, but it works at least slightly better because the act of carrying out a murder (or, to strike closer to our main point, an orgy) is tied to a sensation of detachment far moreso than attachment.

That's not to say that it's not better to try and approach the Heavy Rain standard rather than the worthless dreck that God of War earns its M ratings with if you're absolutely sure you have to put sex in your game, but passing it off as romantic in a way that is genuinely meaningful to the player just doesn't work in games in and of themselves. To be perfectly honest, I've never been particularly inspired by any sex scenes in any media I've encountered, but games particularly fail at it because they fall short of the medium's promises of interactive immersion. Everything about film, for instance, is voyeuristic, so it's not quite as jarring when sex is as well. Film is almost wholesale about caring about things vicariously, with bits of personal stuff that the viewer relates to themselves by proxy. In games, sure, you might feel a sense of accomplishment if a sex scene is notoriously difficult to access, but accomplishment and personal romantic commitment are decidedly separate classes of emotion.

As games generate more public expectations to prove themselves as an artform, I suspect we'll be seeing alot more incorporation of meditated sexuality appearing in the medium, but I doubt it'll ever manifest itself as anything more than a shoddy QTE sequence that we're either going to feel slightly embarrassed to watch, rewind for kicks, or feel anything more emotionally significant than a "good for them" from our dimension on the other side of the screen.

[Erik_Twice]

Damn dude, I watched the Heavy Rain video and I thought it was hilarious! And it couldn't have come in a better time because I was thinking about making a similar topic to this.

I have actually thought about the topic a fair bit, but not from the romantic sex angle, more from a general perspective and I think all can be boiled down to a very important thing:

The fourth wall is still here.

You know, I really think it's doomed to fail because it's still a game and you are still in front of the screen. The game fails because the abstraction that is pushing buttons makes everything silly. It's like your own character commenting how tasty a virtual pizza is, the concept is inherently silly because you can't taste it.

What they need is to use a better abstraction. If the abstraction makes sense, everything will.


Something I really wonder. Don't you find all this supposed sex appeal in any kind of media to be silly? Not evil or bad, just...pretty stupid. When I say Madonna or the latest pop sensation being talked about in the news as "the next controversial thing" it just looks dumb! Or the chainmail bikini thing, it's just so stupid that any kind of sexuality is destroyed! I mean, seriously, it's like bad Japanese porn

[brandman]

First of all, you need to put a NSFW tag in your title, because by the time we read that you think it may be NSFW, we have already clicked on it.

Second, the thought of romantic sex in video games is stupid anyways. Trying to seriously make it work, would be for the developers to request the players become technosexuals and fall in love with a 3D model, which honestly, the time you would devote to this character in a game could have been better spent in real life, much less the fact that not many people would like the thought. It's like those blow up dolls that some people f*ck.

You don't see any other entertainment medium attempt to make you build a relationship with the opposite (or same, if that's your thing) sex just to eventually have sex, and there's a good reason for it. The only time sex is addressed is in a funny way, except in the romance genre, but that doesn't involve you, as those books and movies don't immerse you as the main character.

[AppleQueso]

I'd argue that romantic sex is very rarely handled well in any medium at all.

[brandman]

I'd argue that romantic sex is very rarely handled well in any medium at all.

You don't see any other entertainment medium attempt to make you build a relationship with the opposite (or same, if that's your thing) sex just to eventually have sex, and there's a good reason for it. The only time sex is addressed is in a funny way, except in the romance genre, but that doesn't involve you, as those books and movies don't immerse you as the main character.

[Erik_Twice]

I think he noticed Bradman.

[Original_Name]

@brandman: Sorry, I couldn't get it to fit in the subject line. You're right though, that's not really okay -- I'll rephrase it so that it'll fit.

Also, you bring up some points that I considered while writing the original post. I started to really question just what it is that these more serious games are trying to achieve by including sex. I probably did focus too much on purely theoretical stuff, going as far as I possibly could into the hypothetical abilities of the medium to try and analyze the subject, when the most likely reality is pretty obvious: sex in games will almost assuredly remain overwhelmingly goofy and/or embarrassing.

@General_Norris: I'm 100% with you on all of that.

I don't think there's anything wrong with addressing sex in a vacuum, but spending any amount of time with many of the most popular offerings on television, radio, video games, and the best-sellers list just makes me go "Oh jeez, stop, you're totally ruining it."

Something I meant to get at in a more direct way was that sophisticated sex scenes in games are either going to be addressed as half-interactive cutscenes or as "just something to do" in the sandbox. But the way modern entertainment treats sexuality it might as well be "just something to do" anyway.

It seriously makes me wonder, does anyone even feel anything approaching something sexual when they see a scantily-clad woman anymore? Seriously, we're so inundated with opportunities to see the most unbelievably depraved things after a few keystrokes in a Google search engine that it's hard to imagine the cookie-cutter sex on TV even phasing anyone older than 15.

At the point where I assume that just about everyone is entirely desensitized to the image of a naked woman just being a naked woman and the gossip-girl sexual mentality of "Sex and the City" is actually rooted in real-world modern sexual philosophy, you might as well just be playing a video game anyway.

[brandman]

I think he noticed Bradman.

Maybe

@brandman: Sorry, I couldn't get it to fit in the subject line. You're right though, that's not really okay -- I'll rephrase it so that it'll fit.

Thanks.

At the point where I assume that just about everyone is entirely desensitized to the image of a naked woman just being a naked woman and the gossip-girl sexual mentality of "Sex and the City" is actually rooted in real-world modern sexual philosophy, you might as well just be playing a video game anyway.

In parts of the world (some of Europe comes to mind) naked women (and I guess men, idk) aren't really a bad thing that you should shield the younger ones from, you know, as long as their is no sex involved. It doesn't hurt them, so why do we Americans continue to go ballistic if some celebrity accidentally had her boob pop out of her dress during a super bowl even though we all see barely clothed women in the media, and around the streets?

[brunoafh]

uhhhh. I think you're over-thinking it guy. Sex in itself isn't all that glorious to begin with. In fact, I'd argue "romantic sex" exists only in entertainment mediums anyway.

Damn dude, I watched the Heavy Rain video and I thought it was hilarious!

Yeah, that scene is amazing. I was cracking up big time when I played the game and saw that. Not that I wasn't cracking up pretty much the entire time anyway.

[Luke]

Unless sex adds depth to the story, it is silly to have in video games. It's haha funny in a twelve year old kind of way, but the thought of people thinking video game sex should be romantic creeps me out.

Leisure Suit Larry. Sure. The game is based on "gettin' some" and does so in a hilarious manner (well, sometimes) so the premise works.

A Kinnect sex party game could be a lot of fun though.