Pornography has several values beyond serving as a test-driver for new media. As suggested above in the Betamax-VHS battle, porn, with little cash to spare and its nose to the ground, is often first to sniff out the practical uses of new media, leading the way for profitable investment by the mainstream.
Furthermore, porn draws curiosity seekers, who stay to see what else the new media can do. There is a convenient dovetailing in the audience for computers and pornography: young, white males dominate both markets. Gadget-playing, girl-crazy young men will stay longer at a terminal that supplies both girls and gadgets.(48) Finally, several studies have suggested that, far from creating sexist, violent feelings in young men, pornography has a calming, cathartic effect, easing adolescent cares with a dose of mild erotica.(49)
Other values of pornography have been suggested. For one thing, the very fear that pornography arouses in parents may redound to society's advantage. In order to keep indecent messages from reaching their computer-literate children, parents themselves must become computer-literate and learn to use blocking and screening devices. If Congress is allowed to assume the parental role, parents will have less incentive to learn what their children already know.(50) Furthermore, far from fearing what computer sex may be teaching, parents can use the computer as an opportunity to discuss sex in a meaningful way with their children.(51)
Finally, sex on the computer is far better for children than another kind of sex that is drawing Congressional fire, that is, sex on television.(52) While sex and violence on television shoulder the blame for sex and violence in society, several studies have suggested that something else about television is the real culprit. That is, the passive, solitary nature of television-watching is an anti-social activity, which steals children's time away from more active, engaging kinds of play. Thus, when children erupt in violence after watching television, it is not because they have been watching too much sex or violence but because they have been watching too much television.(53) Computers, by contrast, are interactive and socializing, feeding the very skills that TV starves. Therefore, anything, including the risque, that entices children from the TV to the computer is a good thing.(54)
I will add that porn has educational value in its own right. People who are all uptight and judgmental about porn are typically also all uptight and judgmental about sex generally. For many youth, these illicit forms of sexual materials are the best education they can pursue on a topic that is pretty vital to quality of life (for a variety of reasons). Asking uptight adults isn't going to get them useful, meaningful feedback (and may result in disinformation -- or even punishment) and asking other people their own age is likely to get them little or no information, mixed up with a lot of misinformation. Porn has the additional advantage that while it transmits information, it doesn't transmit disease or cause pregnancy.
Essentially I'm saying that the developers/distributors that make these kind of products will find a way to reach their customers some way or another. Just because microsoft makes this statement may indeed hinder the market from developing in the early beginnings. But it will not stop the perverts in the long run. Not that I'm against this product in any particular way - as I think people are to be free to explore their sexual fantasies. I am saying however, that the market will be (probably) too big to be ignored.
there is no need for me to define perverts. But according to wikipedia...:
Perversion is a concept describing those types of human behavior that are a serious deviation from what is considered to be orthodox or normal. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pervert
Like hell it won't. Microsoft's approval isn't the only way to get code running on a 360, and the Kinect is wide open. I give it a couple of months before everyone can happily thrust their hips at their televisions and rack up orgasm points.
If it weren't for sex, none of us would be here today.
Yet we still hold some kind of Puritanical censor in our minds that tells us it's the worst possible thing in society.
How ironic that it should be banned on the Xbox, where you can encounter every form of violence and gore imaginable.
Would some 3D rendered boobs have been ok if they were zombie boobs?
No. It is equally bad to put realistic violence in the hands of grade school kids; I won't let my 11 year old play Call of Duty, and am actually a little queasy about Halo.
I don't like that AO does to gaming what NC-17 does to movies; adults should be free to play adult-themed games. But I also don't see it as a great loss to humanity. It sucks a little that Microsoft and Sony are catering to a lazy style of parenting, but you can write those games for an uncensored platform instead.
I'm not sure that video games really make exposure to violence that much worse - certainly when I was in my youth in the '70s we didn't have video games but we did have imaginations that turned just about anything we could get our hands on into an imaginary weapon (being in the UK the Bad Guys were, of course, the Germans).
I let my 11 year old play CoD and Halo - sometimes with a twinge of concern but as all his friends do it would have to be more than a twinge to make me stop him.
I don't think this has impaired his view of violence in the real world - we watched a TV recreation of the events of Bloody Sunday and he was genuinely shocked by the behavior of British soldiers even though his school has an Army Cadet unit and he has friends with big brothers in the forces.
I don't think less of you for letting your 11 year old play CoD.
But: why do you have that twinge? And, what does "what all his friends do" really have to do with your own parenting decisions? All my son's friends drink bottomless cups of carbonated sugar syrup, too.
This is a very big problem in the games industry right now, because all controlled platforms have committed to not selling adult only games. The consequences of which have filtered all the way down the chain, and the chilling effect is seen almost every single day in the games industry.
The problem is that if you get an ESRB AO rating, no one will publish it, because everyone believes that Adults Only means porn or gratuitous sex. And maybe it does. But it can also mean violence, or mature content, or things which are simply not appropriate for non-adults. I don't think the distinction should actually exist, honestly, but that's a separate discussion.
But the problem is if you consider a game of some sort that has extensive use of graphic violence, then you put yourself directly in line for a bit censorship banhammer.
NC-17 films can still be made. But effectively, AO games cannot, as the market space for it is artificially shrunk through censorship.
So any time you are working on a game, and the violence or sex or maturity of content starts reaching a potential AO level, it gets cut, or toned down.
There are game ideas right now which can never be made, thanks to platform censorship. It holds the industry back.
There are game ideas right now which can never be made, thanks to platform censorship. It holds the industry back.
Uhhh huh. And do you think we're really missing out on some great works of art which can't fit under the sex-and-violence low bar set by the Grand Theft Auto series?
"Adult-themed" games have existed in the past, from Custer's Last Stand to Soft Porn Adventure. As far as I know none has actually been good, and despite the "adults only" label have appealed only to sniggering twelve-year-old boys.
This kind of argument is exactly the kind which leads to the problems. First, you assume that AO means sex. Second, you assume that if it's AO, it can't be subjectively of high quality.
The easiest way to shoot down your arguments is to google lists of movies rated NC-17, which is the rating which disallows anyone under 18 from watching a movie, and which is the functional equivalent of ESRB's AO.
Among that list you will see movies like Requiem for a Dream, and documentaries like This Film is Not Yet Rated, which is actually very relevant to this whole discussion. (The film actually chose to be unrated, as being rated would have earned the documentary NC-17).
Censorship does happen. Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, was censored to avoid an NC-17 rating. You're correct NC-17 movies do get made, but how often can you go to your local cinema and see an NC-17 movie?
Only in the US release -- extra bodies were added in to the orgy scene to hide certain things.
I saw it when it came out in the uncensored version and, frankly, the less said about the whole movie the better. Stanley Kubrick made some of the greatest films of all time... and then he made Eyes Wide Shut as an old man because it gave him an excuse to look at boobs for six months.
True it was in the US release. I guess I assumed that since we're talking about censoring nudity we were talking primarily about the US market.
This is getting off topic, but I don't think it was a bad movie, although certainly not his best. Despite the nudity, the film is strangely un-erotic. I think you are unfair about Kubrick's motives in making the movie. I also think there's much that can be said about the movie, For example: http://www.collativelearning.com/EYES%20WIDE%20SHUT%20analys...
I've seen a lot of NC-17 equivalent movies here in Canada, in theatres, but that's likely because our ratings system is significantly more permissive than the MPAA's. It does involve going to smaller theatres a lot of the time, but that doesn't bother me at all.
But the cinema argument is also a bit of a red herring -- your DVD player doesn't refuse to play a DVD of an NC-17 film. Movies have two (or three, if you count TV) vectors for delivery, games do not (in that making different platform versions is often the equivalent to making different movies).
Hey, I'm not assuming that brilliant and artistically valid video games with adult content can't exist. I'm just cynically pointing out that they're incredibly unlikely to actually get made.
Movies are a very different sort of art form, with a very different sort of maturity level. Also, I think it's easier to have explicit (or weird) sex in a movie without it becoming pornography [ * ] than it is in a video game since in a video game you are the protagonist. A Clockwork Orange is (I assume) rated NC-17 due largely to its rather nasty rape scene... try imagining a video game version of that and you can see we've crossed the line from Serious Art to Fucked Up Shit.
Anyway, anyone who wants to develop an effectively NC-17 rated game is welcome to write one for the PC (or Mac, or Linux!) where there are no gatekeepers to stop you. I have difficulty imagining what a non-sucky one would look like, but maybe I just have a limited imagination.
[ * ] Oh, and if people want to make games which are just pornography I don't have a problem with that... except that I suspect they'll wind up as bad video games and bad pornography.
Well the irony of developing an NC-17 game for PC would be that the kind of budget you'd need to make a truly quality AO game would likely outstrip the amount PC games make. So trying to do an AO game on PC would really just result in a bad game that would further your own arguments.
Didn't you say upthread that the most lucrative market for games is 13 year olds? How much money do you think there is in AO games, anyways? (Serious question).
Well, the average age of gamers is over 30 at this point in time. I'm 31, and a game developer, but honestly, I'm finding games less and less satisfying as they continue to cater to the teenage boy in me, who is less and less as each year passes. This year I have played almost nothing, to be honest.
I suspect there would be a large market for some truly mature games (and now I'm not talking about AO so much as games that have mature content, not tits and blood), but it's hard to say for certain because the big companies have decided that all the money is in the 13-16 year old range, and that's where games stay firmly entrenched.
It's true that there's a lot of money there, but I think a lot of it is simply that that is where all the games are being directed. It's a feedback loop, where more money is put in to 13-16, and so more money is made there.
Once developers start leaving childish stories and content behind, and moving on to meaningful and emotional content, or more serious and complex content, we should see a shift towards selling significantly more at higher age brackets.
I was personally disappointed in Heavy Rain because it was the potential for a mature game sullied by horrible controls and interface. Had they simply stuck to more traditional control schemes I have no doubt that the game would have done much better. Of course, that wouldn't have made the writing any better, but at least it would have been a step in that direction.
Honestly, I'm looking forward to indie game development becoming more and more prevalent, where developers not beholden to marketing can influence bigger development by branching out and exploring new territory.
I guess maybe it's not the specific answer you were hoping for, and somewhat meandering, but I do believe it's simply a case of money-in-money-out. If people looked for it, it would be there.
Also: doesn't Blizzard make metric crap-tons of money on PC games? Isn't that a pretty powerful counterargument to "AO games can't make money on the PC"?
No, because Blizzard is now making online-only games which are A) immune (or at least resistant) to piracy, B) are built with an art style that is compatible with low-end PCs, but not so much with the realism which would even remotely trigger an AO rating, as the issues become stronger the closer you get to photo-realism.
One could argue Valve as well, with respect to PC games, but they have their own reasons for being successful, which involves building and supporting a game with multiple releases and constant attention which is atypical of the industry.
Yes, it's possible to make money on PC, in the same way it's possible to make money with an iPhone game or a search portal. That doesn't mean that doing so is even remotely viable for the fast majority of people who would wish to do so.
I'd be interested to know what you envisage this hypothetical high-budget non-crap AO-rated console game as actually being like. Because my main problem with this discussion is that I can't imagine a video game that incorporates explicit sex without it being... well, just a particularly embarrassing form of porn.
Also worse is the reason the platform companies do this -- because it is in their best monetary interests to keep the market images of the consoles as "kid friendly." They want that parents can randomly pick a game off a shelf without ever looking at it without fear of putting something inappropriate for a child in the console.
They don't want that a child could ever acquire something inappropriate for the console at all, in any channel, for fear that the reputation of the console would hurt sales in the sub-16 range.
The irony is that they want this so that they can continue selling M rated games to 13 year olds, as that's the most lucrative section of sales for M rated games, as they stand on gaming platforms.
Because really, if you sit back and look at it, the level of 'mature' content that ends up in actual M rated games is the exact kind that appeals to young teens, and everyone knows it.
Why is that inherently bad? The companies release a product with a target market; some content for the platform would be a deal-breaker for their positioning, so they disallow it. It's a free market and companies are allowed to make those kinds of decisions.
If there was huge pent-up demand for adult-themed games, wouldn't it stand to reason that some console manufacturer would buck the trend to collect the profits?
Incidentally, if the most lucrative part of the market is 13 year olds buying M-rated games, doesn't that sort of imply either that there isn't much money to be made from making AO games, or that the eventual audience for those games would be 13 year olds?
Absolutely. The idea that this vacuum of hyper-violent or graphically-sexual video games is somehow a "problem" is more a treatise on what some people believe the market should be more than what the market actually is. It's absurd for precisely the reasons you state. If there was a market for it, however seedy or unorthodox, it would exist to service that market for a tidy profit. It doesn't exist, therefore no one believes it would be profitable.
It is not about hyper-violent or graphically sexual games. It is about games which can conceivably address that content, or use that content for effect, without fear of being marginalized or censored.
You answered his comment but not mine. My point doesn't depend on superficial adult content. If there's money in artistically-valid AO games, why doesn't someone capitalize on that? In reality, aren't we talking about AO developers being unhappy that they can't capitalize on the success of a platform that is successful because it successfully targets 13 year olds?
Hi, I'm Chris Hansen, tune in for a special episode of Dateline NBC, entitled, how your adolescent is having sex with the video game system in your basement...
This is a really stupid article. Everybody knew that Microsoft would never approve a sex game for the Xbox 360, but this was never about that.
They're integrating Kinect support into their already existing Windows sex games using the thriXXX engine. They're using open source Kinect drivers and software to make it possible, they don't need (or want) Microsoft's approval. Microsoft can't do anything to stop this.
45 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadhttp://www.law.indiana.edu/fclj/pubs/v49/no1/johnson.html
Pornography has several values beyond serving as a test-driver for new media. As suggested above in the Betamax-VHS battle, porn, with little cash to spare and its nose to the ground, is often first to sniff out the practical uses of new media, leading the way for profitable investment by the mainstream.
Furthermore, porn draws curiosity seekers, who stay to see what else the new media can do. There is a convenient dovetailing in the audience for computers and pornography: young, white males dominate both markets. Gadget-playing, girl-crazy young men will stay longer at a terminal that supplies both girls and gadgets.(48) Finally, several studies have suggested that, far from creating sexist, violent feelings in young men, pornography has a calming, cathartic effect, easing adolescent cares with a dose of mild erotica.(49)
Other values of pornography have been suggested. For one thing, the very fear that pornography arouses in parents may redound to society's advantage. In order to keep indecent messages from reaching their computer-literate children, parents themselves must become computer-literate and learn to use blocking and screening devices. If Congress is allowed to assume the parental role, parents will have less incentive to learn what their children already know.(50) Furthermore, far from fearing what computer sex may be teaching, parents can use the computer as an opportunity to discuss sex in a meaningful way with their children.(51)
Finally, sex on the computer is far better for children than another kind of sex that is drawing Congressional fire, that is, sex on television.(52) While sex and violence on television shoulder the blame for sex and violence in society, several studies have suggested that something else about television is the real culprit. That is, the passive, solitary nature of television-watching is an anti-social activity, which steals children's time away from more active, engaging kinds of play. Thus, when children erupt in violence after watching television, it is not because they have been watching too much sex or violence but because they have been watching too much television.(53) Computers, by contrast, are interactive and socializing, feeding the very skills that TV starves. Therefore, anything, including the risque, that entices children from the TV to the computer is a good thing.(54)
I will add that porn has educational value in its own right. People who are all uptight and judgmental about porn are typically also all uptight and judgmental about sex generally. For many youth, these illicit forms of sexual materials are the best education they can pursue on a topic that is pretty vital to quality of life (for a variety of reasons). Asking uptight adults isn't going to get them useful, meaningful feedback (and may result in disinformation -- or even punishment) and asking other people their own age is likely to get them little or no information, mixed up with a lot of misinformation. Porn has the additional advantage that while it transmits information, it doesn't transmit disease or cause pregnancy.
How ironic that it should be banned on the Xbox, where you can encounter every form of violence and gore imaginable.
Would some 3D rendered boobs have been ok if they were zombie boobs?
I don't like that AO does to gaming what NC-17 does to movies; adults should be free to play adult-themed games. But I also don't see it as a great loss to humanity. It sucks a little that Microsoft and Sony are catering to a lazy style of parenting, but you can write those games for an uncensored platform instead.
I let my 11 year old play CoD and Halo - sometimes with a twinge of concern but as all his friends do it would have to be more than a twinge to make me stop him.
I don't think this has impaired his view of violence in the real world - we watched a TV recreation of the events of Bloody Sunday and he was genuinely shocked by the behavior of British soldiers even though his school has an Army Cadet unit and he has friends with big brothers in the forces.
But: why do you have that twinge? And, what does "what all his friends do" really have to do with your own parenting decisions? All my son's friends drink bottomless cups of carbonated sugar syrup, too.
The problem is that if you get an ESRB AO rating, no one will publish it, because everyone believes that Adults Only means porn or gratuitous sex. And maybe it does. But it can also mean violence, or mature content, or things which are simply not appropriate for non-adults. I don't think the distinction should actually exist, honestly, but that's a separate discussion.
But the problem is if you consider a game of some sort that has extensive use of graphic violence, then you put yourself directly in line for a bit censorship banhammer.
NC-17 films can still be made. But effectively, AO games cannot, as the market space for it is artificially shrunk through censorship.
So any time you are working on a game, and the violence or sex or maturity of content starts reaching a potential AO level, it gets cut, or toned down.
There are game ideas right now which can never be made, thanks to platform censorship. It holds the industry back.
Uhhh huh. And do you think we're really missing out on some great works of art which can't fit under the sex-and-violence low bar set by the Grand Theft Auto series?
"Adult-themed" games have existed in the past, from Custer's Last Stand to Soft Porn Adventure. As far as I know none has actually been good, and despite the "adults only" label have appealed only to sniggering twelve-year-old boys.
The easiest way to shoot down your arguments is to google lists of movies rated NC-17, which is the rating which disallows anyone under 18 from watching a movie, and which is the functional equivalent of ESRB's AO.
Among that list you will see movies like Requiem for a Dream, and documentaries like This Film is Not Yet Rated, which is actually very relevant to this whole discussion. (The film actually chose to be unrated, as being rated would have earned the documentary NC-17).
I saw it when it came out in the uncensored version and, frankly, the less said about the whole movie the better. Stanley Kubrick made some of the greatest films of all time... and then he made Eyes Wide Shut as an old man because it gave him an excuse to look at boobs for six months.
This is getting off topic, but I don't think it was a bad movie, although certainly not his best. Despite the nudity, the film is strangely un-erotic. I think you are unfair about Kubrick's motives in making the movie. I also think there's much that can be said about the movie, For example: http://www.collativelearning.com/EYES%20WIDE%20SHUT%20analys...
Edited: Terrible grammar.
But the cinema argument is also a bit of a red herring -- your DVD player doesn't refuse to play a DVD of an NC-17 film. Movies have two (or three, if you count TV) vectors for delivery, games do not (in that making different platform versions is often the equivalent to making different movies).
Movies are a very different sort of art form, with a very different sort of maturity level. Also, I think it's easier to have explicit (or weird) sex in a movie without it becoming pornography [ * ] than it is in a video game since in a video game you are the protagonist. A Clockwork Orange is (I assume) rated NC-17 due largely to its rather nasty rape scene... try imagining a video game version of that and you can see we've crossed the line from Serious Art to Fucked Up Shit.
Anyway, anyone who wants to develop an effectively NC-17 rated game is welcome to write one for the PC (or Mac, or Linux!) where there are no gatekeepers to stop you. I have difficulty imagining what a non-sucky one would look like, but maybe I just have a limited imagination.
[ * ] Oh, and if people want to make games which are just pornography I don't have a problem with that... except that I suspect they'll wind up as bad video games and bad pornography.
It's a pretty nasty catch 22, really.
I suspect there would be a large market for some truly mature games (and now I'm not talking about AO so much as games that have mature content, not tits and blood), but it's hard to say for certain because the big companies have decided that all the money is in the 13-16 year old range, and that's where games stay firmly entrenched.
It's true that there's a lot of money there, but I think a lot of it is simply that that is where all the games are being directed. It's a feedback loop, where more money is put in to 13-16, and so more money is made there.
Once developers start leaving childish stories and content behind, and moving on to meaningful and emotional content, or more serious and complex content, we should see a shift towards selling significantly more at higher age brackets.
I was personally disappointed in Heavy Rain because it was the potential for a mature game sullied by horrible controls and interface. Had they simply stuck to more traditional control schemes I have no doubt that the game would have done much better. Of course, that wouldn't have made the writing any better, but at least it would have been a step in that direction.
Honestly, I'm looking forward to indie game development becoming more and more prevalent, where developers not beholden to marketing can influence bigger development by branching out and exploring new territory.
I guess maybe it's not the specific answer you were hoping for, and somewhat meandering, but I do believe it's simply a case of money-in-money-out. If people looked for it, it would be there.
Also: doesn't Blizzard make metric crap-tons of money on PC games? Isn't that a pretty powerful counterargument to "AO games can't make money on the PC"?
One could argue Valve as well, with respect to PC games, but they have their own reasons for being successful, which involves building and supporting a game with multiple releases and constant attention which is atypical of the industry.
Yes, it's possible to make money on PC, in the same way it's possible to make money with an iPhone game or a search portal. That doesn't mean that doing so is even remotely viable for the fast majority of people who would wish to do so.
They don't want that a child could ever acquire something inappropriate for the console at all, in any channel, for fear that the reputation of the console would hurt sales in the sub-16 range.
The irony is that they want this so that they can continue selling M rated games to 13 year olds, as that's the most lucrative section of sales for M rated games, as they stand on gaming platforms.
Because really, if you sit back and look at it, the level of 'mature' content that ends up in actual M rated games is the exact kind that appeals to young teens, and everyone knows it.
If there was huge pent-up demand for adult-themed games, wouldn't it stand to reason that some console manufacturer would buck the trend to collect the profits?
Incidentally, if the most lucrative part of the market is 13 year olds buying M-rated games, doesn't that sort of imply either that there isn't much money to be made from making AO games, or that the eventual audience for those games would be 13 year olds?
They're integrating Kinect support into their already existing Windows sex games using the thriXXX engine. They're using open source Kinect drivers and software to make it possible, they don't need (or want) Microsoft's approval. Microsoft can't do anything to stop this.
You can read the full press release at http://kinecthacks.net/kinect-sex/ . It's pretty what they meant.