It’s natural. It’s chemical. It’s logical, habitual... Sex is natural, sex is good. Not everybody does it but everybody should… The lyrics of George Michael’s I Want Your Sex are words the fading pop star has lived by - now known for his love of sex in public places as much as music. Sex saturates most forms of popular culture entertainment – music, film, anime, internet, literature, advertising, TV, theatre – but is curiously absent in games.
Are gamers scared of sex? If you look at the last 20 years of commercially released computer and video games, the only conclusion you can draw is that game players are absolutely terrified of fucking. Only a handful of thousands of games have contained sexual content, and when sexuality is occasionally used in games it invariably causes controversy and moral panic. In Australia, games with sexual content are refused classification and banned from sale.
Australian gamers seem particularly fearful of sex and the Australian government, via the classification guidelines, has been making sure we don’t see anything ‘naughty’ involving pink bits since 1993. Extreme violence against law enforcement officers and innocent civilians in games is sweet – just as long as you can’t see a penis or vagina.
When the Australian game classification scheme was initially created, the biggest fear was the combination of sex and violence. It goes without saying that no sane person wants a game where the player can rape or commit sexual violence but that can never happen without specific programming and no commercial publisher in the world would ever contemplate it. Getting game publishers to show consensual sex scenes between adults seems a big enough step.
The fight for an R18+ category in Australia is still underway, and while the MA15+ guidelines have been relaxed slightly in recent years, there are regular instances where games are banned or modified for local release – Fallout 3 being the most prominent in 2008. Surprisingly, that controversy involved drugs rather than sex (the sexual element in Fallout 3 was disappointingly timid) but it’s almost always sex that causes the censor’s axe to fall.
The first high-profile game banned in Australia was 1995’s Phantasmagoria. Created by Roberta Williams – at the time one of the world’s leading game designers and one of the few women working in the industry – Phantasmagoria was banned because of a brief full-motion video scene containing simulated sex between a husband and wife. Tame by movie and TV standards – and crucial to the plot – it was enough to doom the adult horror game, which contained other scenes of gore and decapitation (no problem under the classification guidelines).
