If somebody asked you to name or think of a list of ‘mature’ videogames, which games would spring to mind? Personally I would respond with Fahrenheit, Bioshock and the GTA series. I asked a few friends and colleagues of mine who also added to this list Portal, Age of Empires, Postal, Fable, The Sims and Age of Conan (thank you TonyNBS, John and YoMma).
I think anyone familiar with these games will agree that they are mature. All have an adult storyline, do not rely on cute graphics or appear ‘childish’ from the off (though that is not to say that a cute looking game cannot be adult-orientated – see Disgaea – Or amazing - see Kingdom Hearts, Jet Set Radio or Pokemon) and all have the capacity to depict extreme violence in a way rarely seen in other mediums.
Even the two most innocuous games listed above are, once thought about, extremely violent. Portal, an FPS puzzle game with no weaponry, has a storyline revolving around insanity, captivity and murder. Even The Sims allows players to kill and torture their avatars if they so desire (though this probably says more about the player than the game).
The aforementioned games also have one more key similarity. It is this theme that I wish to discuss further today. When I asked my motley crew, and indeed anyone I have asked since, for their mature games candidates one game was mentioned by every single participant without fail.
That game is Leisure Suit Larry.
I’ll save you the history lesson but in a nutshell the Leisure Suit Larry games went from a fresh, risque, never-before-seen take on the adventure/puzzle genre to an agonisingly terrible parody of itself. You play as the titular Larry, a loser/wannabe PUA who tries to desperately sleep with any female with a pulse, which is not helped by the fact that later games cast you as the bastard son of Hugh Hefner and Jimmy Neutron. The fact this game, above all others, stands out to almost all gamers I’ve asked as the most mature game our beloved past-time has to offer is, quite frankly, petrifying!
LSL also goes a long way to illustrate my point. Though ‘mature’ games have exceeded other art-forms in terms of their depictions of violence, gaming’s attitude towards sex remains almost Dickensian!
Every game I can think of that depicts sex, nudity, or erotic/adult behaviour of any kind is at best coy and at worst pre-pubescent titillation. For example: -
- Duke Nukem - a fully clothed stripper and a few jokes. Real Mature.
- Fahrenheit – Though there were sex scenes, nothing was actually seen and the weird control scheme used in the game made it feel rather robotic and entirely un-sexy.
- Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Squad - Throw in a lolicon inspired sidekick and no apparent reason for the heroine wearing a bikini and you have one of the most naive games ever made. Gamers are boys who like to kill zombies and stare at chicks. How could it fail?
- DoA Series - Once again, no particular reason other than bouncy boobs look funny.
- Fable - Should get an honourable mention as you could choose to have sex, get married or be gay, but fails in that women couldn’t be gay, same-sex marriages couldn’t go ahead and the sex scene faded to black.
- Custer’s Revenge – An 80s rape simulator. Luckily, graphics weren’t good enough to depict anything other than blocks back then. How did this even get released?
- Tomb Raider Series – Lara Croft, gaming’s ultimate sex symbol. Scantily clad and an ever expanding cleavage
- BMX XXX – Not a terrible game apparently, and one of hundreds of extreme sports titles released during the Tony Hawk boom of the late 90s, but why the (partial) nudity?
- Mass Effect – This game shouldn’t be on the list. One of the best action RPGs ever made was dubbed a ‘porn simulator’ by some igorant hacks for a 40 second sex scene. With an alien. After 30 hours of robotic murder.
Even the GTA series, the grandaddy of videogames controversy, doesn’t exactly break down barriers in it’s depiction of sex. Yes you can pick up a hooker, but it’s about as sexy as Jack Thompson’s haircut. You don’t see anything. Even the strippers have enormous ‘X’s over their nipples. It would also be ignorant of me to not mention the infamous ‘Hot Coffee’ mod from GTA – San Andreas, where a hack meant you could open a mini-game that allowed you to have sex with your in-game girlfriend.
Yes, you read that correctly, a hack.
Rockstar made it, then decided they didn’t want you to play it.
IT WAS NOT AVAILABLE IN THE ORIGINAL GAME UNLESS YOU CHANGED PART OF THE GAME’S CODE.
You had to want to see it, to actually see it.
Now I’m not saying I need sex in a game. I don’t think GTA IV would have been a better game if you saw full-on sex as opposed to the neutered scenes included in the game. It just seems odd to me that uncensored, graphic violence is fine but nudity isn’t.
There are of course many factors. One of the main reasons is that Walmart, the biggest games vendor in the world, won’t put anything nude on their shelves, or more specifically, it will not stock anything that has the dreaded Adults Only rating from the ESRB. Strangely enough, no amount of violence has ever gained a game this rating, but sex has every time. Also, when the NES was released, Nintendo stated that they would not allow any videogames depicting sexually explicit content or their console, and since then every future console has just stuck to the same principal.
Videogames are an art-form in their infancy, and they must bridge this gap if they are ever to be taken seriously. Slowly, avenues that will allow for this kind of exploration are opening up. Though not exactly mature, the recent DLC for GTA IV (The Lost and Damned), had a full frontal male nudity shot (the inspiration for this article and it’s title). After the initial shock (a reaction I shouldn’t have had) I thought to myself, ‘there is no way that scene would have shipped with the boxed copy of this game’. Games developers can, with DLC, bypass the scrutiny of larger games vendors and get the content gamers want to see directly into their living rooms. Whether this is for the best I couldn’t say.
Now I’m not saying I want to see any Sonic Porn (the furries have that covered). Nor am I saying I need to see Master Chief naked (though it would make videos like these even more amusing).If gaming ever wants to be taken seriously as an art-form though it needs to grow up, remove it’s head from the sand, and learn how to cope with the birds and the bees.
- Mikey Base
