The Pendulum Swings Back: On God of War and Sex and Violence in Games

The importance of portraying sex and romance

Depictions of sex and romance in media can be formative in a myriad of ways. Moon, for example, comes from a conservative religious background. This meant not being allowed to see any gay material in films, books, or TV. Video games, on the other hand, were less monitored.

“The first time I ever saw, you know, queerness or being gay portrayed in even just a neutral way, not even a positive way, was in The Sims,” Moon says. “I went to a friend’s house and they had The Sims, and I played it and it was like, oh, these two characters that are the same gender can flirt with each other, that’s interesting. It had never permeated to me.”

As someone who grew up playing games on PC, one of the first things Moon did when they joined Santa Monica Studio was to go and watch every cinematic from previous God of War games. Regarding the sex scenes, they found them “frankly hilarious” when examined through modern lenses, considering them to have a campy element. In particular, Moon recalls the sex scene in God of War 3, involving Aphrodite. In the lead up to it, Kratos enters her chamber in search of a clue to solve a puzzle involving a bridge outside. Aphrodite is seen with two women in bed—all three of them are topless—and during their chat, she invites Kratos to stay and spend time with her. If accepted, the camera pans out from the bed and focuses on the two women, who are watching the sex act. As the player follows the button prompts, they get increasingly more turned on, to the point of having sex with each other. “This is definitely for mature audiences only,” Moon says. “Parents should not let their children watch this.”

“I’m a queer woman, I am interested in women, that portrayal of two women being so turned on by seeing a man have sex with a woman that they have sex with each other is kind of weird,” they say. “But I think very affirmative consent of all of Kratos’s sex scenes is actually pretty cool and significant. There are a lot of times in media where you see very coercive sexual encounters where somebody’s really drunk or pressuring someone else into sex, and there are a lot of cases where that kind of relationship is portrayed positively or normalized.”

Moon says that they can’t speak for the entire feminist movement, and that critiques about the sex scenes being objectifying are valid, as society still has a problem with women being portrayed as sexual objects as opposed to characters with their own sexual agency. In addition, when it comes to violence against women in the God of War series, that’s a different story, and one that gets “pretty gnarly” looking back.

Aside from the scenes themselves, the developer thinks that the fact that they’re interactive, inviting the player to “push a button to have sex,” speaks more directly to the cultural discomfort around portrayals of sex, and could be a reason why the series got so notorious for them—in a similar vein to the “Hot Coffee” minigame hidden in the code of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Yet, exposure to mature themes is important. While discussing portrayals of romance and sex in games, Moon says there’s a running joke of sorts amongst game developers in which people wonder how long they can talk about these topics without mentioning a BioWare game. But in their experience, it was indeed the exposure to series like Mass Effect, which feature romance and sex between queer characters, that was formative in their youth. While studios and developers in the indie to AA space have more freedom to explore sex and romance in a plethora of ways, AAA games still carry a massive, more mainstream reach. What they portray, and how, is important—especially when the violence in games isn’t ceasing, but other elements are.

How the pendulum is swinging back

Continuing with the Mass Effect franchise as an example, Moon argues that the games in the series have gotten less sexual over the years, with scenes between characters becoming less explicit over time. Romances continued to be nicely developed in them, which is important and valuable, but they still noticed a change.

“I think part of the reason why we continue to see these attitudes about sex and gender and romance is that the leadership at these big studios and big corporations is still overwhelmingly white, straight, male, cisgender, and able-bodied,” Moon says, adding that portrayals of disability in games also have a long way to go. “I don’t think that God of War is the only series that has this phenomenon happening in it.”

Another example that comes to mind are the Uncharted games, which started with a young, sassy Nathan Drake, and culminated with an older, more mature rendition of the character. Notably, Drake becomes a father in the fourth and final game, which is reflected in the overall tone and how the protagonist is portrayed in that story.

“Part of that is, yes, characters as they get older they change and develop, but, it also is the developers working on the game,” Moon says. “Developers will talk about how the experience of like being a father impacted them and the design perspective on the games that they work on, which, to be clear, is not at all a bad thing, it’s just that, because of the imbalance in the people who are working on these games, I think that we are seeing this trend, and we’re seeing this kind of skewing towards, you know, we’re OK with violence, but we’re not OK with sexuality.” (There have been recent outliers, of course, like Baldur’s Gate 3. Notably, as Moon says, the team behind it, Larian Studios, is based in Europe, a region that views portrayals of sex differently. Yet, the RPG is kind of its own case, as both the sex scenes and violence reach uncommon heights.)

It’s also impossible to divorce this phenomenon from the regression in the game industry (and, well, almost everywhere else) around DEI policies. In the past year alone, some prominent examples include Microsoft reportedly shutting down one of its internal DEI teams, Activision employees seemingly leaking internal messages between staff discussing the state of diversity programs at the company to right-wing users, and Take Two Interactive removing references to “diversity and inclusion” from its annual report to investors this year.

Meta joined the regressive momentum of these companies by ending its DEI programs in January. In a memo, Meta’s vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale, said that the “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing.” Moon, via Sanzaru, happened to be working at Meta when this happened.

“As a marginalized developer, that was a real bummer,” they say. “It makes you go from, ‘hey, like I feel like my company gives a damn about my perspective; if a female character is going to be portrayed, I feel like my perspective is going to be valued,’ to, ‘oh, they don’t care, and also they are actually a little bit actively hostile towards that perspective now.’ Cool, cool, cool.”

Moon hones in on the importance of diversity and plurality of voices, especially as someone who has been “the only woman in the room several times in my career.” There are aspects in the way people work every day that are missed, not due to malice, but simply because they’re missing the perspective of somebody that isn’t them. Moon themself recognizes their blind spots when it comes to race, socioeconomic status, or disability. Depending on who’s making upper-level decisions at a studio, however, those necessary distinctions can get lost.

“At a certain point with a studio that I worked at, I really started to push like, hey, I’d really love to have a conversation about how we’re gonna discuss queer characters and how we’re gonna have queer characters in this game,” Moon says. “And one of the things that came up is that the studio was like, OK, we want you to push all of our diversity stuff. And I was like, whoa, I can’t, you know, speak for every marginalized person. I am still very much a white person and operate from a position of white privilege. That’s just true.”

The state of the industry and its lasting impacts

The 2025 State of the Game Industry report by the Game Developers Conference (GDC), which accounted for over 3,000 developers, yielded a more hopeful picture than previous years. Women and non-binary folks now make up 32 percent of the surveyed game developers, compared to 29 percent and 24 percent in 2023 and 2022, respectively. Moreover, one-fourth of respondents identified as LGBTQ+. 

But the numbers also show a familiar predominance. Men made up two-thirds of the surveyed developers, and 35 percent of them were white, male, and didn’t identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community. A total of 59 percent of people surveyed was white—a sheer contrast to, say, the Black / African / Caribbean category, which netted 3 percent in comparison.

The precarization and devaluation of labor keep closing doors on potential candidates who could bring different perspectives to the room. Even those who manage to land a job, especially at bigger studios, aren’t safe from turnover. This has a professional and mental impact on the person, as well as not only the quality of a game, but the overall developer experience of how a game is made. Someone in a junior position will inevitably have a hard time landing a senior role if they’re on contract, for example, and end up having to leave after six months or a year. At the same time, the studio loses someone who had already gotten acquainted with how things work, as well as their perspective.

During their ongoing job search, Moon has noticed that a lot of roles that, in the past, one would have expected to be full-time, are now being put up as contract roles, including at major studios. Salaries are being reduced, while offerings get worse, especially in reductions in benefits. This also includes a clear regression of established practices. In May, EA reportedly announced to employees that it would be ending remote working policies permanently, and that’s just one example.

Even when some efforts aren’t properly reciprocated by studios—such as working on initiatives around queer representation for a full calendar year that ultimately “didn’t get anywhere” due to “forces at the top” not wanting to engage with them—it’s still important to push for that inclusion. Moon has found interesting and transgressive examples in the indie space, such as Cult of the Lamb’s subversion of “cozy” games, including a post-launch update oriented around sex, as well as Anna Webster’s Redjackets, a narrative game centered around asexual relationships. But as someone who grew up in a conservative environment, it’d have been impossible for them to find these games on their own. Meanwhile, AAA titles can have that wider reach.

“As we continue to see these very regressive policies that are coming down, I would hope that people in those higher-level roles at these big companies would have a little bit more of a backbone and really stand up for the rights of marginalized people because, there’s not enough of us for us to stand up for ourselves on our own, right? We actually do need allyship, and we need people to be brave and put their foot down and say, this is important, so we’re gonna do it.” 

Moon is hoping that more developers sit down to think about what it’d like to portray sexuality in creative fields and the work they make. While nowadays people are having more conversations about it—including discussions about sex and romance separately each year at GDC—the industry seems to still be in a phase where it’s still a little uncomfortable or giggly. But as these arguments make these topics and questions more prominent and more present in everybody’s minds, the less scary and intimidating they become.

“There are studios out there that will say, well, we don’t do romance. It’s like, OK, that’s crazy, you’re just saying that there’s this entire segment of like the human experience that we’re just not including in our work. And it’s like, OK, but you realize you’re really missing out because you’re just denying yourself this whole giant area that you could be exploring and you’re not.”

At the bare minimum, Moon would like for people in general to read and engage with media that isn’t necessarily marketed at them. “I have a bachelor’s degree in digital animation and game design, and for my capstone project in my program, I worked on a game that had a female protagonist,” they conclude. “I had a classmate who, kind of to my face, said oh, it has a female protagonist, I’m not gonna play it. We were both dumb teenagers at the time, hopefully his perspective on that has matured in the decades since. But that’s a crazy attitude to have, and I think plenty of people have it.”

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist from Argentina who has learned English thanks to videogames. You can read his work in places like Polygon, the New York Times, The Verge, and more. You can also find him on Bluesky.