This will contain spoilers for Fallout: New Vegas.
I shot the leaders of the Omerta crime family. Shot ’em dead.
Okay, perhaps I’m overstating… actually I roll with Stealth and Speech, so what I really did was talk them in to a room, convince them to shoot at each other, then finish off the survivor with my holdout pistol before quietly slipping out and closing the door behind me.
They know what their crime was: boring me half to death. Attempted murder, as I slice it.
Maybe I had expected too much of Gomorrah, home of the “loosest sluts on the Strip.” Walking in to the casino, after a perfunctory weapons check, I saw exactly what I should have expected given the place’s reputation. The prostitutes standing outside the casino are a promise of what is to come inside: more prostitutes. This is accompanied with the occasional NPC dialog drops about how nice or not nice they smell and how loose they are or are not. Since I’ve seen more interesting half-naked video game people in… well, almost every video game ever, the prostitutes fail to elicit any interest in me from a sexual standpoint. They are in fact kind of comical, doing their stationary hip-thrust dances for awed onlookers. Maybe I feel a little bad for them, which is perhaps the intent.
In the spirit of “let’s see what happens!” I tried picking up Dazzle, a woman who was standing outside of one of the courtyard tents. My New Vegas avatar is female, like most of my RPG avatars, but, it doesn’t matter much. Every western RPG I have played within the last four years that allows any sort of sex seems to make bisexuality the most interesting option for a female protagonist just by default. (Note: I have not tried Dragon Age yet. I hear it is different.) What followed was not a lewd sound drop or a shot of the outside of our little tent but… a whole lot of nothing, except my pockets were a bit lighter after a quick fade to black.
I reset from my last save. May as well keep my caps. I don’t know if there’s some kind of consequence for having bought Dazzle, later on down the line, but now I don’t think I ever will know.
New Vegas is not really alone in this. The sex-for-cash in Fable II failed to entice me for similar reasons. Presumably there would at least be some awkward moaning if I took the men or women on the street up on their sex-for-money offer, but if I wanted that, I have a virtual husband waiting for me at home (and a wife, see above) who is always ready to go. The male prostitutes in Fable are in particular silly, and, seem to be designed to be, but, that doesn’t go very far to making purchasing sex tempting at all. It just makes me wonder why anyone would bother.
You can watch a stripper in Mass Effect. This is funny for a couple of seconds, then it just feels awkward. “Does anything happen if you keep tipping?” ask YouTube commenters. Spoilers: no. On the other hand, trying to woo your partner of choice in the Mass Effect series, and establish a relationship, is deeply compelling to me and many.
So I’ve started to wonder. Is this a moral position that video games are taking? Grand Theft Auto’s “beat up a hooker and get back your money” notwithstanding, it seems like the common depiction of sex for money in video games is that it’s totally hollow, unrewarding, and there is no reason to ever do it when you could be chasing romance. Are games taking a position on this, or, is it just that, there’s no real way to make casual sex narratively compelling, whereas romance actually is? Is the scrutiny and censorship of sexual depictions in gaming post Hot-Coffee having a chilling effect?
Take for example the first Leisure Suit Larry game, Land of the Lounge Lizards. It’s actually possible for Larry to lose his virginity very early on in the game to a prostitute. However, even though “lose your virginity” is supposedly the goal of the game, doing this doesn’t complete that task. The only way to actually win the game is to score with… well, another woman you just now met, but she’s much more attractive than the hooker and you didn’t pay her. At least this is probably the most interesting hooker I ever bought in a video game, since you get a humorous censored sex sequence out of the deal (and an unforgettable Game Over if you forget your rubber for this encounter). The LSL games definitely take a position that, despite the protagonist’s constant pursuit of sex for its own sake, finding a person you connect with is more important.
That’s an overt message in LSL. But it’s a covert message in many other games where casual sex itself is simply not made interesting enough to pursue. And, given that sexual content in games is scrutinized much more heavily than sexual content in almost all other media, games are almost forced to make casual sex uninteresting because they can’t expand on its depiction.
So I shot the Omertas. Not because they were amoral and I am moral. But because I saw no point to what they do. The story is set in Vegas: of course it includes prostitutes, but it can’t really do anything with them.
My sexual encounters in New Vegas otherwise remain confined to one robot, and one man with a nice hotel room whom shortly thereafter I murdered.
Black Widow? A hilarious sound drop about “Charlies?” Hell yes that is compelling. …Buying hookers not so much.
I found the picture of Eve from this Valentines’ Day themed article which is cute and worth checking out.
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