Games have come quite a ways when it comes to partial nudity.
12 years ago the sex scenes in Mass Effect 1 caused a “controversy” but nowadays we have The Witcher and even BioWare’s Dragon Age Inquisition showing boobs. Generally it just grants you a M rating and nobody really bats at eye about it anymore(and even in ME1’s cause it was just Fox News being Fox News, but it scared BioWare to the point where the next few games sex scenes were humping with clothes on)
Granted it’s still stupid how we treat it in general. Especially considering how sexualized characters are allowed to be, provided the women aren’t showing nipples.
You’d think cleaving a guy in half would cause a bigger fuss than sex.
To be fair, modern BioWare games are like 50% cutscene =P
Yeah but there’s a weird thing that men are allowed to be completely shirtless and women can have almost no clothing so long as the nipple is covered up.
Desire Demons from Dragon Age: Origin are a good example of that. They’re basically 1 step away from being naked.
ironicly, the beauty of a human body must be covered, to keep other humans from their animal (normal) reactions;
what an insult to keep a civilisation civilized, isn’t it?
To play Devil’s advocate: many of the people who played d2 when they were teenagers now have small children and AO content may be inappropriate to them because they know they’re going to play around their kids. The best thing blizz could do in this circumstance is perhaps have a setting that allows you to control how grisly/satanic it is. I know the D2 edgelords are going to want it ao, but plenty of people have grown up since then. When i was suggesting a game to my friend that was his main concern.
“Cinematic experiences”!
Nah, I like my Bioware games (if such games still existed anyway).
The fear of the (mostly women’s) naked body clearly has its root in some of the more dominant religions, which again has its root in preserving a specific “social order”, part of which includes suppressing women, but kinda also everyone else that wasn’t part of the elite. Making rules about basic human life is a convenient way to control things.
Probably depends on where in Europe that is.
That said, games should not include nudity or sex just for the sake of it. Then we are into immature territory instead. But when it serves the story or the world, then it is silly that there is a barrier against it.
Though I find it more silly that the US does not have a cultural barrier against the portrayal of violence than having a barrier against nudity.
As for Diablo games, they hardly have much story reason behind nudity outside of succubus demons. It would make some sense to ignore that for Blizzard, to make the game cater to a wider audience.
BUT at the same time, I am sure D4 will have plenty of violence, so we are back to the weird issue of genocidal combat being okay for kids, but breasts are not.
For the most part, this feels like a non-issue though.
The only issue the AO marketing prevents is people buying it who didn’t want AO. That cuts into profit margins. You want to hit as much of your base as possible (hence why i suggested settings)
We must cover it up but we also must make that covering very sexualized.
We’re a very strange society at times.
Yeah I still like BioWare’s games minus Anthem and Andromeda. Hopefully Dragon Age 4 sees them getting back on track.
I’d say it’d be nice if those people(who don’t always have that much of an interest in gaming in the first place) just could leave us be to our own devices, but I know that’ll never happen.
They have an interest in gaming; they want to make it illegal. Entertainment takes your mind away from thinking about their god after all.
It was kinda ‘fun’ to see conservative senate members in US recently arguing for a ban on loot boxes in video games (something I kinda agree with, since it is gambling targeted at kids), but then when they come up with their proposed legislation, it seems clear they want to go against gaming in general.
Well when I say interest in gaming, I mean interest in playing games =P
I’d say thankfully I live in Canada, but we’re not exactly doing better.
With loot boxes I think it’s kind of sad that customers make so many excuses for developers that we even needed governments to start getting involved in the first place.
I’d agree that loot boxes should probably be considered gambling(either simulated or real depending on if buy them with real money), but it’d be nice if customers had more of a backbone.
As far as the US being more lenient with violence than sex…
Sure it can go back to our Puritanical roots but the acceptance of violence in our culture, I believe, is a result of our inherent gun culture. Our nation was born out of violence in the Revolutionary War and so we’ve always just accepted that some good things come from violence. Our nation being one of them.
It is weird that sex has the connotations it has here but it has something to do with how immature we Americans are about it to begin with. Movies, adult or otherwise, with sexual themes have nothing to do with the reality of acts they depict.
We have to really look no further than GoT and the scene where Gilly is nearly sexually assaulted and the first thing she does after being “rescued” is to have sex with her savior. That’s just not reality.
So when we treat sex as immaturely as we do in our artistic mediums, then of course its going to come with some negative connotations.
