Why don’t we have more nudity in games?

Earlier, I was playing Team Fortress 2, shooting AI bots in the face, because I had no internet connection and was bored. These AI bots looked exactly like human characters, the nine classes we all love and hate. After that, I got bored and loaded Saints Row: The Third, and went around shooting pedestrians and police officers in the face with a shotgun that summons sharks. I also used a rocket launcher to blow up cars, before pissing off the one remaining gang and mowing them down with a minigun. I had a lot of fun and it certainly took my mind off the fact that I had no internet connection.

After that though, I decided to play the Streaking minigame. In Saints Row, the Streaking minigame can only be activated when you have no clothes on. You run around trying to shock as many pedestrians as possible before time runs out. Great little minigame. Would be more fun though if everything wasn’t overly pixellated.

I’ve always wondered why Saints Row bothered to pixellate your private areas. You can get incredibly small, coloured circled that cover your nipples and a bit more, leaving the rest of your round bosom exposed, but you can’t have a bare bottom or bare nipple showing. Men’s nipples are perfectly fine though, even though they look very, very similar to women’s nipples. This is a game where you can run around shooting gangsters, hookers and innocent pedestrians in the face, but heavens forbid that you do all that while not wearing any clothes.

Why are we like this when it comes to video games? Killing people is fine if you’re the good guy, and possibly patriotic if you’re some American guy shooting terrorists before they blow up a bomb. Violent fighting games like Mortal Kombat are deemed violent but every nearly character entering these fighting competitions are willingly doing so. Shooting innocents is less palatable, but we always get over that anger after a while and play the game anyway. Sex and nudity though are huge no-nos.

What makes even less sense is that nudity and sex are completely natural things. You have a shower, you’re naked. You have a boyfriend or girlfriend, you’re likely to have intercourse with them, or at the very least see each other naked. But in a more mainstream video game environment, all the sex is hidden away and made tasteful, while your genitalia and female nipples are covered up with either very convenient clothing and armour, or big blocks of pixels.

It’s hypocritical really. If a game is rated M for Mature or whatever, it’s considered bad. No one though gives a shit when there’s sex in TV and movies. The Deadpool film has a really long sex scene very early on in the film. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, even if you don’t see any cocks or anything, but it’s a rated 18 film and sex is perfectly acceptable. This is sex involving real people. There’s also a much, much higher chance of someone underage seeing TV and movie sex since they’re generally much more accessible – everyone has access to cable, streaming sites and Youtube, you’ve got to pay money to whack people with purple dildos in Saints Row.

Oh and there’s plenty of killing and murder on the big screen as well. It’s acting in a movie, or a respawning character in a game. Either way, no one dies, no one gets pregnant and no one gets a nasty STD in both media. Unless that’s part of the plot, but that’s not actually happening in real life. On the flip side, when we do these things in real life, well, if it’s consenting and you use protection (random thought: why is birth control inaccessible when we’ve got an overpopulation problem?), then no one gets hurt, gets pregnant or gets an STD. But you can’t go around killing other humans in real life.

It bewilders me why we so demonize anything remotely sexual. Sex is what allows us to exist as a species. If we didn’t have sex, I wouldn’t be here typing this stupid article.

I suppose we’ve got to blame someone for all of this.

Where’s a random blame generator when you need it?

Medic

Medic, also known as Phovos (or occasionally Dr Retvik Von Scribblesalot), writes 50% of all the articles on the Daily SPUF since she doesn't have anything better to do. A dedicated Medic main in Team Fortress 2 and an avid speedster in Warframe, Phovos has the unique skill of writing 500 words about very little in a very short space of time.

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