I guess I blame this one on Angry Joe for liking The Witcher 2's "romance" scenes. It just...makes me cringe seeing them honestly.
NOTE: The following is all my opinion. If you disagree, that's understandable, but please read the entire thing before writing your rebuttal.
I dunno, to me sex purely for the sake of sex appeal is not 'mature'. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who supports banning nudity and sex from games and stuff...but it honestly bugs me to see all the pointless T&A in games. Maybe it's because I'm a woman myself and while I appreciate female beauty...I find seeing it in a VERY male sexual light very....awkward. Almost like I'm seeing something that isn't meant for ME as a player.
Let's face it, men and women both naturally have CRAZY sex drives, but they don't work exactly the same (Men are from Mars, women, Venus....the whole shabang). To me, when I see a hot woman very lovingly crafted only to have the camera pan over her in a ridiculously indulgent fashion...well, I no longer see a character. What I see is an animated stand in for porn. It's one thing to show off a character model, but another to just focus entirely on the money spots and nothing else. It's the construction of the entire scene which is only concerned with making those women look appealing to their target audience and no one else.
Personally, it drags me right out of the game when I see stuff like that. Sex scenes are fine, but those kinds of shots just...they look so out of place in a game where normally, the camera is either entirely in 3rd person or it's at least a few feet away from the character being addressed.
Just to show you that I'm not anti-sex, I'm going to use the sex scene in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood as a positive example. Yeah, the fact that it's VERY obvious they still have their clothes on is rather stupid, but the way it was animated and put together as a scene made the whole thing seem sensual even though it was ultimately casual sex between two characters who were in no way romantically involved. The camera occasionally went to a more pervy angle now and then, but for the most part, that cut scene didn't stand out enough to rip me out of the experience of playing a game. Even if there was nudity in it, I doubt that it would have ripped me away simply because of the way the nudity and sex was presented.
God of War (the first one...never played the others) also had tits, but there wasn't really a focus on them whenever they came up. The game just happened to have naked women. It was almost casual the way they were animated and shot. I remember when I first played through the tutorial and Kratos woke up in bed with two nude women that I was not at all disgusted or ripped away.
I dunno, I guess what I'm trying to get at is that games should not make such big deals of sex scenes when it doesn't fit the style of the rest of the game. Yeah, I know a lot of you are going to say that it's just escapist fantasy and that you want to enjoy it, but there are sex games out there. Do games with real stories and meaning need to have these jarring pander shots scattered throughout when there are others that are totally willing to fill that niche anyway?
Long winded rant aside, my ultimate point is that "True maturity is restraint" not rebellion NOR celibacy. You can make your character models as sexy as you want, but leave the camera be and don't render the sex scenes in an entirely different fashion from the rest of the game.
Well, that's my 2 cents. What do you all have to say? Rant away.
EDIT: Guys, you seem to be missing my point. It's NOT the fact that they have sex that bothers me! It is the way the camera pans over it that makes me uncomfortable to play. I wrote all this up here for a reason, to explain those feelings. Come on, it's not THAT long of a read.
NOTE: The following is all my opinion. If you disagree, that's understandable, but please read the entire thing before writing your rebuttal.
I dunno, to me sex purely for the sake of sex appeal is not 'mature'. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who supports banning nudity and sex from games and stuff...but it honestly bugs me to see all the pointless T&A in games. Maybe it's because I'm a woman myself and while I appreciate female beauty...I find seeing it in a VERY male sexual light very....awkward. Almost like I'm seeing something that isn't meant for ME as a player.
Let's face it, men and women both naturally have CRAZY sex drives, but they don't work exactly the same (Men are from Mars, women, Venus....the whole shabang). To me, when I see a hot woman very lovingly crafted only to have the camera pan over her in a ridiculously indulgent fashion...well, I no longer see a character. What I see is an animated stand in for porn. It's one thing to show off a character model, but another to just focus entirely on the money spots and nothing else. It's the construction of the entire scene which is only concerned with making those women look appealing to their target audience and no one else.
Personally, it drags me right out of the game when I see stuff like that. Sex scenes are fine, but those kinds of shots just...they look so out of place in a game where normally, the camera is either entirely in 3rd person or it's at least a few feet away from the character being addressed.
Just to show you that I'm not anti-sex, I'm going to use the sex scene in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood as a positive example. Yeah, the fact that it's VERY obvious they still have their clothes on is rather stupid, but the way it was animated and put together as a scene made the whole thing seem sensual even though it was ultimately casual sex between two characters who were in no way romantically involved. The camera occasionally went to a more pervy angle now and then, but for the most part, that cut scene didn't stand out enough to rip me out of the experience of playing a game. Even if there was nudity in it, I doubt that it would have ripped me away simply because of the way the nudity and sex was presented.
God of War (the first one...never played the others) also had tits, but there wasn't really a focus on them whenever they came up. The game just happened to have naked women. It was almost casual the way they were animated and shot. I remember when I first played through the tutorial and Kratos woke up in bed with two nude women that I was not at all disgusted or ripped away.
I dunno, I guess what I'm trying to get at is that games should not make such big deals of sex scenes when it doesn't fit the style of the rest of the game. Yeah, I know a lot of you are going to say that it's just escapist fantasy and that you want to enjoy it, but there are sex games out there. Do games with real stories and meaning need to have these jarring pander shots scattered throughout when there are others that are totally willing to fill that niche anyway?
Long winded rant aside, my ultimate point is that "True maturity is restraint" not rebellion NOR celibacy. You can make your character models as sexy as you want, but leave the camera be and don't render the sex scenes in an entirely different fashion from the rest of the game.
Well, that's my 2 cents. What do you all have to say? Rant away.
EDIT: Guys, you seem to be missing my point. It's NOT the fact that they have sex that bothers me! It is the way the camera pans over it that makes me uncomfortable to play. I wrote all this up here for a reason, to explain those feelings. Come on, it's not THAT long of a read.
