Gamers Are Scared of Sex? Wait…What?
January 12th, 2009 | Written by Anthony Perez | Topic: Media Watch, Play
I’m a little perplexed by a recent article on the Australian gaming site, GamePlayer. The article poses the question in its headline, “Are Gamers Scared of Sex?” While the article is decent, its premise makes practically no sense. It argues that since controversy is always stirred up when games contain explicit sexual content that is sometimes even barred by censors, that gamers need to get over their fear of sex.
That’s kind of like wondering why teenage girls are afraid of sex because their parents won’t let them stay out late on Saturday nights. It’s not the girls that are afraid, it’s the parents.
Which is why the real question is why is society afraid of sex in video games? Hell, if you watch Monster’s Ball you get to see a hardcore sex scene between Halle Berry (good) and Billy Bob Thorton (very bad; in fact, frightening), but it’s out there. In Zack and Miri Make a Porno there is nearly as much female nudity as in an issue of Playboy. In Irreversible – yes, it’s a fairly obscure French film, but it does have Monica Belluci (once again, good) – there is a straight up rape scene which lasts several minutes.
What do they all have in common? They’re all approved for viewing by viewers 17 and up. That’s the same age as M-rated videogames. So why the double standard?
The quick and easy answer is about how old the industry is. The industry started out as a child’s playground, and the notion that gamers are mostly kids under 18 years of age has stuck through the decades that have seen those gamers age well into their 30′s. The regulatory bodies that watch over the content in games haven’t adapted to its aging audience, so tame sexual content like Hot Coffee build more controversy than anything shown in those aforementioned movies.
To be fair, GamePlayer’s article touches on this:
The fear of sex in games is rooted in the old notion that games are mainly played by kids, despite research which finds the average age of game players is late-20s and rising. With game stars up until the mid-1990s being child-friendly heroes like Pac-Man, Mario, Crash Bandicoot and Sonic the Hedgehog, the common misconception amongst non-gamers was that games were just for under-18s. But why would working-class Mario work so hard to rescue an uptight Princess? It wasn’t just to hold hands – he wanted a taste of that juicy royal peach.
I covered this subject years ago, shortly after the Hot Coffee controversy. In my article, “Sexual Misapprehension: Are Games As Corruptible As They Say,” I discovered that controversy over everything from sex to drugs and violence will slow down as the industry ages. There’s already precedent for this stuff in film and music.
The question behind it all is, are games simply at too early of a state for objective criticism? Looking at history, other forms of new media have undergone disparagement of their own. In the early days of television the only married couple you saw sharing a bed were the Flintstones. Throughout 1950’s and early 1960’s television, married couples generally slept in separate twin beds.
The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA, now known as the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA) established the “Production Code,” or sometimes referred to as the “Hays Code” in 1934. The code was put in place to govern and censor film before the establishment of the modern MPAA by prohibiting nudity, religious bashing, depictions of crime (such as arson or smuggling), drug use, and maintaining the sanctity of marriage. It took the movie industry roughly 33 years to abandon the Production Code in 1967 and establish the current ratings board which regulates film today.
Video games as a mainstream form of entertainment have only existed for nearly a decade, so how could it be expected for the medium to be understood in the same light as television or film? The current controversy over video games is a result of misapprehension and misunderstanding. Its most nefarious foe is not the white-haired senator in Washington; it is its own infancy.
What do you all think?
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