Sex Games Should Make You Feel Sexy...Right?

Brenda Brathwaite's talk this morning was a shot of espresso to start off the conference. She's a relaxed, funny speaker who isn't afraid to take a tangent or a stand. She began with an overview of the important moments of the year, both good and bad: Hot Coffee (today, she noted, is the one-year-anniversary of the controversy), legislation, the GLBT WoW Incident; on the positive side, the formation of the IGDA Sex SIG and the growth of MMOEGs (that's Massively Multiplayer Online Erotic Games of course.)

There's a lot more to the talk and I'll be interviewing her later, but after the hour I was left wondering something. The game industry has tried so hard to insist that violent videogames do no make people feel violent; how do we reconcile that message with trying to make sex games that make people feel sexy?

The reason that violent videogames don't make me necessarily feel violent is because shooting enemies becomes merely a game mechanic after a while, not unlike pushing crates or whacking a mole on the head or fitting the right block into a stacked pattern; so how do we prevent sex from being merely an empty mechanic?

This goes back to the much broader question of how we can make people feel with games the way we can with films and books. But as those media have taught us, simply having a sex scene is not enough - it must be a good, compelling sex scene. Most Hollywood sex is pretty unerotic to me; to be truly hot, there has to be something - special, I'm not sure how to define it.

Hmm, I'm going to have to think about truly hot moments in film history for a moment, and for that I think I'm going to need some coffee. More later.

Comments

[Troy]

After about ten minutes of typing, I realized that I was inappropriately bloating your comments section with my opinions, so I thought I'd just post my thoughts up on my blog and point you there. Basically, I don't think we'll find our emotions in the game mechanics themselves, but rather in what comes before and after those mechanics.

[Girl_from_Mars]

i dont know about anyone else, but i think that game that is well done, does make you feel.

remember when Aris died? I sure do. A stray tear may have gotten away from my eye.

You know when you beat that last boss, and triumph over evil? I sure feel that.

I think too, that arousal is a different kind of emotion from violence. I think it's a universal... emotion vs. violence

[ScottMan]

Spontaneity is key here, I think. And that's something that can't be coded, unless it's taking a bunch of random variables, which can result in more humor than eroticism -- "The tentacle rabbit puckers his lips and spanks your nose" and so forth.

At the same time though, it's true that if it's well done, it will bring out that emotion. I can go back to Planetfall and still get choked up over Floyd's death scene.

So it's only obvious. Hire porn directors to script your sex games.

[Mark]

Good games are like good sex. They both have to balance the build up of tension and the final release of tension. Some of the hottest scenes in movies for me are rarely the full frontal sex scenes. Rather, the build up of sexual tension and delay of release is more effective at being sexy. I think the focus should be on sexuality in games rather than just sex passively depicted or integrated interactively into what will only achieve minigame status. I think a good example is the relationship between Boss and Snake in MGS3. The sexual tension between the those two characters is electric. And I don't think their sexual history was ever explicitly stated in the game's narative although Kojima later stated in an interview that Boss and Snake had been lovers. Kojima wanted to focus more on the maternal/nurturing role Boss had in Snake's life though. It was this understated sexual tension that made the otherwise technically awkward and frustrating final battle between Boss and Snake one of the most emotional gaming experiences I've ever had.
As far as video games as interactive simulated sex, I'm not sure how you would integrate a game mechanic like that into a larger narrative driven game. The threesome minigame in God of War was not hot and seemed more of a novelty easter egg. I can see a place for interactive sex games as stand alone software though. But this would be nothing new. I remember finding "Mac Playmate" on a floppy disc in my dad's desk back in the mid 1980's. But these titles would seem to be exclusively for either "personal use" or educational purposes. "Fellatio for Dummies" on Wii?

[kuwang]

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