Sex and Nudity in Games

Obvious content warning is obvious. Cover your sweet, innocent eyes, children!

“Why are there so many naked people in art?”

This is a question a friend asked me not too long ago whilst wandering around an art gallery, looking at an exhibition on Japanese photorealism. It’s something that I’ve wondered myself, because nudity is everywhere in the art world, from fine art, to film, to the cynical “sex sells” moto of advertising.

But the problem with nudity in art is that, like most things in art, it is subjective. Sure, the viewer may simply be stood staring at a still life study of the artist’s spouse, but it is up to the viewer if the nudity is a metaphor for something; purity, innocence, divinity, beauty, debauchery, vulnerability, or any other descriptive noun.

Sometimes the meaning behind the nudity is more overt; it may be titillating, amusing, intimate, or even disturbing depending on the presentation. As I mentioned above, advertisers love to link sex to an inanimate object, like a car or a particularly fetching jumper, in order to sell those products.

Inevitably, we come to gaming, where I was surprised to find out that nudity and sex have been regular inclusions in gaming basically five minutes after a Pong machine was placed in a bar. These rudimentary games, such as the sexual assault orientated Custer’s Revenge, mostly used nudity in an exploitive way and were contained to seedy bars and sex shops.

Full Motion Video (FMV) games, combined with the arrival of the CD, revolutionised sex in video games because it used video footage in an interactive way. For example, Voyeur used real nudity as a, ahem, “narrative” tool; as a private eye, the player sees many NPCs in lingerie and engaging in sexual activities of varying degrees of taboo. Using sex as a narrative tool in FMV was a big draw to developers in the 1990s, shockingly, with Phantasmagoria, Night Trap, and Man Enough being the most notable, and some of the most sexist, examples.

After this, basically all FMV games can be considered misogynistic pornography (apart from Mortal Kombat, unless that’s your thing), and as much fun as it would be to explore the pornographic genre of gaming, I don’t want to risk going blind. Instead, I’m going to continue to examine the use of sex and nudity as a narrative tool in gaming, because then I can at least pretend I’m talking about art.

So, now we’re #WatchingItForThePlot, what sort of games include sex and nudity? Well, pretty much anything with a mature rating. Quantic Dream frequently use nudity in an exploration of their characters relationships, no matter how awkward. Wolfenstein: the New Order does something similar, using sex to demonstrate the intimacy between Blazkowicz and Anya in contrast to the dieselpunk fascist nightmare that surrounds them. These scenes are not that graphic, obscuring the really biological bits but serve to demonstrate the development of a relationship.

Many MMOs feature systems like in-game messaging that can be misused by players to engage in what is called emergent sex, but none have embraced and even encouraged it quite like Second Life. Furthermore, Second Life’s support for user created content and mods has allowed many players to fully customise their characters for a variety of activities, from mountain biking, to “wearable” sexual organs, to virtual equipment for BDSM and, as Brenda Brathwaite writes, “to fetishes not even possible in the real world”. In this there is a sense of safety, spontaneity, and mystery in these encounters, simulating real life without the social stigma of going to, say, a ladies night at a singles bar.

Mature content in gaming has become far more acceptable in general, with a real escalation of graphic violence but also graphic nudity. LA Noire unflinchingly features a lot of naked cadavers to help establish cause of death (even if most are women, which we will discuss momentarily). This is a good example of a mature rated game taking full advantage of its rating, placing itself alongside crime thrillers for a similar audience, like Seven or non-descript-Scandinavian-police-drama.

Rockstar, 2011

Other games seem to be content with continuing to use sex and nudity for shock value, cheap laughs, or generally just being creepy. Grand Theft Auto infamously features sex with prostitutes, which whilst not graphic (players only see the car moving around and hear the girls moaning) cause a real moral panic in the early 2000s. Later entries in the franchise also introduced strip clubs where players could pay for a private dance, as well as actual male or female dating partners, who, once wooed enough, would invite the player home for “coffee”.

In GTA: San Andreas, it was discovered that the “coffee” was due to be an actual controllable sex scene that was only half complete before it was cut, causing yet more controversy for the franchise and saw it briefly removed from sale in America. In contrast, God of War actually went ahead with controllable sex scenes, in which players could have sex in return for character upgrades.

Finally, I’ll talk about CD Projekt Red, because this developer has struggled with many accusations of sexism for years now. Starting with their most iconic and cherished franchise, The Witcher, which has received criticism for its use of sex as either a means to gain rewards or itself being a reward. Like GTA, players can pay to have sex with prostitutes – unlike GTA, however, sex will earn the player XP, but will gain more from prostitutes in wealthy areas than the women in the more downtrodden parts of the world.

CD Projekt Red, 2015 via the Nerdist

There are other issues with sex too; some NPCs simply handing themselves over to the player after saving them from a monster, and the ability to woe potential romantic partners in the original game was cheapened by the fact that each partner seduced unlocked a pornographic collectible. These elements have led many feminist game theorists, like Anita Sarkeesian, to accuse CDPR of creating a game where sex is a reward for good behaviour. Perpetuating ideas like this are really problematic in our current cultural climate as they are given legitimacy by the rise of internet misogyny and poisonous subcultures like the “incel” community.

CDPR’s latest project, Cyberpunk 2077, attempts to utilise nudity in a way that improves player immersion and to convey the brutality of the game world. Right at the beginning of the game, the player will see their avatar’s junk in the character creation menu. In the one piece of gameplay the public has seen, the player character will be rescuing a naked unconscious woman from a tech implant harvesting gang.

Her nudity is quite obviously to highlight her vulnerability, and the characters are clearly worried about her. There are no rewards linked to this poor, naked woman other than XP for saving her life. However, her breasts are placed right in the centre of the screen where the player can see them best, which could be construed as a reward by using the logic presented earlier.

When it comes to games, sex and nudity are difficult to get right. Context and authorial intent may be everything, but when presented poorly will cause you problems forever.