Sep. 10, 2008 - Issue #673: Sex in the City 2008
Infinite Lives - Where’s the romance?
Toss the topic of “sex in videogames” around in your head for a
while, and it’s tough to avoid the conclusion that, man, it’s a
pretty terrible landscape. Jokey adolescent tittering, crude girl-getting,
pneumatic cheesecake, testosteroidal beefcake, all refracted through a lens
of violence and stridently heterosexual power fantasy. Bleah;
“mature” content, right?
Romance, though ... almost from the beginning, games have been stuffed
start-screen to credit-crawl with tried-and-true storybook shit. Paragons
of chastity (princesses or girlfriends) kidnapped by inhuman monsters and
hidden away behind wave after wave of henchbeings, to be freed only after
many screens’ worth of righteous stabbing, punching and shooting.
What nerd of a certain age can ever forget the gripping opening sequence of
1987’s Double Dragon in which girlfriend Marian gets gut-punched by
thugs ... and in which we got our first, precious glimpse of digitized
panties as the lead thug threw her over his shoulder,
sack-o-potatoes-style? Classic!
Sappy storybook (especially in Japanese role-playing games) and dumb pulp fiction: dames in jeopardy, unrequited affection, yearning glances, desperate deathbed declarations of love as the universe gets sucked into some vortex or whatever ... this is human relationships in videogames. That is, if the love object is lucky enough to be actually alive; many’s the wife or girlfriend who’s had to give up the ghost in order to provide motivation to our hard-bitten heroes. Just once, I’d like to see a videogame character in a stable, mature relationship with a living, non-abducted, non-demonically-possessed significant other; is it possible that game designers might take a break from ripping off Aliens long enough to rip off Hart to Hart, instead?
Now, that’s just the narrative side of things, the storylines that
are supposed to turn the repetitive drudgery of gaming into
“interactive cinema.” It’s even worse when games try to
translate the subtleties of human hearts and hormones into playable
mechanics. Our friends the Japanese, those intrepid erotonauts of the Far
East, have long been innovators in this, pioneering the “dating
sim” genre, many elements of which have found their miserable way
into the mainstream. Available in a range of spiciness levels, from PG to
XXX to NO NO NO NO, dating sims involve (usually) a guy trying to (usually)
score with (usually) girls. They’re all about managing time and
budget, saying the right (or so very, very wrong) thing at the right time,
and generally wearing down your target’s defenses until victory is
yours and you claim your sexy prize.
To be fair, some of these games are pretty sophisticated, and some might
even make useful primers for the socially inept. But when this mechanism
gets grafted onto another game, whether its a happy E-rated farming game
(Harvest Moon) or a gangland fantasia (Grand Theft Auto), it’s always
boiled down to something exactly like video-game combat: choose the right
weapons and attacks and hammer your opponent until a certain number is high
enough and a certain other number is low enough, and ... A WINNER IS YOU.
This is the “puttin’ in the hours” model of success with
the ladies as popularized by ‘80s teen movies, a model more likely to
produce restraining orders than romance.
And as for attempts to bring the “physical act of love” into the bleep-blorp realm, well ... at their most sophisticated (ie, not counting the X-rated “shoot vaguely semenlike missiles at vaguely womanlike blobs” and “dodge arrows in order to rape the Indian maiden” games of yester-century), mainstream games that have dared to include (or almost-but-not quite include, in the case of Grand Theft Auto’s infamous “hot coffee” content) explicit or semi-explicit sex present it as nothing more or less than a game of Simon: do what you’re told, when you’re told to do it, or you’re fired. This is actually relatively accurate, but twiddling the thumbsticks so Kratos can get his rocks off with some slave girls and collect a couple Power Orbs (or whatever) before heading out to fight some medusas has as much to do with real sex as ...
... as playing Halo has to do with being in a real gun battle, I guess. Huh. What am I saying, that videogames ought to start portraying real people in real relationship situations, that when they include or allude to sex they ought to make sure the gameplay accurately simulates all the wonderful complexity of human psychology and physiology? How could that really work ... and how could it be fun? Honestly, if there are going to be videogame experiences approximating real-world sex, they’re not going to come through interfaces and algorithms, but through real people on the other side of the screen. That’s right; I’m talking about cyber-sex in multiplayer games, and ... sweet Jesus, I’ve never been so glad to be out of space. V
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