On Sex and Games
Susie Bright asks, in her post Poke the Doll - And Then What?:
I grew up with the first generation of boys who played Dungeons and Dragons. I always wondered how come that world wasn’t sexier. My own version of Dungeons and Barbies certainly had the erotic suspense element.
What do you think? Did you or do you ever play a computer-origin game that feeds your inner horny dragon?
Computer games were a big part of my childhood and of most of my friendships from that time. We didn’t play “official” D&D but enjoyed an ad-hoc version that we mostly made up as we went along.
It wasn’t until my late adolescence that I began wanting my computer games to be more erotic than they were. One of the big selling points of Baldur’s Gate II was the interactive “romances” that the player character could become involved in. The lovingly-crafted main character, representing the player, could engage in flirtations and eventually in sex (couched in PG-13 euphemisms) with a select few companions.
Unfortunately, the available “romance” plotlines numbered only four, with three of the four only for (presumably heterosexual) male characters.
The one romantic interest available for (again, heterosexual) female characters read as though the writer, embittered with women, had composed a list of What Women Want that read something like this:
Women Want:
1. Arrogant assholes with hints of vulnerability
2. Knights in Shining Armour
3. Rich Men
4. Men they can dream of changing for the better
Needless to say, the one available male romantic interest was not terribly interesting romantically, and female gamers were disappointed (Sequential Tart has a great article on the subject).
This is where user-created content saved the day. A group of dedicated fans managed to write their own plotlines and insert them into the game, not only creating more palatable male romantic interests but sexing up the original plotlines considerably.My favorite of the new characters was Solaufein, a brooding, philosophically-minded, Rimbaud-quoting dark elf whose dialogue was short on sexual explicitness but very high on eroticism. In addition, he would “romance” both male and female characters. I was so impressed with Solaufein that I even wound up developing quite a crush on his author, Westley Weimer.
As the Sequential Tart link above discusses, what was ultimately so disappointing about the sexual/romantic content on offer was that the idea was so full of promise. Even now, in my computer games, I find myself looking for opportunities to flirt with the in-game characters rather than chop them to bits with magical swords.
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