Let's Talk About Sex (In Gaming)
- Mackenzie Glover
- Jun 24
- 5 min read
There was a moment in Cyberpunk 2077 that stood out to me the most. It wasn’t a big action packed gunfight, or an explosive car chase through the neon lit streets of Night City, it was something far more intimate. After several missions attending to the needs of a woman named Panam, who was a tough, battle-hardened desert fighter, you need to take shelter in an abandoned house during a sandstorm. It’s just you two alone, and needing comfort. There had been subtle hints thrown at the player, about a possibility of romance, but this moment is when it appears for the first time properly.
You’re sat together on a couch, and she inches closer to you, and then puts her legs over yours. You are given a choice, whether to pull her closer and make a move, or try to speak to her about her emotions. If you chose the former, like myself, you expected a typical video game moment. One that appears in far too many video games. A sex scene. Two 3D models would be animated to rub up against each other for thirty seconds or so, and it would always feel weird. In the game though, when you chose to make a move, Panam would actually pull back. She would move away from you, and explain how she isn’t ready for things to get serious. This moment shocked me, because it wasn’t your typical gamer fantasy, it felt real. It felt as though Panam had made a real, and genuine reaction, instead of giving into what most gamers wanted out of that scene.
A power fantasy in games is usually a good thing, because games are made as an escape. I want to be a super powerful mercenary who can dodge bullets and hack turrets and somersault into the air. It’s different when it’s applied to real world situations though. I could explain how the realistic wars depicted in the Call of Duty franchise often vear into the harmful, such as that moment where you gun down thousands of civilians in an airport in the mission “No Russian”, but for this ramble I will just stick to talking about the intimate.
It’s weird in so many role playing games when it obviously wants you to be powerful. You spend the whole game leveling up, learning new abilities, and becoming stronger than the enemies ahead of you. It makes sense, and it works, but when that power applies to your ability to flirt and sleep with a woman, it gets very icky. It’s that weird grey area between what’s real and what isn’t. Gamers (hopefully) know that they can’t train some muscles and develop the ability to shoot fireballs, but they might not know that they can’t just act like a sex pest and get what they want.
My mind is cast to, most likely, my favourite video game of all time, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Released in 2015, by the same developers as the aforementioned Cyberpunk 2077. I like comparing these two because in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, it is the pure definition of a male fantasy. You play a good looking, cool, charming mercenary who has magic and friends in all walks of life. This guy is well known, has women diving at him from start to finish, and is tough as nails. A minor side point here is to say I do genuinely love the character, Geralt, because he is just a joy to watch. He has fun quips that don’t get in the way of serious moments, he has a genuine, serious goal of trying to find his adopted daughter before she befalls mysterious pursuers, and his performance by Doug Cockle is fantastic. My original point still stands though. He is a male fantasy and he is what everyone wants to be. The developers made a point at the beginning of the game that Geralt is ostracized by society, and people consider him a freak, but this lasts only a few hours of playtime in a game that stretches into the hundreds. We don’t see much of his shortcomings, because he essentially doesn’t have any. His interactions with the various strong, powerful sorceresses in the game is something I want to focus on right now though.
As a 12 year old who definitely shouldn’t have had access to The Witcher 3, I remember how the main character comes across various beautiful women during the story. There would be several choices of dialogue, and it would usually include a normal comment, and a weird flirty comment. The harmful thing about this game was that the flirty comment would essentially always “work”. When that flirty dialogue option appears, a sex scene would surely follow. It felt like a game that rewarded being a weird sex pest. If you aggressively flirted with women, you get to see boobs. As a young male, this was all great to me, but as I’ve matured and grown up, it’s just weird. This is why 5 years after The Witcher 3, when Cyberpunk 2077 released, and I saw the scene with Panam, it felt like progression. A game studio, and I, had both grown up.
What does this all mean? Nothing. I remember the mission that followed that moment in the house, was a weird and gross sex scene where you pilot a vehicle with Panam linking your brains. Imagine Pacific Rim, where two people are needed to control a huge vehicle. For some reason, this results in you both being horny enough to want to have sex. It’s full of awkward camera angles of your own player character and Panam rubbing into each other, various clothes popping in and out because of how broken the game was on release. The music was far too loud and only interrupted by two voice actors who clearly weren’t getting paid very well for this. A horrid tonal shift of the tender moment shared between you in the mission previous. This felt like a studio tried to make something real and genuine, only for them to pander to the male player base.
I have basically no point here, I just think it’s interesting to compare the approach that two games have to intimacy. I wish we’d move away from sex as a “reward” for doing certain missions or achieving certain criteria, because life is a lot more complicated than that. Unless it’s not? People love going out to the club and trying to sleep with whoever. That’s also completely fine. Sex is just weird isn’t it? Thanks for reading whatever this is.
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