Sex in video games

[Bjorn]

Cara Ellison over at RPS is starting up a regular column exploring sex in video games.  Seemed like a great opportunity to start a thread here.  The first game she's tackling is Ute, which is pretty fascinating both thematically and mechanically. 

 

Ute’s a woman whose grandmother sends her on a mission: to fuck as many men as she can before she gets married. Ute can grab a guy (spacebar to seduce), take him to an out-of-the-way corner, and then have outrageous sex with him (more points are awarded if you press the arrow keys in a designated rhythm). But Ute has to climax before another man walks by: if he catches some driveby dogging, his heart and the heart of the man you are sleeping with will be broken, and you will never get to sleep with either again, or more importantly, Ute will never get to marry them. The idea is to rack up as many points by sleeping with as many of the eleven men as you can. It’s actually kind of difficult to do this as there’s no damn privacy, and men keep walking in on me before I’ve even screamed my victory (and in the game). Incidentally, Ute’s orgasm noise is the cutest thing I’ve ever heard.

 

This is interesting to me on a few levels.  As my daughter reached college age, I discovered a rather amazing secret conversation that happens within some families.  The older women are concerned about her sex life (including aunts, grandmothers and great-grandmothers).  They want her to have one.  They wanted her to have more of a chance to learn and have fun than they did.  I say secret, because this is sooo counter to what young women are usually taught.  And secret because almost all of these conversations happened between my wife and the other female relatives.  They felt uncomfortable directly telling our daughter that it was okay to be promiscuous, so long as you were as safe as possible.  My wife had similar conversations with other parents, who secretly want their kids to have fulfilling sex lives, but don't know how or want to communicate that.  They feel an obligation to tow the standard midwest American line that sex is bad, dangerous and should be reserved for marriage, even though they don't believe it.

 

Mechanically, the flip in agency regarding initiation of sex is interesting as it mirrors real life (women really are the ones in charge of when sex happens), but it's often the opposite in popular media, unless a woman's reticence is being used for comedic affect.

 

Fascinating stuff. 

[SGP]

I'll have to check into the RPS post. I appreciate your story quite a bit. Game developers can do what they want with sex, but I appreciate how some developers have included sex without bringing with it (either through reproduction or reaction) all the cultural nonsense surrounding it. I think Heavy Rain went about this tastefully with an optional sex segment that was simply sex in the framework of the game. The camera doesn't avert or fade out to the noise of creaking, the game does not applaud the player for choosing to engage in it, you simply choose to have the character engage in it.

 

Not going to get into these, but off the top of my head these games also had sex or inferred it:

Mass Effect, The Witcher, Thirty Flights, Persona 4 (& other dating sims)

 

Dating sims are quite a weird frame for young minds to adopt regarding romantic relationships...

[Murdoc]

My character paid to have sex with a scarecrow in Dragon Age. 

Fascinating.

[Reyturner]

I look forward to her coverage of Saints Row 4.

[Latrine]

This reminds me of the Best of 2013: Sex category on www.freeindiegam.es : http://www.freeindiegam.es/2013/12/best-of-2013-sex/

 

The only one I played was Anne Hathaway Erotic Mouthscape but it was really cool. 

[Roderick]

I'm gonna tout my Gamse of the Year 2011 here: Catherine. Though the sex itself has no gameplay function, it's so embedded in the storyline that it's integral to the game. The whole thing is about you as Vincent being seduced into cheating on your girlfriend / being too weak-willed to withstand it / or even secretly wanting it, and the ramifications on your relationship. Before the regrettable final act, this theme is explored really nicely, supported from every side by the levels, the cinematics and the in-between gameplay segments where you're talking to your friends and strangers inside a bar about your struggles.

 

It became my GOTY2011 because I had played no other game before that that dealt with that specific problem at that specific age before. It felt mature and considerate as well - lurid covers and ads aside.

[Bjorn]

Catherine has been on my list of of games to play since it came out, but I never remember to actually buy it.   I also haven't played through Heavy Rain. 

 

I just played through Anne Hathaway Erotic Mouthscape.  An interesting piece of erotic fiction, but I still struggle to understand simple twine pieces.  Does the act of clicking on a word to reveal the next "page" do something for some people?   Larger twine pieces I get, in that they have more choices and interactivity. 

 

I did play with Ute a bit last night.  If you enjoy this sort of thing, it's worth doing just to see all the animations.  It's a very simple game, but does have interesting commentary on sex.  Women's sexual history can affect who they date in the future. Women have more control over when sex happens than men.  Women can get sex pretty much whenever they want, if they are willing to lower their standards. 

[kaputt]

I bought Catherine, but it didn't hooked me. I remember a lot of people saying the game talked about a mature and serious subject, and then it got me interested. But then I played the game, and while the theme of the game was marriage, a serious and mature topic, it was dealing with it by talking of a monster woman from hell who killed men who had sex with her, probably because she was "the other woman" or something (at least that was what the story was implying from the beginning, I haven't gone further in the game). Video games.

Maybe I was expecting too much from the game. Reading some reviews, I kind of expected it to deal with subject with some maturity, without fantasy and stuff, so I was disappointed when I saw that wasn't the case. Maybe I'll go back and play Catherine with this in mind, but I'll change the difficulty first, those puzzles are quite hard.

Anyway, about the topic, I'm not a person who played dozens of video games in my life, so maybe I can't give the better answer, but I think that the best representation of sex I saw in a game was in The Wicther 2. There's a scene in which Geralt have sex with Triss, and the story at least tried to give some context, even if it was totally cliche. But it was much better than God of War, for example, or even Mass effect. I remember being totally amazed in Mass Effect 2 when I was getting closer to a crew member (I think it was Miranda) and then the dialogue prior to the sex scene happened. It was probably one of the weirdest scenes ever, Sheppard made a really weird grin and said something like "you know what I want" or something even more cheesy, and Miranda said she wanted too, but that they should wait for something, whatever. It was totally unnatural and it seemed to be there just to reward the player because he unlocked something, but that that reward should come at the end of the game, as some kind of final prize.

I really liked how it was portrayed in Thirty Flights of Loving, though. In Heavy Rain it could be better, I didn't felt that the characters were enough attracted to make sex, it felt a bit out of place, but that game have other problems with its writing.

[Bjorn]

There's a new S.EXE column over at RPS.  Idle Thumbs fans will be happy to know that in it Cara Ellison has replaced pictures of dongs with Jeff Goldblum: