A History of Sex & Games

Despite a trail of poorly-designed sex games interspersed with occasional greatness and the ever-present shroud of censorship, the current landscape of sex in gaming is as bountiful as it is bizarre. Riding on the back of online distribution and growing public interest we’re faced with an increasingly broad selection of sex-themed games.

At the bottom of the innovation barrel are the no-brainer titles that shove sex (and little else) in a box and throw it out the shelves. Games like 3D Sexvilla by ThriXXX Software – a modernised version of MacPlaymate – allow the player to set up and animate slippery scenes of pixel penetration. Viewed as interactive pornography, 3D Sexvilla is reasonably arousing, but the problem stems from ThriXXX touting it as a computer game, when it’s clearly anything but. Risk and reward, something at the heart of any game, is non-existent here. You can’t lose, no matter how inept you are at simulated foreplay. The women don’t give up on you, get dressed and leave and the blokes maintain their erection no matter how little you stimulate them.

Mash your PS2 controller the right way in God of War 2 and these lovely ladies will reward your orbs – or something to that effect.

Further up the evolutionary ladder are titles injecting sex into established genres. This is where territory gets dangerous but potentially rewarding. God of War, and more recently God of War 2 for the PlayStation 2, pulls this trick off with ease, presenting sexual content and NPC nudity without feeling like it was arbitrarily tacked on. As a player, you’re well aware the game would be a madly fun hack’n’slash affair with or without bare-breasted women, but their inclusion adds weight to the hedonistic atmosphere of a game soaked in Greek mythology.

No justice would be done without paying out on uglier attempts to include sex in an established game format, and there’s no shortage of them. BMX XXX, a cross-platform console game developed by Z-Axis and released by Acclaim, is all about strippers riding dirt bikes. Seriously, that’s the entire premise. It does naked women and the BMX sport no favors, being a sub-par game with nudity a weak hook.

The real excitement, however, lies not in titles built from the ground-up to include sexuality, but those featuring ‘emergent sex’. Emergent sex occurs when players develop sexual relationships and behaviours inside a game environment – typically online – that was never explicitly designed for it.

It’s not new – emergent sex been happening since users first went adventuring via MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) back in the 1970s, but the explosion of graphically rich and impressively interactive MMO titles has proved fertile soil for emergent sex. While someone can happily level their Troll Priest to 70 in World of Warcraft completely bypassing any sort of sex play, they can make use of built-in emotes like ‘/dance’ and ‘/flirt’ with other players to make sexual advances. From there, players can engage in cyber sex via chat or enacting scenes with their avatars, finally taking the relationship onto VoIP software and eventually the real world.

The ridiculously popular persistent online world Second Life is a grand example of emergent sex. Unlike the more rigid confines of standard MMO games, Second Life not only allows freeform communication, but freeform creation. Users can create anything they want inside the environment, like houses, cars and even body parts. You can see where this is headed. People have been madly designing dildos, bondage equipment and orgasm animations for use within Second Life. Residents have even built brothels where players can work as hookers, paid in Second Life currency to service the whims of others. All this serves as concrete proof that people want sex in games, even if they have to make it themselves.

Second Life is all about freeform expression, with freaky low-poly nude people.

Sexual expression in online worlds is a sliding scale, however, and while there’s fun to be had there’s a tangible dark side. Give people the tools and freedom to act out fantasies in a virtual world, and concepts like rape and underage sex crop up. Second Life players have constructed private clubs with names like ‘Jailbait’ where users can play out fantasies with facsimiles of children, while other multiplayer online worlds like Sociolotron accommodate rape and forced prostitution in a player versus player setting from the moment you sign up. Moral questions about how we deal with virtual rape or pedophilia begin to surface and mental harm via online sexual assault becomes a bona fide risk. Custer’s Revenge seems a universe away.

Humans aren’t even content leaving sex and gaming behind the screen. The relatively new field of ‘Teledildonics’ focuses on mixing sex toys with configurable software like computer games, allowing interactive entertainment with actual physical stimulation.