So,  epic rant at  this article. Not about IT though, about the stupid things it reminds me of. Seriously guys (as a collective term) , from the perspective of a girl/semigamer/whatever, please consider this rant.

So, the article begins with saying that gamers are afraid of sex, but I doubt it’s the gamers themselves. If anything, they want more of it in their games. Scantily clad women are EVERYWHERE in games targeted at an older audience. Developers and work teams who have put time/effort/money into their games will not want it pulled from the shelf, reguardless of content. There ARE guidelines they have to follow, infact.

If I had put hard work into making a (non-independant) game, I’d want it released. I wouldn’t want to have to put up with re-calling it after my team had planned a celebration party in honour of our own damn awesomeness.

Why would they spend time developing something that would get pulled? (we’ll talk about hotcoffee later). I’m not saying that sex scenes/references shouldn’t be apart of gaming because of the filter, but if a game can be just awesome without it, what’s the point? Won’t it be better for the game if it can reach a larger percentage of the gaming population?

Phantasmagoria was banned because of a brief full-motion video scene containing simulated sex between a husband and wife. Tame by movie and TV standards – and crucial to the plot – it was enough to doom the adult horror game, which contained other scenes of gore and decapitation (no problem under the classification guidelines).

That’s a really awesome argument right there. The guidelines favour releasing gore over sex. This IS stupid, but so is everyone in existance.*  The guidelines ARE very one-sided, but so are the mainstream articles on gaming (except for the Wii, it seems). The ratio of positive articles linked to gaming in the media (opposed to negative or neutural) have currently been counted as 1: infinity.**  The gaming industry believes it can’t risk another outbreak towards its own defeat to make a few sex-deprived gamers give the thumbs-up. The media feeds off the tears of gamers. *Excluding Stephen Hawking and maybe Ben.**Yes, this IS an official count. No, you can not have evidence.

Everyone has heard a negative article about gaming, and the thing is, quite a few of these events are horrific/cracked out, but VERY FEW of them actually immediately relate to gaming, and there are even fewer in which gaming is the catalyst. People are just too stupid/closed minded towards the rest of the world. The writer magnificently states that here :

“And after the public controversy started, why did no civil libertarians and cultural critics – like those who rush to defend explicit sex in arty French movies and child nudity in Bill Henson photography – come to the defense of animated sex in a video game?”

(on ‘Hotcoffee’ mode in GTA4)

Totally valid point. My guess is that the people that the fanatical people that argue about this kind of thing to a certain point are the kind of people that consider to ‘woohoo’ in the Sims 2 as TOO GRAPHIC. Or, you could look at it this way.

So anyway, on to talking about sex in videogames…

No, screw that *ba-doom-tish*

Let’s talk about our sexxed up modern day world, (because I have a habit of writing my whole rant in what I plan to be the introduction. That, my friends, is the beauty of a rant).

As the article says (a few times) there is sex in every aspect of our lives. On t.v., in music, movies, books, magazines, every other medium we could think of.  The world gets more promiscuous and nothing is sacred any more. Is there enough of it everywhere else, or do we really need to bring more sex into videogames? Then again, why shouldn’t we?

Times are a changin’ Much love and many words about something, Cinnah.

Tags: Censorship, CensorSHIT, Epic Rage, Rant, Sex, The Media, Videogames