politics-in-gaming
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Building a better MMOusetrap: PPOrnography in games
Quick turn out the lights, shut your door, and unplug the phone... today we're going to talk about boobs. shh shh shh, I know, please keep it down, don't get all worked up, it's really not anything to worry about. I'm not actually going to show you any boobs, just talk about them, or rather about morality, censorship and the like in our favourite type of video games. As I'm sure you're all aware, as informed gaming news readers, you've read the latest load of tripe about our beloved "sex-boxes" and how they are filling us full of sodomisingly good times. Well, I decided to take a look at MMOs under the same plate, but before you fill the comments section with slander, and my inbox with hate, let me just say I think the fellow who wrote the article is a grade-A ass, but he did make me think about a few things.First off, let's look at the ESRB rating that comes on most of our MMO titles, generally they are rated T (for teen!) but have the wonderful disclaimer of "experience may change during online play". Now frankly that's pretty much a carte blanche to do whatever they like, because if they get pulled into court they can just grab their Objection! sign and point at the rating. But I think that for the most part MMO game developers take a lot of strong steps towards keeping the playing environment relatively tame. There certainly aren't any terribly un-graphic alien lesbian love scenes in Paragon City, and last I checked, even though the Mithra are cute little cat ladies, there hasn't been any rampant cases of cross-species hot loving in Vana'diel.I think what I'm trying to get at is, that game developers do in fact keep our online experiences as puritanian as they can (violence aside of course), because they don't really see a need to change their games into online porn. Certainly there are the usual video game metrics of unrealistic body types (for both the women and the men), and the fact that somehow the more armour a female character puts on, the more like a princess leia golden bikini (link is semi-NSFW) it looks. But other than that things are generally tame, that is, until it gets into the hands of the players.
