Updated 23 May, 2012, 6:39 pm IST

Sex and the Videogame!

29 Mar, 2010, 9:58 am IST | by Avinash Bali

Can you handle sex in your video games?

Sex. It’s a natural phenomenon that pretty much everyone on the planet enjoys still the mere mention of the word sends shudders through some conventional (and not to mention hypocritical) people. So you can pretty much imagine how those people the world over react when developers shove sexual content into their games. Remember the San Andreas Hot Coffee debacle that got blown way out of proportion? Or the Mass Effect incident where an entire news channel (Fox) proved their ignorance on national television by comparing Mass Effect to full-blown pornography?

What a lot of these people conveniently forget is that these games have been made specifically for adults hence the M rating (which if you didn’t know means Mature Audiences). Hey if your kid’s beating off to some alien waka waka wao on the down low it’s not our fault. You as a parent should exercise stricter control over your kid so we don’t suffer in the long run.

What irks me the most is that there’s this sect of people out there who feel the need to mollycoddle us adults telling us what’s right or what’s wrong. Who the f**k died and made you my parents? Thanks but no thanks. If I can pay taxes I can very well decide what’s suitable for my eyes and if that involves Jack Shepard getting a little alien nookie, so be it.

In that respect I really admire BioWare for not shying away from this topic and inserting it in all their latest games from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 to Dragon Age Origins. And it’s not done in a crass way mind you because BioWare is well known for characters you can connect with so when you do consummate with them, it's more emotional than carnal. Even games like BMX XXX, POSTAL etc. may be a bit crass but it’s nothing you wouldn’t enjoy after a few beers. Its stuff like Rape Simulators that really push the envelope in a horrific way.

A few years ago a Japanese game called Rapelay sent shockwaves across the industry when it surfaced on Amazon.com in which you graphically rape a mother and her daughter from a first person perspective. At this point I don’t know who the sicker f**k is; the guys who came up with the game or the guys playing it. It’s this kind of sick sh*t that gives the entire industry a bad name.

Morbid games aside my point is that video games today have evolved to so much more than just “kill an X amount of Nazis/demons/zombies”. In some cases it’s a mirror image of real life packed so unless you shy away from sex in real life I see no reason to throw a hissy fit if it’s in your video game.

Today we take stuff like shooting people in the face for granted. I mean how many of you actually thought about not killing innocent pedestrians in an open world game? If you think about it isn’t taking a life a far more heinous crime than consummating with someone? Think about that the next time you feel the need to boo a game for wearing its sexual content proudly on its sleeve.