It has been a long, long time since I played Leisure Suit Larry. I don’t remember either. Remember that Roberta Williams was on the original cover?
She’s the one on the right.
Based on this walkthrough, though, one of the first things Larry does is have sex with a hooker, so, I dunno about “stopped objectifying women” as part of Leisure Suit Larry.
If I remember correctly (and I can’t believe I remember any of this since it has been over 20 years), if you had sex with the prostitute, you died. Then there was something about a condom and then Larry decided that losing his virginity to a hooker (he is supposed to be like 40 in the game) wasn’t a good idea, sneaks out the window and Larry remains a virgin I believe throughout the game (though I may be wrong here, in later games he does have sex).
The rejection theme though wasn’t very strong in the early games. It wasn’t until the last couple games that they were really pushing it hard.
Well, again, referring to the walkthrough I linked – it’s right there, he does the deed with the hooker. I remember the censored sign over the action even to this day. What can I say, I was a teenager?
I think you might be remembering sans condom.
Well, again, referring to the walkthrough I linked – it’s right
there, he does the deed with the hooker. I remember the censored sign
over the action even to this day. What can I say, I was a teenager?
I just watched a walkthrough of LSL 1 (I can’t believe I did that) and you don’t have sex with the hooker. You ask about a condom, you get second thoughts and then you climb out the window. You do apparently have sex with Eve at the end though and as far as I can tell, it was pretty skeevy.
Maybe it is one of the things you can either do or skip, remember that Sierra had a point system and you could finish a game without getting all the points.
Regardless, I do remember that playing LSL as my 12 year old self, and in my 12 year old mind the only goal I had was to get those “CENSORED” animations to bump up and down.
Sure, its not grand theft auto rape scenes, but I don’t remember it as particularly positive introduction to sexuality.
Oh, so you were a gamer, eh? I guess for the right game then! 
I played games a lot as a youngster, my current game though is “avoid getting peed on in the eye by my 4 month old”.
No. They’re heading where the guaranteed $ are. Hollywood churns out violence by the shitload, but don’t even THINK of making a sex-heavy movie unless they want it to be shown nowhere. You’ll notice that Hollywood and the Porn industry are two different beasts and the boring, vanilla mores of the mainstream are the reason. Violence is acceptable thanks to Hollywood and that’s why they can make violent games without much pushback.
The other thing to bear in mind is that people enjoy video games because of the adrenaline that a simulation of being shot at creates. There have been times while playing video games that I’ve wondered if my heart should be beating as hard as it was. Sex, on the other hand, is either a ramp-up to climax after which it’s all over (poor replayability) or story-based (romance novels, leisure suit larry, MOST japanese porn sims) and I’d contend that without the adrenaline you won’t have the hardcore gamers usually required to push a game into being a financial success.
I love sex and I love porn. I’ve also got the cracked version of one of those 3d sex simulator games (the crack gives you bondage and transvestites) and I think I’ve launched the thing all of 2 or 3 times because the experience of sensuality/sexuality doesn’t translate well to a game imo.
The core of this issue is vastly deeper than video games. Or even free speech.
What this comes down to is a discussion of how we ensure that we have a capable population building a better society for tomorrow. Ultimately in a democracy, an essential component is an informed populace. With the death of the learning channel, and the history channel we can see that in the television medium we have lost two great sources of education.
In video games, we also feel a need to compel interactive participation that challenges people to grow. There’s nothing wrong with goofing off, but if you are expected to contribute to society, you need to be capable of doing so.
Now this points to an implied self determinism in your decision to contribute. As with schools, the no child left behind policy if fraught with obvious risks. This is no different for adults. Some folks just won’t end up being capable of participating in our society. How do we first decide who those people are, and how do we provide a future for them that we, and they can be happy with.
More to the point how do we prevent people from abusing any methodology employed to do so? The advent of Jim Crow laws did a great deal to point to the risks of raising the intellectual bar on voting.
Getting back to video games… should there be an explicit requirement that some quantifiable portion of video games be dedicated to the betterment of society be it through education or some other value. That’s the real question.
And I don’t have an immediate answer, but our white collar blue collar divide in this country is turning into zero asset and societal asset divides. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.
No one mentioned the fact that any company that woud make a sex heavy game would become a pariah in the industry no matter how good the game.
Sex is seen as a bad thing in our society, whether you are European or USAian.
This is easily seen in how games are rated or censored. The latest example is Saints Row 4, blocked in Austrailia for showing a naked guy shooting people. The objection was to the nudity, not the violence.
Reactions to hot coffee and Mass Effects sex scenes are additional examples of this.
Why would a company risk parental and societal rage, censorship and bad press by making a game about sex?
And really, Leisure Suit Larry doesnt really count, it’s more of a parody on sex and that game was released during the renaissance of gaming when games were still small time.
The problem is not that sex is a bad topic for a game, in truth, we just don’t know - because most good developes don’t dare to explore this taboo territory.
Separate from the social aspects, games are often about gameplay - the “fun” @jonathanperrine talks about. That means they need to have a core mechanic that rewards some combination of skill, reaction times, planning and daring, where you get to feel that you managed to achieve whatever the goal is because you performed well. Shooting at people that are also shooting at you is a popular setting for that because it has a good balance of challenges, not just because you’re simulating violence.
That said, I imagine a high-quality paintball game with the same mechanics would do OK, but not nearly as good as the same gameplay in a WW2 wrapper … both because doing well in the latter makes it feel like you’ve mastered something that’s real (and unlike paintball, not entirely niche), and because it lends it some escapism.
As for sex vs. violence: The way to go to get comparable gameplay action (as opposed to comparable ratings) might be some sort of orgy simulator with scores by caused/experienced orgasms, several stats, and an involved control scheme - and to be perfectly honest that’s not a project I would put my money behind. (Then again … the talent trees would probably be fun to design.)
Granted, the games industry is sourly lacking in exploitative female characters.
Nope. Saints Row IV was denied classification in Australia because the classification board deemed the “alien anal probe” weapon to be sexual violence that was not justified by context. There was also a bit about alien narcotics giving you super powers that they didn’t approve of either.
Objectified or not, if that TV were to fall in the bath they’d be cooked.
$39 back in - what is that, 1960? Must have been huge money.
Sex as the focus … nah. I have a suspicion LSL helped contribute to a renewal of misogynistic undercurrents in the male community. Violence isn’t the answer. Where sex is the goal - I think LSL influenced people as they felt more proximate to the real-life endeavour, whereas soldiery shoot-em-ups operate more at a fantasy level, with only a few deranged people actually practicing it.
When I played LSL as a young 'un, no-one explained the point to me, and when I understood it, I thought “oh. how dull.”
Constructive games that stretch the imagination, that teach and instruct - puzzles / strategy etc - now that’s different. If the soldier games involved learning how to survive in the wilderness for instance, with the gathering of correct and dry wood, the avoidance of poisonous plants - that’d be something.
Sex is nice, but as David Duchovny might say, a little distracting in quantity.
Indeed, it’s been a while since I played one where a woman was responsible for the exploitation - or the exploits.
Are you trying to be ironic?
No, and that’s a pretty dangerous idea. Who decides what is “betterment”?
This issue is really confined to American media, which admittedly infests most of the planet in one form or another. But it’s a nearly universal state in American media that sex is “voluntarily” censored more stringently than a similar degree of violence. For example, explicit violence typically gets you an “R” rating in movies, but an explicit sex gets you an NC-17. Cable TV has made a lot of progress in balancing this a bit more fairly, but this hasn’t carried over into games. I think part of it is that many industry folks still see their games as being targeted to 16 yo males, rather than a broader, more mature audience. RPGs nowadays frequently include possible romances with NPCs in the game (the Witcher series is a good example), but even then, the romance is never more than a tertiary plot. There isn’t usually a complex quest line that leads to a love relationship with an NPC. When there is a quest line, it’s usually something trivial, and more commonly the characters just fall into the relationship based on dialog choices rather than actions. I can see where implementing a romance quest line could easily cross the line or be perceived as objectifying the NPC, so maybe publishers just see that approach as too risky.
I find more people are comfortable with the idea of killing someone in a video game because they can justify the act i.e. it was either kill or be killed. Which begs the question, why play a game that forces you into said scenarios?
If we can’t handle sex maturely in the real world how on earth can we expect people to approach simulated sex acts, in a medium that is very child focused, without having an aneurysm? I’m not one of those people who always exclaims “what about the children?!” every time something like the hot coffee hack for GTA comes along.
I think if we actually educated our children properly with regards to sex, then sex in video games wouldn’t be an issue. Unfortunately we live a puritanical society and sex is the ultimate ‘no no’, though it seems at times that it is transforming more and more into a socially progressive one.
As for the question posed: I think video games should at times focus on sex. However, video games are often very myopic in their focus. I realize that it would be difficult to create a game that encompasses more than one or two themes in depth, but that is the very reason why I’ve pretty much quit playing video games. The games I have played that have attempted to be more inclusive with themes tend to fall flat in my opinion. So I admit I recognize that it isn’t easy.
