Scenes from GDC

Entry #2, 12:35 p.m.: Sex, Sex, Sex

Brenda Brathwaite is working on a book about sex in games. It's basically a survey of everything from Custer's Revenge to Hot Coffee, and she's even considering more thoughtful subjects like the way relationships and intimacy are addressed in games. Not that they really are, at least outside of The Sims and cheap knockoffs like Singles. But credit Brathwaite for casting her net beyond the merely salacious. In her talk at GDC, she even makes a case that Zoo Tycoon, in which happy animals breed, is arguably about sex. But no one's here to hear about the happy faces on a panda's status chart.

So Brathwaite seems inclined to amuse more than anything else. The way she sort of nudges and winks is a mild pandering delivered to an appropriately titillated audience. Not that I'm on any moral high ground. I'm here instead of at a talk on something loftier, like violence. I'd like to think it's because I'm socially conscientious, but the agenda did promise graphic content.

It turns out to be just slides from stupid fare like Virtually Jenna and a few hentai games. Brathwaite makes an excellent point that this is almost entirely straight white men making things for other straight white men (her slide of games that deliver sexual content aimed at women is blank). But the whole thing is a bit shameless. She gives Clinton and Liberman a hard time. She brings up parallels to the comics code in the 50s and the Hayes code in Hollywood in the 30s. She even seems to hint that here might be a market for more beefcake in games, as if a little something for the ladies might make this industry less about toys for boys.

After all, there isn't any sex in games in any meaningful way. There's plenty of crude and cheesecake. There's lots of pornography that pretends towards gameplay. There are strange asides like Hot Coffee. Brathwaite reminds us of the activist who paid a programmer at Maxis to sneak gay Easter Eggs into SimCopter. She brings up the Trance Vibrator for Rez and even lets someone demonstrate how he reverse engineered force feedback from an Xbox to work on a rubber phallus. I'm not sure I can use the word that it's called, but we all know what I'm talking about, right? But at this point, there's virtually no opportunity to include sex in games in the way that it's included in, say, a movie like Last Tango in Paris or a book like Lady Chatterley's Lover.

It's not until the Q&A that I appreciate Brathwaite real stand on the issue. I ask her about whether she feels the industry has any responsibility when it comes to sex in games. After nearly an hour of good-natured winking, she gets abruptly forceful and passionate. "Yes, yes it does," she says, "The responsibility falls in three laps." She mentions ratings ("We need to be very clear about what's in the box"), retailers, and parents. "I think parents is where most of the responsibility lies," she says, "I hear so many parents say they don't know much about games, about the things their kids are playing. Well, learn, dammit!" But as for developers, she thinks they've done as much as they're supposed to do and it's time for retailers, ratings, and parents to take it from there. "We have met our responsibility," she says firmly.