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Bruce Everiss

Sex in games

Bruce Everiss
Games Consultant
November 20, 2007

If you read a James Bond book you will know that our eponymous hero certainly gets his sex in. This is the case in most literature unless it is written for children. Then there is specific erotic literature which is pretty much non-stop sex.

Then there is literature with every sort of kink and perversion that you can possibly imagine. All done without any age ratings. It seems to be that sex is what people want to read about.

What works with books is also pretty true of the film industry. Except for the age ratings. Pornography is massively popular and has stars like Jenna Jameson who are internationally famous.

Even the popular music industry seems centred on lyrics that have sex as their main preoccupation. Sometimes very explicitly, which can lead to a parental advisory sticker on the packaging.

Then you come to the game industry and, when it comes to sex, it is a puritanical wasteland. You really would think that babies were delivered by storks. It is patently obvious that this is a ridiculous situation. All the other media are obviously giving the public what the public want. And we aren’t. Yet we have advantages, such as interactivity and connectivity that mean we should be able to do this whole sex thing a lot better than they can.

Part of this is down to our industry’s heritage of entertaining adolescent males. They obviously aren’t interested in sex!

It is strange with this audience that you cannot be seen to be giving them what they want. Everybody knows that one of the main consumers of adult magazines is not, in fact, adults.
However the main restriction on the development of content is the approval process of the platform holders.

This really holds the industry back in many ways by narrowly limiting the sorts of games they will allow. Graphically killing other human beings with a knife is okay. Encountering a ladies hockey team wearing only smiles is not Okay. This fails totally to treat adults as adults. I would much prefer the hockey team encounter.

Some say that the nature of our media, the interactivity and connectivity, is a justification for the much higher levels of censorship we suffer from. If this is the case then surely books should be the most censored of all because it is inside our brain that all those little black squiggles are converted into images and emotions. Even film deserves more censorship as it has a level of graphic reality that consoles are still a few generations away from.

So do you think we should grow up and give our customers what they want? Or are you happy with a diet of violence and sport?

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