Why Computer Games Cannot Be Sexy

This weekend, Melbourne-based literary journal The Lifted Brow is celebrating the launch of its ‘Sex Issue’ with two big parties: one in Melbourne, and one in Sydney.

Tickets to each event come with a copy of the issue, which is packed with the sex-themed writing of names like Dan Savage, Benjamin Law, Krissy Kneed, Adam Curley and Astrid Lorange, as well as Junkee contributors Briohny Doyle, Amy Gray, Stephanie Van Schilt and Chad Parkhill.

To celebrate the issue and our deep and everlasting friendship, they allowed us to reprint one of the pieces you’ll find therein: an examination of sex in gaming by Shaun Prescott.

Everything in the issue is just as good as this; order it online now.

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The first time a woman took her clothes off for me I was about eight years old. My parents had purchased a second hand Commodore 64, and it came with a box of 5-inch floppy discs and dozens of tapes. Few of the discs were properly labelled, but one definitely was. It had the word ‘Smut’ written in capital letters in red pen on its label.

I didn’t know what ‘Smut’ meant, and when I asked my parents for an explanation they said they didn’t know either. They did warn that it was very important not to load that disc into the machine because it might ‘corrupt’ the computer.

Inevitably one day I did load up the Smut disc at the demand of a friend who I suspect knew what the word ‘Smut’ meant. It turned out the game on the disc was called Strip Poker.

Strip Poker is pretty self-explanatory, but it wasn’t when I was eight years old. You have to repeatedly defeat a woman opponent at poker so that she gradually removes all of her clothing. Eventually she is naked. I’ve since learnt on YouTube that it’s possible to see her breasts properly, but her vagina is tactfully folded away beneath one forward leaning leg. There is no option to make a male player strip. The woman was not a real woman, though she was quite lifelike for an 8-bit illustration. It could be said that Strip Poker had reasonably good graphics for an 8-bit era computer game, good enough that you felt like you were beholding an actual woman.

I wasn’t much into breasts when I was eight years old, but my friend was very excited by the game and especially 8-bit woman’s breasts. He loved breasts and he cheerfully admitted it, probably because he watched Baywatch with his Dad. Problem was, we weren’t good enough at the game for the 8-bit woman to properly reveal her breasts. We never ‘won’.

My friend was titillated by the game, but I was shaken by it. The knowledge that such a game could exist on the same entertainment platform that hosted Giana Sisters and Skate or Die was very eye-opening. It taught me more about the adult psyche than I was prepared to know at that age. It taught me that some people are very desperate to see naked women, to the extent that they would enjoy looking at a naked computerised woman. Looking back now, I can only wonder how I would feel about the game had I been a teenager or a man when I discovered it in a world without the internet. Because all things considered, for a sex game, Strip Poker was very tame indeed.

But was it sexy? Can games be sexy?

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Games don’t have a good track record when it comes to sex. Probably the best known depiction of sex in games is the Atari 2600 game Custer’s Revenge. It is not known for good reasons. It’s possible that Custer’s Revenge planted the seed for a seemingly permanent fear of the depiction of graphic sex in video games, and for good reason, because it’s a game about rape.

The player character is based on George Armstrong Custer, a General in America’s Indian Wars, which was the war that colonial Americans waged against the region’s indigenous population. The game tasks the player with navigating the Custer avatar towards an Indian woman on the far right hand side of the screen. Custer has an erection, and it is required that the player insert this erection inside the American Indian woman on the other side of the screen in order to ‘win’.

This is definitely more horrible than Strip Poker on every single level, and yet it shares one thing in common: early sex-oriented video games had a very questionable attitude towards sex, and especially towards women, and why is that?

It’s important to remember that in the ‘80s video games were not taken very seriously at all. It’s true that video games are not taken as seriously as they deserve to be now, but back then, they were largely ignored unless providing some fodder to outraged tabloids, which Custer’s Revenge duly did. The problem was that at that point in history, no one expected anyone to care about an especially horrible video game. But then they did, and there was outrage.

Custer’s Revenge was developed by a pornographic video game studio called Mystique Games. Another of Mystique’s games was entitled Beat Em and Eat Em. This game tasked the player with controlling a female avatar who was required to consume the semen of men masturbating from buildings above her. It was important that the men’s semen enter the avatar’s mouth and not simply splatter onto the ground, because that’s how you ‘won’ the game.

This game released on one of the first video game consoles ever and, while not officially endorsed by Atari, it was readily available. Mystique had a couple of other similarly-themed games, but what’s curious about them is how they interpret sex in general.

Imagine for a moment having sex. Now imagine sex, but gamified. What is the goal? You might assume the goal is for each person to please the other to the extent that both parties are sexually happy. Some would claim that ‘winning’ this game is complicated, because bringing someone to the point of orgasm might not be as simple as it seems. Some people might say that’s not even a requirement always. Yet if you were going to make sex a video game, then presumably this would be the goal, unless you considered one gender or partner less entitled than the other. Or unless you considered conceiving a child ‘winning at sex’.

The one game-oriented truth about sex is that it is usually game over when the male has reached a certain point. There is a definite fail-or-win state for both parties if the goal is orgasm, because if it’s over for the man then it’s over for everyone.

But getting off for a man, in these games, is the goal. Simply because it can be a ‘goal’, and hence ‘won’.

If you’ve ever watched a pornographic film this process may seem a lot simpler than it is in reality. In hetereosexual pornographic films the man is in charge and he has his way with the woman in many different variations, in a manner that appears effortless. Often pornography is an extended and dramatised depiction of the ‘winning’ aspects of sex: ecstatically screaming women, men bursting all over the place.

Similarly, in these early pornographic games, it is the man who is ostensibly in charge, and the ostensible novelty is in the way a man can bend a woman to his whims. So rather than simulating an exchange of orgasm, it is about the man finding novel ways to please himself, whether it be winning a naked body, pouring himself into another or, at the worst, having sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex.

What’s fascinating—and yes, ugly—about these early pornographic video games is that they seem to me like a kind of horrible folk art, or a telescope into the male species’ ugliest instincts. The video game was an emerging platform in the ‘80s with very limited technological power, and as a result the depiction of sex needed to be as simple as possible, and it needed, crucially, to be a game. But never did the woman ‘game’ the man: the man could only game the woman.

Men are at an advantage in the world of games because of the nature of their sex organ and the fact that it basically shoots—like a gun—and that’s consonant with many popular gameplay mechanics. Most modern blockbuster video games are all about shooting things or swiping things with long phallic swords or otherwise smiting foes with powerful pole-shaped objects. In games it’s always one party winning over another. It is important to have this binary because the impulse to win is often the driving force behind games, which is probably why sex games which strive to simulate this process are rarely or never successful.

It may be possible to simulate courting in video games, but the actual act of having sex? What are the parameters for victory there? None that are very sensible or fun.

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Then there’s Leisure Suit Larry – the point-and-click adventure about an ugly squat little man laying beautifully buxom women. Then there’s games like the Postal series which make a point of objectifying women because targeting political correctness is a form of humour that some people relish. Then there are Japanese ‘Eroge’ games, which often depict graphic sex — with one of the genre’s early proponents, Square, going on to create the Final Fantasy series.

Then there are modern games that try their hardest to address matters of sex and sexuality in as sensitive a manner as possible, such as RPG games like the Elder Scrolls or Mass Effect. These are tied to larger narratives though: the things you do inside the game on a regular basis—smite foes with magic and swords, shoot enemies—have no real bearing on these decorative narrative elements, and yet real efforts are made to accommodate sexuality of all inclinations, and tenderness is an emotion the studios strive for.

Crucially though, these modern and more sensitive titles never task the player with simulating sex – only with the process of getting it. With the rise of virtual reality hardware like the Oculus Rift though, this is definitely going to change. It didn’t take long after the Oculus Rift was successfully crowdfunded for numerous pornographic VR titles to surface with their own Kickstarter campaigns. Will these be games or simulations? They will be both and they will be everywhere, and many of them will be ridiculous. Sex games are going to have a renaissance soon and it isn’t going to be pretty.

Video games are trying really hard to be taken seriously now, and it’s a very noble pursuit, because it’s a warzone out there. Identity politics dominate a lot of game criticism and discourse, and rightly so: video games are a huge part of mainstream culture, and yet the medium still seems unable to portray these subjects sensitively and with the depth required.

My friend never got the 8-bit woman to strip entirely. Frame it this way: trying to leap over a fiery chasm in Giana Sisters and failing—repeatedly—is frustrating. Losing to an 8-bit buxom woman who you know will reveal her breasts if you play your cards right must be the most frustrating thing in the world. A young man’s opportunity to see a bare set of breasts and a little evidence of crotch hair was denied by his inability to play the cards right. The content is there, if only he could hack it. It’s important that he played the game correctly, but he never could. Imagine that frustration. You just cannot get off with video games. Not yet. Maybe never.

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The Lifted Brow Sex Issue Launches

Melbourne: Saturday March 1 @ Bella Union, with performances from Agent Cleave, Olympia Bukkakis and Lola Ramone, and a live reading by Sofija Stefanovic — $18-$20, book here (includes a copy of the mag)

Sydney: Sunday March 2 @ Alaska Projects, with Brendan Maclean and Total Bore – $12 tix on the door (includes a copy of the mag)

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Shaun Prescott edits Crawlspace Magazine and CVG Australia. He is working on a collection of short stories about a magical town in regional New South Wales. He keeps a blog at shaun-prescott.tumblr.com