Nudity in PC Games

For a long time moral crusaders expressed horror at various movies. They decried the violence and sex and questioned the impact it might have on impressionable youth. Nowadays it seems the videogames industry is top of their hit list. While violence has always been prevalent in games, sex and nudity has been relatively rare. Whenever it does pop up there are scores of ignorant detractors trying to drum up support for censorship. It is only relatively recently that developers have been able to include nudity and sex that bears any relation to the real thing in their games but it is still incredibly tame when compared to TV or movie sex. Why the outrage?

There have been games with nudity since the beginning but it was so crudely done and so rare that it escaped much attention. Looking back at games like Custer’s Revenge or the ridiculous Chiller now, the blocky pink nude bodies are laughably crude. Both those games quite rightly took more flack for their violent content and racism than they did for the nudity.

The first games to feature proper nudity were Strip Poker simulators. They would often use an actual photo and slowly reveal the nude model beneath if you won at cards. Then there was the age of the video footage (Full Motion Video or FMV) games like Phantasmagoria. It came on around 100 CD ROMs and allowed you to steer your way through a series of cut scenes with the odd saucy scene thrown in.

Sexy games have traditionally been pretty rotten. The Leisure Suit Larry series always springs to mind but the early releases there were actually free of nudity, they just suggested it a lot. The more recent efforts have included nudity but it is cartoon style and the poor quality of the game is more worthy of vitriol than the nudity is.

Most recently the GTA series has been the main target of moral outrage. It started out with complaints over the violence but with the GTA: San Andreas “Hot Coffee” mod the cries for the game to be banned reached fever pitch. (I tried to sell my copy to EB, but they wouldn't take it because they were only allowed to sell a later version of the game which blocked the mod. -Ed.) Most of the people who called for the ban didn’t seem to think they even needed to see the content to judge it. The thing is mods and nude patches for games have existed for years. The nude patch for The Sims was hugely popular and there was the dodgy looking Lara Croft in all her glory in Nude Raider as well! Berating a game for what modders come up with is about as apt as writing Play-Doh a letter complaining that some naughty children used it to make inapproriate anatomic approximations.