What is love? Baby, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more.
I’m also not a big fan of using sex to sell things, especially MMO games. If there’s a scantily clad woman telling me to “Play now, my Lord!” while I plunk down strategically placed buildings and units to strengthen my army… it’s just stupid advertising.
When a dragon turns into a woman and then has cleavage that could easily be covered up the dragon scales she has in dragon form ((This is Crucia from Rift, at the very least), that’s just silly character model design.
If an MMO is called a mature game because it uses too much cleavage from both sides of the body to make it a worthwhile title to play, but the game itself has few redeeming gameplay qualities, then people are simply being played by a developer. Worse still, some players are deluding themselves into thinking it’s a great game because, “Hey! I can make my character looks like some sexual being I can objectify and mistreat at will.” Scarlet Blade, I’m looking at you.
Strangely enough, the objectification of the body also tends to be skewed more towards making most humanoid female character models sexy and then male character models appear dashing or imposing. With the exception of the SWTOR character models, it becomes very difficult to find less than fit men or women in MMOs.
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The Bottom Line
Sex is something that happens every day, and while it is an important component of relationships and functioning society in the real world, it is less of an imperative in MMOs. I’ve tried to make the strangeness of this topic more palatable by infusing it with ludicrousness, but the nagging thought weighs in my head greatly.
Sex, sexualization, and other aspects of physicality and representations of people have to be treated more gently and with more respect. They have to at least be less damaging to the idea of sex and the treatment of others as something that people should not take lightly.
I’d like to take more time to discuss this further, but this was just a simple primer to how absurd or otherwise strange sex and sexualization are in MMOs. Aside from titillation, it serves little purpose other than as a means to sell people on a game. There are better ways to sell a game, and one of those is by simply making your game worth playing.
Victor Barreiro Jr. / Victor Barreiro Jr. maintains The Devil’s Advocate and ArcheAge columns for MMORPG.com. He also writes for news website Rappler as a technology reporter. You can find more of his writings on Games and Geekery and on Twitter at @vbarreirojr.
- Song lyrics used in today’s article:
- Salt N Pepa - Let’s Talk About Sex
- Marvin Gaye - Sexual Healing
- Right Said Fred - I’m Too Sexy
- Haddaway - What is Love
LINKS:
- Last week on The Devil’s Advocate: The Internet Response League
- The MMORPG.com Scarlet Blade Review
- Bill Murphy discusses the strangeness of Scarlet Blade
- Lisa Jonte talks about Stereotyping men in video games
