It's almost like sex is a natural part of human existence and it being taboo is the bit that really fucks people up.
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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I mean sexualized movies with skimpy ladies and jacked dudes, and smut books are not harmful broadly speaking, so I don't really see why video games would be different.
Skimming their data tables (don't have access to the journal outside of work), it feels like a really broad hodge pdge of semi-related studies (which the authors essentially admitted).
But it also kind of misses the point. The problem isn't titties or dicks in video games. The problem is the culture around it and what it reinforces and it very much goes far beyond video games. Big jiggly titties? You are a mature game. Dick size slider so you can rock a magnum dong that needs a monster condom? You are progressive. What? Both of those are just more male gaze?
And all of that is normalized. You won't see a significant change from the baseline because that IS the baseline.
You know what you almost never see (outside of those "problematic gay games that turn the kids into litter boxes")? A sexy twink. We all made the same joke about Lies of Timothee Chalamet being one of the better souslikes of the past decade but it is also very telling that we mostly see our twinks in full stillsuits or twelve layers of Victorian clothing. Look, but have enough chastity belts that nobody needs to be worried about being able to touch. And the moment you have a woman who doesn't have an hourglass figure? See: The Last Of Us 2.
Which is the issue. We have a cult of toxic misogyny that insists everything MUST be male gaze and the only acceptable nudity is big titty girls and guys who look like Ahnold. And any divergence from that is "ruining games" or "being woke" to the point that we don't even GET those games outside of the rare case of a game nobody cared about becoming popular (I'll always cite that Yasuke was a recurring character in Nioh long before people turned him into a culture war).
Its like saying that gas stoves cause no meaningful decrease in air quality but having every study take place in the home of a pack a day smoker.
You know what you almost never see (outside of those “problematic gay games that turn the kids into litter boxes”)? A sexy twink.
So you never played JRPGs ?
You mean the homeboys that are almost always wrapped in about forty buckles and, at best, exist as a viewpoint character for the harem of big titty anime girls?
But yeah. East Asian media tends to have fewer massively jacked protagonists. But it is still the fundamental male gaze. It is just that East Asian dudes tend to be less likely to spend dozens of hours a week working on glamour muscles.
You speaking of the culture around is really important. That culture is part of the coomer and gooner problem which seems innocent and harmless/inoffensive to others but it is much more insidious. It essentially creates less of an actual reason to interact and a false sense of body expectations.
Essentially the otaku/neet problem japan is facing. People don't know how to interact with the opposite gender and when they do, they do so with their sexual interest as the prominent reason. Most people innately reject this forwardness based on appearances and the rejected will not understand how it is their fault they got rejected. There is little to no decorum or respect.
It's essentially a self feeding, lust-driven antisocial cycle that creates angry and dejected incels. It feeds into the other frustrations and creates a very spiteful and resentful person. I personally believe this is intentional after observing 4chan trends, as it creates easy people to manipulate. (Fappening grand invitation on Fox news, then the pepe dogwhistle to embolden those who are racist, while outraging those miscontrued - which eventually just is embraced)
Extreme emotions create easy to predict reactions, just point them at the person you want them to blame.
It's not innately videos games or media, but creating an entire culture that completely surrounds them does. Lust is one of those material prisons that is naturally inclined as it gives you good feelings. The internet overall has allowed kids to get endulged into this culture without any real risk or entry cost, long before they are of adequate age to understand the intimacy of reality.
I just want to make it abundantly clear I am not with this person.
Titillation is good. Masturbation is good. Sex is good (when between consenting parties).
The issue is not that there are tits and hints of dicks in games. The issue is that there can only be the kind that caters to a very specific male gaze and anything else unleashes a holy war.
Lust is one of those material prisons
Sweet fucking Eothas
Look at gacha games. There's an entire industry revolving around selling anime girls, and when you realize that's what the business model is, it's not surprising how toxic their fanbases have become. I've suspected that some of these devs are even deliberately trying to filter their audience to the most desperate gooners.
Maybe we need more women working in game design. I don't know the figures, but I'm guessing they are underrepresented. We probably need more diversity in games generally. It feels like this should be obvious to studios too - the more diverse your team, the more likely your game is to appeal to a diverse audience = a larger pool of customers.
That was always my experience. You can force people to do hundreds of hours of sensitivity training and explain to them why making the acronym for their solver "SLUR" is inappropriate. But if you just focus on increasing the diversity of your hiring pool and ACTUALLY hiring the best and the brightest, so much of that solves itself because now there is someone to explain that China and Japan may have a lot of shared culture and history but are very much not the same country or why that word is totally a slur and so forth.
I don't know the actual metrics per studio (and most that DO report it are heavily skewed because they put the administrative staff in with the creative to juice their numbers). But, mostly, every time I think about "popular gamedev" it just reeks of startup culture. The idea that if you were part of a successful team then you should lead your own and that this game was made by one auteur rather than a giant team and so forth.
And that has the exact same problems we see at so many startups as a whole. The person who was real good at coding is HORRIBLE at management and has no understanding of what HR is even for and so forth. Which leads to the kind of shit that was deeply frowned upon in a conference room at 3 am becoming corporate culture and leading to "cube crawls" and the institutional abuse at companies like Blizzard or Ubisoft.
One thing that sticks with me that has only been vaguely alluded to by the more "woke" games media outlets. Ikumi Nakamura kind of became a sensation when she went full kawaii during a press conference for (I want to say) The Evil Within and all follow up interviews revealed she was a fricking genius with amazing ideas and really strong arguments for why certain features were there or not. Then she mysteriously disappeared. She alluded to it being the stress of game dev and "politics" but considering the next time we saw her (at a completely new studio) she was still doing horror but ALSO had a kid...
explain to them why making the acronym for their solver “SLUR” is inappropriate
I'm gonna need some context please
Maybe we need more women working in game design.
eardrums immediately shattered by screams of Gamergate reactionary media
If you have a way to make (qualified) women study software engineering and other game dev related fields, please do share. I would love that.
But you can't fix lack of women and generally diverse people skilled in game dev during hiring. We have seen the results of trying multiple times.
Wow. Every dog in the tri-state area suddenly started barking. I wonder why...
But yeah. That is some bullshit that comes up every time anyone tries to address the diversity issues. "Well, if there were more intelligent black people, maybe we would hire a black or two" level comments.
In my experience, most first year undergraduate courses for STEM related degrees more or less match the demographics of the university itself. Depending on how rigorous the program that can change drastically as the weeding out courses happen, but it generally is "close enough" by the time they are in the 400s and going to special guest lectures by us industry a-holes.
The problem is what comes after. There is a reason there are Black Engineering and Women in Engineering mailing lists. Because so many companies (and graduate programs) basically want a "diversity hire" and nothing else. So you might have a class that graduates with 40% women entering a workforce that will hire 5%, at best. And... the good groups talk about this and encourage people to have a plan B. Whereas men (at least up until recently) know that if they just keep trying they'll get hired eventually because 95% of those jobs are for them.
And grad school (less an issue for game dev) has the added problem where so many advisers are complete creeps with tenure. But that is a different mess.
No. Whatever the field, if you actually work towards having a diverse hiring pool and actually hire on merit, you tend to have an employee demographic within a stones throw of the regional breakdown. Because, yes, socioeconomic and institutionalized racism do give certain ethnic groups a serious disadvantage. But when you are hiring for roles with undergrad or graduate degrees? The best of the best are the ones who actually DO tend to find a way to bootstrap themselves up (or have parents who did). And... long term that goes a long way towards fixing things. It isn't the complete solution but it REALLY helps.
A very good friend of mine who I worked with heavily on doing exactly that at our old company loved to joke about it as "reverse-gentrification of the work force". The idea that if you get a diverse foothold into a "neighborhood", it spreads. Those pesky women are more likely to know other pesky women who are a great fit for a role. And the kids of the Walker family are suddenly growing up in Silicon Valley and going to private schools rather than fighting for scraps at PS 118.
In my experience, most first year undergraduate courses for STEM related degrees more or less match the demographics of the university itself.
I don't know anything about other STEM fields or other countries, but where I live, most sw engineering courses don't have above 5%. (And I guess even fewer men in the medicine field. Some fields just seem to attract specific genders, idk why.)
But yeah, dismiss reality I have seen with my own eyes as "The dog whistles! The dog whistles!" And then act surprised when no one outside your echo chamber takes you seriously.
if someone is not able to distinguish between fiction (regardless of the medium) and reality, then the problem is much deeper than pearl-clutching religious fanatics insist on believing, and will NOT be solved by abolishing all the "bad" fiction
i would argue that religion itself plays a large part in developing these problematic attitudes from early childhood, especially towards sex
You mean constantly displaying sexuality as evil and interest in it as sinful leads to a unhealthy sexuality? Say it ain't so
- set the rules in opposition to fundamental human (i.e., mammalian) instincts
1b. punishment is unimaginable suffering for eternity - everyone lives a guilt-ridden life full of shame
- leverage for control in every aspect of life (i.e., slave congregation)
- ???
- profit. a fucking lot
side effects of psychological damage, suicide, sociopathic tendencies, etc. don't matter in the slightest to the people collecting your tithes and controlling your behavior-- so, rather the same as social media
tl;dr: people in a perpetual state of unfulfillable desire are easy to control
i think if less tolerance for religion became more commonplace, it might be better for mental health in general honestly.
Yeah. It's always been perplexing me that people who seem mentally okay in other ways can seem to think fiction and reality are basically the same thing.
Glad to see this opinion organically. I have been feeling like its moving more and more toward censure. I always thought japan pretty much had it right and then they took a step back. If its not real, its not real. I honestly don't care about any fictional stuff be it writing or painting.
the owner class wants it that way. if you can get people to throw reason, facts, evidence, and everything else out the window in order to genuinely believe that 2+2=5, then you can tell them anything you want, and they will kill people over the matter. see: literally all of maga
if someone is not able to distinguish between fiction (regardless of the medium) and reality, then the problem is much deeper than pearl-clutching religious fanatics insist on believing, and will NOT be solved by abolishing all the “bad” fiction
We've been trying to make this exact argument to the exact same group of people since the earliest days of D&D and I'm sure someone was having the same conversation about some other thing before that. 😠
They used to think novels were bad for women in the 18th and 19th centuries bc they worried they were too dumb to separate fact from fantasy
https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-were-bad-for-you/
Don't worry, maga will get us back there soon enough...
not able to distinguish between fiction (regardless of the medium) and reality
religious fanatics
The line is a circle
Wouldn't it be awesome if people cared about research and facts.
Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television. They have pushed many major media platforms into censorship already, and are just getting started.
But what if I just pirate and use VPN's? You tech-savvy kiddos might ask, getting a small thrill from feeling like anti-establishment pirates.
Well never fear, they have plans for that too! Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more "product" to sell to our for-profit prison industry!
Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television.
Wasn't the OG 80s era censorship campaign coming from Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman?
Didn't we get this whole '10s era Christian Conservative "We just want to debate! We just want our free speech on College Campus and The Internet!" campaign?
It seems as though censorship of is mostly just a wedge issue to put your partisan group on the side of the current popular media trend. In the '80s, it was saying you were Opposed To Satan during the Satanic Panic. In the 90s, it was saying you were Opposed to Gangster Rap and Saggy Pants and Drugs. In the '00s, we were in an ideological war against Islam. In the '10s, we were in an ideological war against Big Government Socialism Taking Over Our Lives. In the '20s its been the War on Woke Foreigners.
Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!
That's one theory.
Another is that we're trying to put together an industrial scale compromat operation, such that any given individual can be smeared and alienated from the public at-large if they oppose the current regime.
I'm sure advertising can function as a side hustle. But we've been drifting away from any kind of real consumer economy for nearly a decade. Everything is "how quickly can the government and its business interests cycle money between one another to replicate economic growth"? You don't really need end-users if all you're making is an AI-driven marketplace.
Ive been worried a bit about that compromat situation. My Internet history alone makes me easily politically assassinatable if I ever try and take up politics.
Dont worry, nothing illegal, but it'd be enough. This guy got took out by an ill timed stealth photograph of him eating a sandwich. I'd be toast.
Wasn't the OG 80s era censorship campaign coming from Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman?
It's cute that you think Democrats aren't conservative.
Sure sure.
The United States is a one party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them
But these were ostensibly the priorities of the party winning the votes of liberals.
Coming from From Software:
Christian Ring.
Final boss: Jesus of the supply side order.
I was beating my meat to Natalya's (Goldeneye 64) cone-shaped tits at age 10. It may have been arguably better for me than jerking off to droves of actual tits.
...Not that I wasn't doing that also..
She had nothing on Xenia's polygonal proportions
The Box Bra, by Croft.
It's almost like there's another reason for censorship
Okay but what games are considered sexualised and how many people are actually playing them?
Cyberpunk certainly qualifies both. It's got explicit sex, and it's got a large player base. But while uncouth and perverse things happen, you can't really be party to them. You tend to show up after. Maybe your choices might lead to some, but you're not there for it. The only sex involving the player is generally wholesome. Except, you know, the ghost of Johnny Silverhand riding shotgun and not necessarily consenting to it (especially when you hook up with the cop).
Then there's Skyrim. Bigger player base but no sex outside of mods. And there are plenty of mods, but if you look at the player count among people using those mods... it's nowhere near the player count of Skyrim as a whole, or Cyberpunk, or even a lot of the other games. And from there it drops off sharply.
So... what sexualised video games?
Sexualisation is not the same as sexual content. Widowmaker in Overwatch is a sexualised character, because she is portrayed as sexually attractive, seductive and generally in such a way as to have her viewed as a sexual being. There are other characters who are not sexualised.
I'd also say the way sex is portrayed throughout Cyberpunk 2077 is important to the setting. Sex is everywhere, but none of it is particularly fulfilling. That the PC can find a healthy sexual relationship at all almost seems like a one in a million chance in Night City. Capitalism pushes forms of sexuality that can be monetized. Capitalism can get you laid, but it can't get you happiness.
(I totally get the criticisms that the game is a mediocre experience. It is, but it's not without value, either.)
Much as I’d predict support for that conclusion, I feel like there’s room to doubt the survey process used - as has often been the case for studies on gamer behavior.
Something, something, can't prove a negative... While valuable research, it doesn't prove no harm is done. It can only provide evidrnce that the harm they tested for didn't appear to happen. That is a kind of important difference.