I've been playing Mass Effect 2 lately and it really got me wondering, from a design perspective, how do you guys feel about sex in games?

The main that I've been thinking about:
How do you make it not feel like a "shock factor" gimmick?
I've only played 3 games which have included the ability to do the dirty of your own accord. Mass Effect 1/2, and Fable 2. Both of these had different approaches. Fable 2 pretty much let's you go at it with anyone... but there a concequences, STIs and babies. Personally, I think this approach was pretty decent, it enabled you to "play" the type of character you wanted. Whether it be loyal family-man or village slut. At the same time because it didn't encroach on the story line you weren't forced to do anything you didn't want to.

However, Mass Effect is slightly different. Now... I'm a nice guy and in most RPGs I tend to do the moraley right thing or say things to be a "nice" character when given the choice. What result did this get me in Mass Effect - sex with a blue alien. The whole scene made me feel uncomfortable and squirmish. I "just wanted to be friends" but my character had other plans and thus, I felt a sense of distancing myself from my character.

So those are my thoughts on just one side of things.
What other things must we consider when introducing this concept into a game and how can we deal with them?

The Witcher is all about getting some. It's a bunch of side quests to date the girls in the world. The main thing the dev team had to deal with was making the game deliverable within the confines of the various country censorship boards.

u dont like aliensex? i ecspecially like the red aliens :D

Hmmm

Grand Theft Auto and God Of War handled it like an action movie, will silly games attached to it.

Indigo Prophecy has sex in it, but the camera turns away and I think you just watch a lava lamp while the camera moves up and down in suggestive motions. It wasn't really like a gimmick in that game. I think the European version (Fahrenheit) may have handled it differently.

Tons of games have had sex in them. From Custer's Revenge, and other games from developer Mystique way back on the Atari 2600. The raunchy humor of the Leasure Suit Larry games. To full on pornography games. And outright disgusting stuff like RapeLay. Pretty much everything about sex has been presented in video games before. Look into games in general, and sex has been there in various ways sense the dawn of man...The cliched idea of the "goodly knight rescueing the fair maiden/princess" has its roots in role playing sex fantasies.

Daggerfall failed because you can't have sex with anyone. Fable 2 failed because you could.

I never actually played Fable 2, of course, but that is a pithy, memorable statement that anyone could take away whatever they wanted from.

Sex in videogames is mostly there because, face it, most gamers are still 16-24 year old males that like millions of boobs. Sex in games is portrayed as a victory state, and NPCs are played as things to conquer.

Although, really, that's true for all games, sex or no sex.

Nobody wants to play a game about teenagers awkwardly making love, or about someone like Jake Barnes. You know, sexually impotent and maybe disfigured because of some war injury. Of course, that'd have the potential for a lot of nuance, but I don't think gamers like nuance.

I probably liked nuance when I was younger but I don't really have an attention span anymore. I look to videogames as an opportunity to cap things with shotguns and whatnot. I'm not really sure it's an appropriate medium for a discussion on human sexuality.

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Original post by MeshGearFox Sex in videogames is mostly there because, face it, most gamers are still 16-24 year old males that like millions of boobs. Sex in games is portrayed as a victory state, and NPCs are played as things to conquer. Although, really, that's true for all games, sex or no sex.

 

And this is where I think the player should have more choice as to what they want to partake in. I am indeed male and fall into that age category, I feel that I'm being made to adhere to a stereotype that I am not.

Don't get me wrong, if it's done well it can be a good device for humour or empathy towards the character. But in my opinion, it hasn't been done well yet (in my experience)...
 

 

Thematically, I don't think games have really done anything all that well. Even violence, the mainstay of contemporary video games, is generally treated pretty poorly from a big-picture perspective. There just isn't that much substance to modern games.

Now, when it comes to sexuality in particular, I think we have a long way to go before we get games that handle the subject decently. The United States remains one of the dominant players in game production, and American culture is pretty stupid when it comes to sex. I still see people cringe in embarrassment when they walk past Victoria's Secret storefronts, as if women being sexually appealing was some kind of shameful secret that we shouldn't admit to in public. While that kind of attitude pervades the culture, we're not liable to see many games treat sex as more than an "lol boobies" kind of venture.

That said, I don't think we're without hope; traditionally, creative media have been one of the defining ways for advancing and shaping cultures, and in that regard games have a tremendous potential to contribute towards general attitudes and perspectives on subjects like sex. But I think that for now, games are more of a reflection of our existing biases than anything else, and that means we're stuck with "lol boobies" for a few more years. Pity.

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Original post by MeshGearFox Sex in videogames is mostly there because, face it, most gamers are still males.

Fixed.

Seriously, sex is more a part of our lives than shooting faces. It's dirty because the church says so. If there was sex in every game like there is sex in every goddamn movie and tv show, it wouldn't be such a taboo. If there's romance in the game, why can't there be sex also?

Because then it gets a higher age rating.