Changing the Culture Around Sex and Nudity in Video Games

My name is Bobby Ricci. I’m the owner and founder of Eek! Games, and I conceptualized and wrote the game House Party, a game that’s gone on to sell over half a million copies and has exceptionally positive review scores amongst Steam users. It also contains sex. 

Contrary to what you might have heard, House Party isn’t a sex simulator. Sex is a mechanic of my game just as it is in Mass Effect 3 or The Witcher 3 — acting as a reward, reaction, or a story element that is part of a much grander experience. Sex may be a more prominent feature because of the smaller scale of my game compared to the ones listed above, but just like those other games, my focus has always been in creating an awesome player experience.

But unlike the games above, and despite overwhelmingly positive player reviews and reception, my development journey has been occasionally hassled with the published opinions of critics who claim House Party to be misogynistic, homophobic, and all-around icky. And while their opinions are their own, the arguments made against House Party always seem to be based in a clear cultural disconnect about sexual content in video games, especially when the player is in control of that content.

When I created House Party, I didn’t expect it to get the kind of attention it did — at least not with a magnifying glass held up to its sexual content. While the main focus of House Party is its diverging decision-based storylines, the scenes that make up only about 5% of its content, the sexual encounters, are what some people know and claim House Party to be. It’s with this 5% that people label my game a sex simulator, or “pornographic”, neither of which is the aim.

In the early iterations of House Party, I thought of completely censoring all sexual encounters within the game, but this was in 2015 when the most popular thing on television was “Game of Thrones.” That show was chock-full of violence, but it also didn’t hold back on its portrayals of sex. Nudity wasn’t ever a surprise on that show, it was an element found in nearly every episode, including various cultural taboos. Why, I thought, should my game hold back if the most popular show of the time didn’t have to? 

Whether it be back in 2015 or even present day, the darker, more primalistic themes found in television comedies and dramas alike are the same: sex and violence. They are the most prominent elements found within popular narratives. The reason why that is can only be derived from both Western and human culture as a whole. It just is. 

But when it comes to video games, the most prominent medium of today’s entertainment industry, the theme of violence reigns supreme while the theme of sex is hardly ever to be found — and it’s shunned when it is found (not by players mind you, but by critics despite positive player reception). Doom Eternal revels in gruesomely ripping the spine from a demon revenant, and the ever-popular battle royales are based in leaving a wake of bodies in your trail. Stream these games to Twitch all you want, but don’t even attempt to stream Genital Jousting, a game that doesn’t even really have sex in it, unless you’re looking for a ban. 

As a whole, this is how it is. The list of games that are banned on Twitch is small, but it’s fairly encompassing of the popular adult content you can find in mainstream markets. There isn’t a single game on the list of banned Twitch games that found itself on that list because of violence. 

House Party is a comedy, and with that in mind, the dialogues and scenes taking place outside of the sexual content was and always is our main focus. It’s also a choose-your-own-adventure of sorts with dozens of endings to dozens of stories. The player is placed in a sandbox environment and allowed to make any choices that they’d like, including terrible ones. But no matter how terrible the choice, it never results in the player landing in any kind of nonconsenual sex because again, the focus of the game is not sex, but comedy, and there needs to be an air of levety in any of the sitautions we present to the player to deliver on that. 

Again, the detractors of House Party would have you believe otherwise. In 2017, two years into my development of House Party, an article was written that (not really) detailed a playthrough of a very early build of the game. The author made some good points about the game being bad, because I was a solo developer and it was at that point, in fact, bad. But his comments didn’t stop there. The author also wanted his readership to know he found the game to view women as objects to be won and that the entire party was a ruse to get the player into some not-totally consensual sex. This was never the case, not in 2017 and certainly not now. 

What was clear was that the author believed that House Party had sex in it and not much else. He played enough of the game to see that certain player decisions allowed you to play the role of a dirtbag, but failed to play any further. Anybody who had spent enough time playing House Party, even in that very early iteration, would have understood that you can take on many roles within the party and being the dirtbag is just one role of many that you can choose– all of which are meant to be played in a comedic sense. This stuff isn’t just a parody of a party; it’s a parody of parody.  

But instead, the author of the article chose to indulge in the stigma around sex in video games, showing it in a negative light and then insinuating that anybody who plays House Party is a misogynist (and homophobic for some reason… even though the game contains gay and lesbian content).  While I believe his opinions to be unfounded, I don’t think he was trying to attack an entire playerbase. Rather, he was toeing the line that so many game journalists seem to toe: sex in games is bad, because sex in games is bad. 

Game journalists are the voice of a larger gaming community, and with a quick stroke of the keys can hinder or help a game’s success. For the adult market, their voices are very much skewed towards the former. This isn’t always without due critique, but more often than not, they seem to allow their cultural bias towards sex speak on their behalf.  

Outside of journalists, the actual players have made it very clear how they feel about House Party. Since launch the game has fluctuated between 85% – 95% positive player ratings on Steam. Paired with strong sales, it’s clear House Party is offering something players are looking for — something not enough games are willing to explore. 

I mentioned earlier about the disconnect between depictions of sex in television compared to video games, and it all seems to come down to player agency. An everyday users’ ability to make choices. To consciously say I’m going to do this. This idea is the prelude to those political arguments of yore, the arguments that poisited killing someone in a game would lead you to kill someone in real life. We all remember those tiring days. 

I believe that developers in the adult games industry are living in those days right now, even if it’s never being said directly to our faces. As the arguments against violence in video games dissolved over the years, critics don’t find problems in a player’s choice to go on a mindless gun-toting rampage in Grand Theft Auto V or any other violence-fueled experience that can be found in countless popular games. But with sex and nudity, it’s like a different taboo that hasn’t been uncovered and people aren’t supposed to talk about, much less play! How did we get to this point? 

In a recent Joe Rogan podcast, ID Software Creative Director Hugo Martin when questioned about the game’s violence, went on to explain why Doom: Eternal has no cursing or sexual content: which essentially boiled down to he wants his 9-year old to be able to play it with him. Doom is hands-down the most violent game released in 2020, and it probably will hold that throne all year. Streams of Doom: Eternal gameplay can be found all over the front page of Twitch at the time of this writing. Here we are at a point in our industry where an industry titan is explaining the only way he could violently murder through hordes of demons with his young son is if there wasn’t any sexual content. Does this seem right to you? 

It’s the most interesting part of this whole conundrum to me: if House Party had been all about murdering everybody at the party, would I ever have found myself under such scrutiny? The answer is clearly not, as that game was released only a few years ago to applause. 

In all reality, if I had removed all elements of sex and instead played into causing a bloodbath, House Party wouldn’t raise a single eyebrow. It wouldn’t come close to measuring up to the violence readily available in games like Mortal Kombat and my game would have just been another in the pack of hundreds that freely offers a player the opportunity to mercilessly kill and maim. No matter the extent I pushed on the violence offered up, I would face no limitations like I have when offering minimal amounts of sexual content into a video game.

What is desperately needed is some consistency between how we view these two major themes. Both violence and sex should be approached with consideration if they’re to be used in our mediums, but to hide one while the other shines speaks directly to the disconnect from other mediums to video games. I, amongst other adult developers, hope to change that. 

I cannot say I’ve been completely unassailable for the choices that I’ve made in the development of House Party. As the game evolved, as well as my understanding of the culture I wanted to build around my game, it was clear that some of my narratives needed to change for the sake of the game I wanted to create and the message I wanted to send.

Never was a storyline written from a place of ill-intent. House Party’s gameplay is all about choice, and in the beginning I didn’t want to limit that choice in any manner. I wanted the player to be able to see the routes available to them and think “Wow, they even thought of that?” The idea of creating an adventure with endings the player never saw coming, every developer chases that feeling. Including darker paths was one way to achieve just that. But as time went on, my vision grew to realize I didn’t have to include things that I was uncomfortable with or undermined the levity of the game to be able to achieve that vast sense of freedom and choice. 

This was a great lesson for me as a developer of adult games, and a valuable one. The rules for this genre aren’t written in stone and it was through taking missteps that I could grow and my game could evolve. That evolution still hasn’t reached its final stage — I’m always adjusting dialogues and actions to help players of all sorts feel comfortable and included.

One of my favorite parts of the development process was seeing how the universal appeal of House Party continued to expand. From very early on, it was clear that people from all across the social, sexual, and cultural spectrum wanted to have their own experiences at the party.

This led me to begin work on a female playable character, and already there are multiple routes that include same-sex intercourse. There’s still much more I could do here too, but the lessons I’ve learned along the way were invaluable towards allowing House Party to become what it is today. These changes and additions are being made because I want whoever’s playing to feel that they can truly play their way. Because that’s player agency; playing exactly as you see fit. 

House Party is entirely about choice. While I’ve enjoyed every step of the learning process, I couldn’t help but notice that those darker choices that have since been removed were often the more popular choices amongst players.  It should be mentioned that these scenarios also included a counterpart “good guy” route in which the player chooses a more selfless route, but the darker of the two paths ended up being too… well, dark, and I wasn’t able to find a compromise between keeping the humorous tone of the game alive through the heavy theme of the content. This combined with the scene being written against a very early version of the game on old mechanics prompted a complete rewrite of the material.  Again, the game is and always has been about choice, but it’s a comedy first and foremost, and even though my development process centered on freedom of choice to the player in as many ways I could think of, I still had to make choices when it came to keeping the consistency and humor intact.

Is this though perhaps where a lot of the concern about sex in video games is stemming from? That instead of creating a generation of killers with Grand Theft Auto V, we’re creating a generation of sexual deviants with House Party? I can understand if this is a concern, but isn’t it the very concern that most publications were arguing against when politicians were trying to say that violent video games encourage violent behavior?

There are genuine conversations that need to happen here, because I’m not saying I’m completely right in my stance. As it stands to me and many other adult developers, we’re offering a fantasy escape that is just that — a fantasy. It’s hard for us to accept the limitations and taboo that’s rendered against us without fully understanding the reasoning behind them, and when the counterpart fantasy of violence is seemingly allotted no limitations whatsoever.

Either way you look at it, there is a clear stigma in Western culture about how sex is portrayed and engaged, especially when you’re giving the player control over that engagement. For a healthy adult niche of the games industry to bloom, our cultural approach needs to become more inclusive and understanding. No more hiding these concepts of sex away from the player, but rather encouraging a healthy exploration of the matter as a whole. To make this change, the media and platforms around gaming also need to be willing to explore this genre along with us instead of trying to shut us down at every turn. 

As time goes on, things are moving in the right direction. There are some journalists who are making a positive forward push into uncovering the themes of sex in games, and we’re better for it. Several outlets have featured entire series that explore sex in video games and have done so with a healthy desire to learn and know more about what this niche has become.

Just recently, PC Gamer published an article about House Party’s newest update which included the well-known Game Grumps as the newest members of the party. The article includes some of the same arguments of the past, including things we’ve removed or changed years ago, but as a whole, the author admits that the game has appeal, and it can only become more successful as the genre grows. 

Again, I have to wonder what would have become of my game if I had chosen to follow the route of unabashed violence without consequence as a gameplay. Would House Party have had its chance to shine on Twitch?

I am not the arbiter of what should and should not be allowed in a video game, just as my critics are not either. But until our industry aligns our ideals as a whole, I’m certainly not going to stop making engaging, fun content with sexual themes just because certain people find it icky.