“When sexual content is used as a selling point, the commodification of it produces content that may be disingenuous and lacking in emotional depth,” they wrote. “So queer people find they want ways to tell their own stories and represent their identities, and often end up creating games to do so.”Ĭharissa So and Tida Kietsungden, whose visual novel A Summer’s End portrays a romance between two women amid the rapidly changing world of 1980s Hong Kong, echoed the sentiment that freedom from market demands allows for a more honest portrayal of sexuality. “Representation of queer characters in mainstream video games isn't great, although it's getting better,” Conway said. Good representation needs authenticity, and Conway noted that indie games are freed from the market demands and design committees that can compromise accuracy. That’s not to say it wasn’t enjoyable, but critics could tell that a game about the gay dating scene wasn’t made by gay men. It was praised for its engaging tone, and for giving a queer narrative mainstream attention, but was also criticized for not engaging with gay culture or using queer language. And generally, major studio writers are not.”ĭream Daddy, while not from a major studio, was funded by YouTube behemoths Game Grumps.
“I feel like major studio writers can't do justice to stories about marginalized characters when the writers are not a part of those groups. In Conway’s view, the indie scene is better equipped to handle such subject matter. Not every game needs sex, but for a subject that’s fundamental to the human experience, mainstream gaming lags well behind other mediums in portraying it seriously and credibly. Meanwhile, thin lists of gaming’s “ most sizzling” sex scenes unintentionally reveal the sad state of big budget titles by continually repeating aging games like Mass Effect and The Witcher. Indie games, and LGBTQ+ developers in particular, are filling that vacuum.ĭream Daddy, which was released in 2017 and starred a single father looking to romance other solo dads, featured in a Markiplier video with 6.8 million views, a sign that LGBTQ+ friendly romance games were starting to push into the mainstream. It was seen as a mark of maturity for the God of War franchise when its 2018 installment abandoned the subject entirely rather than return to the cringeworthy “Here are some tits, you rube” minigames of previous entries. Sex has been part of gaming from the beginning-Atari 2600 owners could buy Custer’s Revenge, a heavily criticized rape fantasy that sold 80,000 copies-but for most of the medium’s history, any sexuality was aimed at straight white men with all the subtlety of a horny sledgehammer. But while Cyberpunk was criticized for its bad sex-and for flubbing LGBTQ+ representation-the erotic indie title Hardcoded was gathering praise for its explicit, queer-friendly sexuality set against a dystopian cyberpunk backdrop.
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The sex in Cyberpunk 2077, one of the biggest releases of the decade, was lambasted by PC Gamer as “horrifying” and “truly awful” for its weak writing and general clunkiness character models designed to run and shoot just look strange when made to contort in moments of intimacy.
Video game characters do not have great sex lives.