Virtual Pick-Up Artists: The Monotonous Sex Life of Videogames

Most attempts reinforce a negative and pervasive view of how courtship and sexual pursuit work in wider society. While it is easy enough to woo your digital childhood friend by raising your charisma stat and being nice, assuming the same works in a more realistic setting robs the other person of their agency. Despite how videogames portray it, flirtation is more than putting kindness coins into a vending machine until sex falls out, but this view is depressingly common today and results in people believing they are entitled to positive consequences. Some people never understand how to humanize potential romantic partners and games sadly facilitate that toxic mentality.

It is not that videogames are actively attempting to coarsen depictions of love and sex, but the medium is largely uninterested in portraying the complexities of sex accurately and limits it to existing ideas. Videogames can only emulate love from the outside looking in, wrapping the idea around its existing mechanics to fit the ideas into its existing molds. This leads many developers to staying within the existing framework that came before them and not offering any alternatives to their romantic designs. Players want to win at relationships as much as they want to save the world, so developers offer them the quickest route toward victory without the frustration.

Sex and flirtation take many forms—there are as many types as there are people. With few exceptions, videogames still take just the one form and present it as normative, providing few speeds beyond extreme and not providing much of a landing pad for everyone else. The back-and-forth dance is wholly supplanted by positive reinforcement and a will to keep hammering away toward a goal. In Mass Effect 3, I found myself careening toward a romantic relationship with James Vega by encouraging him to take an exam, eliciting an eyebrow raise when he solicited my character in an odd turn of tone in the conversation. It is so easy to sleep with a non-playable character in Mass Effect 3 that I nearly ended up engaging in it by accident.

This is not a problem that can be solved by simply demanding better writing, though that would certainly help. While videogames continue to use sex as a facet of its narrative, it inherently has to sidle in between the existing dialogue system and world-saving fairy tale as a feature rather than a centerpiece. Star Maid Games’ Cibele stands as an exception to this and talks about sex in a way most videogames don’t, treating the player as an adult in pursuit of more than just a win-state. Love within the game is messy and unfair and proceeds at a natural pace before it crashes into a wall.

Not all games choose to focus on love and sex in the same way Cibele does, nor should any videogame be obligated to portray it realistically. The problem arises when such an important aspect of romantic interaction is tossed into an already moving machine and expected to simply conform to existing design. Whether it is Mass Effect or Dragon Age or The Witcher, the easiest path to featuring sex is to make it no different than loot at the end of a quest, a prize to be won by applying the game’s mechanics to characters. You are essentially Googling for the key to their chastity belt.

Developers presume that players want to simply fall forward into partners’ beds, creating unrealistic and somewhat warped ideas of how common interactions might proceed. Most people playing games will never face down a demon army or travel through time, but they will meet people with whom they share an attraction. Games shouldn’t shy away from sex in any form – if anything, they should grab onto the subject with both hands and present it maturely. The apprehensive way videogames approach sexual relations now, however, provides for both unsatisfying narratives and poor life lessons.

Imran Khan is a San Francisco-based freelance writer that frequently tweets @imranzomg.