There are a lot of things the world is short on right now. Fossil fuels, jobs, strong families, and finances are all in excruciatingly short supply and pretty much everyone knows about it. But one thing the world ISN’T short on is sex. It’s abundant, it’s free and it’s EVERYWHERE. And in times like these, people really need it! But great deals of us are abusing that abundance.
Television, literature, cinema, magazines, and even my favorite form of media: video games, are all littered with the stuff. It’s the culture, and if I had to guess, it’s here to stay. I’m going to go ahead and talk about sex in video games, because that’s where I’m most affected by it.
There’s a game company that I’ve always loved. They make awesome science fiction and high fantasy RPGs (that’s role-playing games. Yeah, I’m a geek and proud of it) and I’ve always enjoyed winding down with some dragon slaying or alien incinerating at the end of my boring teenage days. Thing is, their games back when I was like 14, were always super wholesome. All the “sex” was nothing more than a fade to black and then characters saying they had kissed. Whatever. But as time when on, the T rating went ahead and matured right along with me. I’ve always played M games, but never really the ones with any sort of sexual content. I never had a problem with any gore or language really. So anyway, the games this company, that I was a devout follower of, was beginning to make started carrying the loathed “Sexual Themes” tagline. Those usually meant I couldn’t rent or buy them because 1. They were only able for purchase by people ages 17+ and 2. My parents would certainly want to know what that rating was for. But of course, like any teenager who wants something, I played the system.
So while playing these games, I remember being stricken by the openly sexual characters. Open bisexuals, side boobs, sex scenes, touching, it was all there. And I was just like “whatever, it’s not like it’s anything worse than the freaking porn I watch” And so that was that. Fast forward a few years, and I still like the company (although the ending of one of their most recent titles is just flat out balls) and the sexuality in their games is getting worse and worse and it adds less and less to the games.
Now as a Christian, I really don’t like being tempted by beautiful blue alien women or scantily dressed medieval pirate ladies. But as a teenager, I certainly don’t mind staring them up and doing the usual “mental undressing” that us teens are so good at. But I love these games so much! They have such fantastical stories that are just so much deeper than any movie will ever be. Lovable characters, intense climaxes, action, the whole bit, it’s got quadruple whateverHollywoodwill ever have. And the worst part is that there just aren’t many gamers I know, no one to share my annoyance with. And most are more than happy to indulge in the sexual content.
I feel like the world freaks out too much at the games that 12 years olds smuggle into their PS2s to kill a bunch of people and not the kid who sneaks in the story driven RPG that involves deep, emotional sexual content. I feel like the rate at which gangster video games turn children into psychotic murderers is much much MUCH lower than the rate of kids who are lusting over women made of pixels and program code. I’m not saying that one epidemic is worse than the other, I’m just saying that I think we let the sex slither its way in, and there might not be a way to ever censor it. But sex isn’t only on the internet or the recesses ofHollywood. It’s in your Spider-Man comics, your T-rated shooting game, and even in the table top games we play. I feel like there’s a culture of geeks and role-players who need Jesus just as much as the rest of us. And I feel like we’re mostly being ignored just because the things we like aren’t as “cool” as the latest “check your brain at the door” action movie.
I’m sounding exactly like the lawyers and parents who cornered my favorite geek mediums. But I’m trying to sound more like a geek pleading for Christian geeks to reach out to more geeks! Just because some of them are trapped in their mother’s basement writing Dungeons and Dragons campaigns aren’t right on the streets asking for change, doesn’t mean that they don’t share the same hunger for hope and love.
Gamers, geeks, LARPers, theater types, nerds, comic book guys, are out there, and sex is in their stuff too. And I’m sick of hearing that we’re all a bunch of perverts and weirdos just because the sexual content in our media contains aliens or something. Have you watched Star Wars? The aliens are played by PEOPLE you know. Christian gamers who are sexually tempted by games are on the same playing field as Christians lusting after Megan Fox checking the engine in Transformers.