Sex and nudity in video games

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The inclusion of sex and nudity in video games has been controversial since the early days of the video game industry. While many video games have used scantily clad images or characters to sell or enhance games, some go further, using sex acts or nudity as a character motivation (that is, the reason for a character's behaviors and actions), in-game reward, or simply as a gameplay element. These games originate worldwide, on most platforms and can be of any video game genre. While releases in Europe and North America have been sporadic and often unlicensed, Japan has seen the emergence of a pornographic video game subgenre—eroge, first appearing on the NEC PC-88 computer platform in the 1980s. In the 1990s NEC (on the PC Engine series and PC-FX) and Sega (on Saturn) were the only companies who officially allowed sexual content on their consoles in Japan, but eroge was more prevalent on the NEC PC-98 and FM Towns computer platforms.

History[]

1980s[]

One of the earliest video games (if not the first) to feature sexual themes was the 1981 text-based Softporn Adventure, published by On-Line Systems for the Apple II. Despite heavy piracy the game still sold 25,000 copies, roughly equivalent to 25% of the number of Apple II's sold at the time. In a 1981 article in Time Magazine, On-Line reported that they were making a version of the game for straight women, though this never materialized.^[1]

In 1982, the video game company Mystique released three unlicensed games for the Atari 2600; Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em, Custer's Revenge, and Bachelor Party. The games were noted for their negative reception, particularly Custer's Revenge for its depiction of (what was perceived as) General Custer raping a Native American woman. Despite the increased sales (due to one of the first instances of video game controversy), Mystique went out of business after only releasing these three games. A company named Playaround began distributing these games packaged in 2-in-1 "double-ender" cartridges. These games also included re-worked versions with female protagonists, Philly Flasher (Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em), Bachelorette Party (Bachelor Party), and General Retreat (Custer's Revenge). The re-released version of Custer's Revenge was titled Westward Ho!, and featured slight modifications, such as the Native American woman beckoning to indicate that she welcomed Custer's advances. They released four new titles, Burning Desire/Jungle Fever and Cathouse Blues/Gigolo. 1983 saw the release of another Atari 2600 game, X-Man. X-man features the player as a nude man working through a maze toward a pink door in the center, past antagonistic crabs, teeth and scissors. Players that reached the pink door were rewarded with a controllable sex scene.

In 1983, a company called Entertainment Enterprises, Ltd., released an arcade game called Swinging Singles which was mostly meant for bars, adult stores and sex clubs. The game requires the player to drive through the city maze gathering dots like Pac-Man before reaching a brothel where the player is required to fight off a venereal disease and collect keys to unlock sex scenes. Once the scenes are unlocked the top door is open where the player can go and engage in a controllable sex scene, letting the player have intercourse with a woman until the player reaches orgasm and the game is over.

Also released in 1983 was Strip Poker: A Sizzling Game of Chance for the Commodore 64 and other 8-bit platforms which was created by Artworx Software.^[2]

In 1986, Martech released a Strip Poker game featuring digitized pictures of Samantha Fox, on the Spectrum, C64 and Amstrad. The same company would later release the controversial Vixen, featuring another page 3 model Corinne Russell.

Also in 1986 On-line Systems (now called Sierra On-Line) asked game designer Al Lowe to create an adult game in the graphical adventure style made popular by their King's Quest series. Lowe took the basic elements of Softporn Adventure, greatly expanded it, and released it as the 1987 game Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. Sierra didn't advertise the game and retailers were loath to carry it, so initial sales were low. However word-of-mouth spread and soon the Leisure Suit Larry series was a success, spawning two sequels before the end of the decade, 1988's Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), and 1989's Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals.

1990s[]

With CD-ROM and multimedia based games in the 1990s, most adult games featured video clips with limited interactivity. Both pre-rendered and real-time 3D graphics were also used. While most games could be considered nothing more than pornography, some attempted to include actual story and plot. This can be seen in some games with less explicit content, equal to an R- or PG-13-rated movie.

1990 saw the release of the first game in the Gals Panic series. The game derived gameplay elements off an older title called Qix, which didn't have sexual images. The object of the games is to slowly remove pieces of the playing field while avoiding an enemy or groups of enemies. Removing the playing field slowly reveals pictures of models in escalating states of undress. The game had nine sequels throughout the 1990s (with a final game in 2002).

Voyeur by Philips came out in 1993 for their CD-i console. While the game does not show any explicit nudity, it allows the player to spy on several characters in lingerie, foreplay, and explores taboos such as BDSM and incest.

2000s[]

This section needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (October 2017)

Modern console publishers often have policies against depictions of nudity and explicit sexuality, particularly Sony Computer Entertainment with its PlayStation brand of consoles. BMX XXX for the PlayStation 2 was censored in the American release, while versions on the Xbox and Nintendo GameCube were not and featured nudity.^[3] However, Sony allowed nudity in the title God of War (2005), also developed by Sony, a game based on Greek mythology set in Ancient Greece, where nudity was perceived differently. Nudity was subsequently featured in the game's sequels, God of War II (2007), God of War: Chains of Olympus (2008), God of War III (2010), God of War: Ghost of Sparta (2010), and God of War: Ascension (2013), which were also based on Greek mythology. The full motion video quiz game The Guy Game (2004) gained notoriety for its use of an underage model. The scenes in question led to a lawsuit by a woman who explained that she was only seventeen years old when the footage was taken, thus classifying it as child pornography which is illegal to own or sell in some countries.^[4][5]

Sex scenes and nudity have also appeared in Quantic Dream's Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy) and Heavy Rain, released for the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 respectively.^[6]

Sexuality and sexual frustration is also a theme prevalent in the Silent Hill series of survival-horror games.

A new generation of adult social games has emerged that bring multiple users together in sexual environments. Examples include Red Light Center, Singles: Flirt Up Your Life and Playboy: The Mansion. While it is not explicitly intended for purely adult-oriented entertainment, the virtual world of Second Life, which is made up almost entirely of player-made content, has an array of very exotic adult entertainment including nudity and full-on sexual activities.

Adult games may take the form of bootlegs, circumventing mainstream publishers who may have policies against such games. Patches or hacks to mainstream non-adult games may add sexual and pornographic themes, mostly for humor, especially when sexuality was never intended in the original game. Examples include the Tomb Raider video games, the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Hot Coffee mod, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, (which both have multiple such mods), Half-Life 2's FakeFactory Cinematic Mod and ROM hacks for console emulators.

The Internet has allowed adult games to receive wider availability and recognition, including amateur games in Flash or Java. It has also allowed amateurs to create and distribute adult text adventure games, known as "Adult Interactive Fiction" or AIF.^[7]

Modern consumer virtual reality headsets, such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, allow users to engage in virtual sex through simulated environments. An example is VR Kanojo.

2010s[]

Blizzard Entertainment's 2016 game Overwatch has inspired a notable amount of fan-made porn. Short porn videos featuring official characters have been animated via Source Filmmaker and are popular on porn sites such as Pornhub and YouPorn. Despite its popularity, Blizzard has issued cease-and-desist orders to some of the creators.

Indie games have expanded the reach of adult games, and Steam now allows adult games onto its storefront.^[8] Patreon provides direct funding to adult developers, allowing games like Hardcoded to appeal to niche markets that previously would not have been created.^[9]

Eroge[]

Eroge often feature anime and manga-style graphics.

In 1982, Japan's Koei, founded by husband-and-wife team Yoichi and Keiko Erikawa (and later known for strategy video games), released the first erotic computer game with sexually explicit graphics, Night Life,^[10] an early graphic adventure game^[11] for the NEC PC-8801. That same year, Koei released another erotic title, Danchi Tsuma no Yuwaku (Seduction of the Condominium Wife),^[12] which was an early role-playing^[13][14] adventure game with colour graphics, owing to the eight-color palette of the NEC PC-8001 computer. It became a hit, helping Koei become a major software company.^[12]

In another opinion, Yuji Horii recalled in 1986 that he saw a demonstration of a Yakyūken-like game running on the FM-8 in the end of 1981, and he considered Yakyūken was the origin of adult games.^[15] Some writers say that Yakyūken (1981) produced for Sharp MZ computers by Hudson Soft is the first Japanese adult game.^[16][17]

Like with Koei, several other now-famous Japanese companies such as Enix, Square and Nihon Falcom also released erotic adult games for the PC-8801 computer in the early 1980s before they became mainstream. Early eroge usually had simplistic stories and extreme sexual content, such as rape and lolicon.^{[citation needed]} In some of the early erotic games, the erotic content is meaningfully integrated into a thoughtful and mature storyline, though others often used it as simply an excuse for pornography.^[10]

In 1999, Key released Kanon. It contains about 7 brief erotic scenes in a sentimental story the size of a long novel (an all-ages version was also released afterward). Kanon sold over 300,000 copies.^[18]

In response to increasing pressure from Japanese lobby groups, in mid-1996 Sega of Japan announced that they would no longer permit Sega Saturn games to include nudity.^[19]

Many fanservice video games with sexual content have some brief nudity. The "M" rated series Senran Kagura has some nudity in both gameplay and cutscenes but genitals aren't displayed. Fanservice games rated "T" such as Hyperdimension Neptunia offer similar content but less than what Senran Kagura has. However, since 2018, Sony has now issued new regulations for PlayStation 4 games with both fanservice and sexual content. For the localized release of Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal, "Intimacy Mode", a mode where the player can play with the characters' bodies was removed, but by comparison, this mode is still available in the series' previous titles Senran Kagura: Estival Versus and Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash. The PC release of Burst Re:Newal was not changed.^[20] Many other recent PS4 games with sexual content are facing the same problem from Sony, including Neptunia, Date a Live: Rio Reincarnation, Death end re;Quest and the Nekopara series, although Sony did allow nudity and a sex scene in The Last of Us Part II. This controversy had become a problem for the development of , in which publishers Marvelous are now reconsidering the game^[21] and series producer Kenichiro Takaki is now leaving Marvelous.^[22]

Lists of related games[]

• List of erotic video games
• List of regionally censored video games
• List of Japanese erotic video games
• List of AO-rated video games (the ESRB's "Adults Only" rating)
• List of controversial video games
• List of banned video games

See also[]

• Overwatch and pornography
• Cybersex
• Eroge
• Hentai
• Virtual sex
• Uncanny valley
• Criticism of Second Life
• Gender representation in video games
• BDSM in culture and media
• Sexism in video gaming

References[]