In chapter 15 of How to Do Things with Videogames Bogost touches on the controversies of sex in videogames. He touches briefly on the hidden sex scenes in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Mass Effect, but then goes on to talk about earlier sex-themed videogames from decades past in the United States. Later he talks at length about modern sex-themed games with a focus on Japanese hentai or eroge games. Over all, he makes the point that these games may not entirely be for the achievement of pleasure through an interactive, digital medium, but more for the achievement of a sense of discomfort in confronting the perversions enjoyed by other people or cultures. In other words, we might find Japanese interactive porn to be very disturbing, but elsewhere others might find the very detailed (well, as detailed as you could get at the time) porn games of our Atari age to be just as disturbing.
While I appreciate his scope of going into the past and across the seas in discussing this subject, I feel as though the chapter might have benefited from discussing more modern games in North America. I was really surprised he didn’t talk about the Sims games, to be quite honest. The whole concept of being able to make “woohoo” with another sim is something that I remember being quite controversial a number of years back. These games were out before this book was published, but not the Sims Social, a facebook game that enables you to play a 2D version of the Sims games with friends on the social networking site. What makes this different, though, from the other Sims games is that it has no (visible) rating. The other Sims games are rated T for teen because of the sexual aspects of the game and parents are able to monitor that. But anyone can have a facebook account, and therefore anyone of any age can play the much more cartoony and family-friendly looking Sims Social, yet I have heard no controversy over it at all. Could it be said, then, that games involving sexual content are becoming less controversial as they grow in numbers? Are things different now than from 7 years ago when GTA: San Andreas was criticized?