The great void between pornography and video games gets ever closer as time passes, back in the days of the Atari and other retro consoles, nudity in video games was none existent unless you used stick men for naked women.
Stick men representing naked women, as you can imagine, wouldn't have the same effect. Game developers hyped there game by trying to sell us the story, the gameplay and even the graphics, and it worked, but back then video games were not in the same league as the movie industry or other popular forms of entertainment, not by a long shot.
I remember my first encounter with sex in a video game, looking back at it now, it was like losing some form of digital virginity, if there is such a thing. It was in Baldur's Gate 2, one of BioWare's many masterpieces that whilst following the story it was easy to see where it was leading with my main character, while subtle, it was a clear indication of what was to come and that one day I would experience my first game-world relationship.
Was it enjoyable? Well that is the question here, as previously mentioned it was subtle, it didn't contain any of the lightly clothed ladies showing off more than likely their breasts that you'll find in other games, it was a simple progression in the story and added more than it subtracted so, yes, it was. But when you have love stories in games such as Gears of War, it certainly is not, let's be honest, people buy Gears of War to blow stuff up, kill countless hordes of aliens and generally deal an ass kicking to any and all who stand in there way, love stories and sex don't deserve a place in a game like this, does it? I remember coming to the point in the game where the love story starts and thinking to myself, you've got to be kidding me...
There have been many games that use nudity and sex to their advantage, The Witcher is a fine example, nowhere else have I seen such nudity in a none-pornographic based videogame, topless elves and dirty barmaids, what rounded it all off was the ability for players to find these women and rescue them from their digitalised sexual needs, a compelling gameplay element some may say. There is no doubting that The Witcher was a fine game, the story was involving and the gameplay was fun and engaging, but then was it because, as the main character, we got to go around having sex with all these women in a video game environment?
It's preferable then that all games should have some pornographic content for the mature audience, isn't it? Well surely a game wouldn't sell without it, can you imagine naked Sackboys and Marcus Fenix's strutting their bits and pieces all over our screen for everyone to see? Thankfully it doesn't work like that. Most of the hype that comes from one of these types of games is from the controversy, when a developer decides to whip up a storm among the media press about how their game has some sexual content which shouldn't be seen by anyone not mature enough.
Two fine examples were the sex scenes in Mass Effect, the media had a field day over BioWare's inclusion of such a scene, but when players actually got to see the scene in question and choose between Liara and Ashley they were disappointed because it didn't actually show anything apart from some legs, arms and heads. The other example is Rockstar's Hot Coffee incident which let you perform sex acts on a girlfriend and control all the positions, plus the recent batch of download content for Grand Theft Auto IV, titled; The Ballad of Gay Tony, this game included what is sure to be the first naked male in a high profile video game, again, the controversy hit the media and people were left wondering what place this sort of content had in the video game industry, do we really want to see this pixelated male nudity in our games...
Then overall should we all come to the conclusion that this is our own fault, the media hype the controversy, in-turn spreading the word about the game, people see it, hear it, and read it and thus in turn creates more sales for the developer and publisher. So the question must be asked, is this a bad thing? So if it means due to our own negligence that we see equal amounts of male and female nudity in the future, the question to be asked is, is it a bad thing?
