Sex? Sex.

Sex. Sex sex sex. God, sex is awesome- everyone knows that, even the religious ones among us know that, they just pretend not to. Sex in the media though- well, that's another story.

Video games have always had a confusing relationship with sexuality for several reasons- the first of which being that the primary consumers of gaming are teenage boys or socially inept young men. Now, why is this an issue? Well, as someone who was once a teenage boy who has blossomed into a beautiful, socially awkward butterfly I can tell you that young men should never, ever be put in charge of writing anything sexual.

Your dialogue, scenes and characters essentially end up like the scrawlings of a madman on the inside of a school-toilet door, except with less plot cohesion or subtext. "Sally is a slag" may be all very well and good, and even true at times, but it doesn't exactly captivate audiences or convince naysayers of the maturity inherent in our chosen hobby slash media format. At best you get Duke Nukem's attitude to sexuality, hiding behind a thin veil of self-awareness an immature hilarity that has echoed through the ages and taught so many of us so much about nothing.

The second issue is that game developers themselves- charming and handsome as they may be- usually have very little experience with the promiscuity their games so frequently portray. For example:

Meet Gabe Newell. Gabe is many things- he invented Half Life, revolutionised the games industry and ate 400,000 doughnuts all in the space of a couple of years- but one thing he is not is a blazing-loined Lothario with a penchant for dialogue-tree based pick-up lines. This goes for his cohorts in the RPG, adventure game and other general gaming industry developers. These two issues may not mean much- a retarded audience and bad writers may not be mutually exclusive- but when you combine the two you have the following problem:

Sweaty virgins writing for sweaty virgins.

It's a catastrophe; nobody wants to see that. Nobody. As time goes on and graphics, writing and technology improve we see minor updates in quality, but we're still lumbered with the fact that nobody really knows what the hell's going on any more. Video-game sex is even a draw for some audiences: Look at Tomb Raider on the PS1- it's a classic, right? Wrong! It's a clunky piece of ass which only sold because on the box was another clunky piece of ass.

Putting a "super-sexy girl" on the front of the box was always going to sell, but writing these characters to be sluts with massive, splayed-legged romances? That's ingenious. Why not make them a lesbian too? In fact there are a few games which feature lesbian protagonists as their major selling point- Ps1 action game Fear Effect was yet another awful game which benefited massively from over-sexualised characters in ridiculous positions.

What is this? What does it even have to do with anything? Writing a gay character is easy- you write them the same as the straight characters because doing otherwise is sexist as hell. Goddamn, the games industry is bad at this. Well, maybe I should say used to be bad at this.

Modern RPGs apparently now require some kind of relationship-functionality. I know multiple women who have purchased Dragon Age and Dragon Age 2 purely on the merit of the complexity of these systems. Well, the complexity basically boils down to: To make character X sleep with character Y, do Z until your XY meter is full enough to proposition X. Apparently I'm a plebian wretch for not realising the complexity of the characters involved in these virtual trysts, but if my comprehension of sex as a fillable bar followed by a cutscene is moronic then so be it.

SO REALISTIC!

The thing that is truly confusing though is the apparent requirement for same-sex relationships in these games. It can be occasionally jarring when the character I'm playing as, or one of his cohorts suddenly attempts to fondle something I never would. It's not homophobic to simply play a straight character and not want them to suddenly contemplate kissing their best friend, is it? I get that one has to cater for the sexual pleasure of all hellas, but putting an emphasis on homosexual relationships is surely somehow… I don't know- heterophobic?

Why is it a big deal when homosexual relations make it into a game but nobody bats an eyelid at Morrowind's "The Lusty Argonian Maid". Surely haggard inter-species sex between a lizard and a man is more abhorrent than hypothetical gays? Well, apparently not- the inclusion of same-sex relationships in Bioware RPGs, the Fable games and even new-age epic Skyrim is somehow worthy of the front page.

I don't get it. When are people going to realise that gay people deserve to be just as miserable as the rest of us? As for me, I don't play games to emulate fantasy relationships, I play them to do things which are impossible for me to achieve in real life, like killing dragons or saving the world.

…Or finding a relationship. :'(

If you're playing Skyrim or Dragon Age to make the characters fall in love with one another then you bought them for the wrong reason. Just saying.

Toby Ellis