Hyper Sexuality in Video Games

Unlike women who have faced similar subjugation for a long time, this is alien to men. Women have are depicted in games as something inhuman; they are tall, thin and have breasts large enough to make any bra supporting them a miracle of suspension rivaled only by the Golden Gate Bridge (Ivy of Soul Calibur).

[LiquifiedArt]

(cough) If i do recall... Male characters are displayed the same way lol.

Thats why they are created. Bodies, Abilities, Smarts etc... all beyond that of the oridnary man.

[puffkix]

Over half the article is about how it's true about male characters...

[Walrus]

And once again, no one on n4g reads past the headline...

Why do we even bother posting links to the aricle?

[Komega]

truth FTW!

[Varodor]

I click on this news only for the pictures

[ReconHope]

LULZ for Varodor.

[yesah]

This article has not my approval, such topics should not be discussed in such ways.

[Quagmire]

Chris Redfield and Kratos are the male equivalent of Hyper Sexuality. Bulking bodies and one of them's half naked!

[Dsnyder]

Yeah people also fail to look at the other gender. Men are shown as overly muscled and possibly overly endowed. We dont really complain about it but there is no doubt that it has risen the standard of the good looking male even further. While men like women with huge boobs, women like men with 20" biceps and an 8 pack. In short, its harder to get laid now than it was when there was no media at all.

[AlienFodder]

"While men like women with huge boobs, women like men with 20" biceps and an 8 pack."

Please don't be too quick to generalize. As a woman, I think Sam Fisher (in Conviction) and Nathan Drake are the sexiest male video game characters and they certainly don't have huge biceps. And as a matter of fact, Kratos is not even on my top ten list. :)

[MarkusMcNugen]

@Dragonfodder Yet another person who didnt read the article... how sad. If you did then you would have seen this "There’s clearly a problem when a character like Nathan Drake seems to be a relief from the industry’s muscular-man syndrome."

[ravinash]

He talks about when we are exposed to so much unrealistic examples of the male form that it distorts what we expect the male form should look like.
Its similar to what women have been expereancing from womens magazines with their photoshopped pictures which he also meansions.

[AlienFodder]

@MarkusMcNugen - Excuse me? Then I guess you didn't read my comment correctly because if you had, you would have seen that I was merely replying to Dsnyder's comment! Next time, maybe YOU should read more carefully before replying and wrongly attacking someone. I did read the article in its entirety and I clearly understand what the author is saying.

[ReconHope]

Forgot to mention almost every metro-sexual male character in Final Fantasy.

[CoLD FiRE]

Male characters in FF aren't metro-sexual. They're just emo and gay.

[TronEOL]

Kratos is drawn off Spartans, and to most people Spartans have been well-built, toned and ruthless. Not to mention I don't think people covered up too much back then.

Chris Redfield was a fantastic "male equivalent". Kratos? Not so much.

[Kingmitch23]

If they showed true Spartan culture most males in our society (including me on some matters like pedophilia) would not find them even close to "epic"

[Quagmire]

Spartan men had sex with other men like it was no business. True story.

[CoLD FiRE]

@Quagmire Spartan men had sex with young boys (aka pedophilia).

[chainer3000]

While well written and executed, this is nothing new. "Hyper sexuality" will continue to exist in media so long as it sells, and it will.

[Komega]

Nothing wrong with sexuality as long as it's not employed at the detriment of story, gameplay, etc... So I guess that is what he means by "hyper-sexuality" so ugh....nevermind.

[Darth_Bane79]

Look, as long as girls have big boobs and nice asses in videogames, I don't give a rats ass what the male charaters may look like.
On a side note, who else thinks that the guy who wrote the article is a fatass lardo? LOL

[Komega]

and the award for "obligatory douche comment" goes to...

[Darth_Bane79]

Really!!?? OMG!!! Thank you!!! Thank you so much!!! http://media-files.gather.c...

[MarkusMcNugen]

I agree with Komega... so... your welcome? Good job on being a golden douche bag! Props to you! You even posted a picture of the award you won.

[Darth_Bane79]

LOL! People can't take a joke! Oh well..

[ravinash]

I don't.
In fact I think he's very observent and realises the issues that can arise when the media bombard us with sexual imagery about how we are suppost to look and how often we should be doing it.

You may think it doesn't effect you, but if you go with out TV for a month and you would be surprised about how it effects your own self confidence.

Oh, and I'm also not a large ass before you go saying anything.

[ReconHope]

That's kind of jumping to conclusions don't you think?

[Dsnyder]

Sexuality in video games is fine to some extent. Sex sells and making your characters look halfway decent will sell games. But the problem is when the game becomes nothing but sexual inuendoes. Beyonetta is one of the worst games of all time because of that. Nothing but stripping and provacative poses at every corner. When games like that are critically acclaimed and sell well, it encourages other devs to make games just like that and it kills the video game industry's reputation all together. Depicting sex in a more realistic manner is the way to go. Heavy rain had sex and nudity but it was under realistic circumstances so it didnt get called out by the media. Scenes like the GOW III sex scene make it hard to tell people that video games are a serious artistic medium when you are seeing the implication that two women will have sex with each other if there are no men around. Video games are still young and now they are going through the eary teen phase and thats why we are seeing these exaggerated depictions of sex in games. Hopefully it will grow out of it soon.

[MarkusMcNugen]

Not to spam post because of my reply above this one, but have you seen movies recently? How about read any magazines? Comic books? Games do this, movies do it, magazines do it, especially comics, all of the media does it. To say that games are in there teens, that just makes me laugh. I guess the movie, magazine, and comic industries are just elderly teens... Strange how you refer to games as being hard to see as an artistic medium because of sexuality when nudity has been in art for over 2000 years... Check your history if you dont believe me. Perhaps the greeks and romans? Maybe it is a little overly sexual with the stereotypes, but once again, all of the media does it...

[ReconHope]

It's because of the stereotype that only kids play videogames that makes some people worry about it as if it was an actual problem. We do have esrb ratings for a reason.

[iceman06]

I sort of agree with what you are saying. But, I don't blame the age or infancy of the industry as much as I blame the lack of progression of our society. If the sexual revolution wouldn't have been stagnated everyone would be able look at sexuality and nudity in a different way. As it it, nudity is a "shock" ans sexuality is exploited only because it is considered so taboo. As open minded as Western society claims to be, we are still stuck trying to separate nudity, sexuality, and true sexual perversion/deviation in the name of false morality. All in all, it's more of a cultural issue which is why print media, television, music, movies, and video games will be able to exploit it for some time to come.

[BinaryMind]

The author is nostalgic of the last generation of console games when yet half of his examples of "hyper sexuality" are from that time period (Bloodrayne, God of War, Soul Caliber). Games have been hypersexualized since they were created. I don't think there's anything to suggest this is a trend.

[MrJack]

Kratos must be on roids, and even then, when does he ever go down the gym? I mean yeah killing Zeus and shi* must be decent cardio, and well he never seems to eat, so it's fair to assume he has a low fat diet, but the guy doesn't even do situps, let alone long hard workout sessions and look at him, he'd win Mr Olympia. He seriously needs to write down his excercise program and sell it, he'd make a fortune.

[Komega]

bubbles for you sir!

[nskrishna2]

Hahaha...
Have a bub bro..:)

[lil boy blue]

lmao that made my day also bubble 4 u

[ReconHope]

Well if you take into effect the make believe game-time to realtime ratio than it probably took him at least a month for each game. He did run a hell of a long time in each game. Pretty good cardio regime if you ask me.

[nskrishna2]

Excellent article....whats with N4G these days...reading some really good articles these days...

[Komega]

Yeah, I thought so to but it's currently rated 4.4 out of 10 on the site, some people just don't get it...

[Katana Yamato]

I agree excellent article. Unfortunately, you're right, people just don't get it. And frankly, i don't think they'll ever will.

Anyway, its good to see sumthing like this with the amount of useless articles about Top 10 or so Lists of Cosplay girls, Video Game girls and of course Uncharted 3 and Black Ops fanboy articles. Sumthing like this should really have more indepth discussions. Too bad mostly the majority of gamers are biased (and male) and don't seem too concern on how women are depicted.

So i guess we're stuck with bimbo's like Bayonetta... *sigh*

[MarkusMcNugen]

Katana Yamaoto... the article's about both male and female hypersexuality. So I guess what you meant is that we'll be stuck with big boobs and slender bodies for women and 6-packs and muscles for men...

[Sarobi]

and i don't mind that what so ever.

[NeloAnjelo]

Hyper Sexuality... I think I suffer from this.

On a more serious note... Sex is in Everything. Many adverts, sitcoms, and many more things in our daily lives are filled with images, words, and references to Sex. This is what sells. Games offer a visual and mental experience. As a result Sexuality will always ... Whether its a Sexy character, a Sexy dressed character or something else pertaining to sex. Dam, thats alot of sex (Good!)

[MarkusMcNugen]

lol, your right. Its strange how people think that sexual stereotypes are bad. Last time I checked there was a difference between fantasy and reality, and sex was a natural thing that all creatures seem to partake in. Even the ones that have sex with themselves (Thats asexual for the people who didnt finish high school biology) Yet somehow its the sex that makes people distasteful, not the fact that people are being ripped apart and shot in these games... just seems ass backwards to me...

[NeloAnjelo]

Well said Marcus!Bubbles for you!

[tubers]

Time to play some JRPG?

At least half the time they aren't overly muscular if any. But they still have "pretty" faces.

[phinch]

how was the girl lay on the beach unreal looking body shape wise?

[TheTwelve]

I prefer seeing great-looking people in videogames. It's escapism. I can see normal people in RL.

12

[T3MPL3TON]

The article is pretty damn spot on.

Male characters couldn't exist in the real world because, they are literally, TOO AWESOME. The world wouldn't be able to sustain Kratos and Marcus Fenix and Travis Touchdown all in one place. It'd just be way too much badassery. The badassometer would explode like a nuke. Sure Kratos would probably kill the other two but, the mere seconds that they existed together would cause the polar caps to shift.

[stuntman_mike]

soon we will have game characters walking around naked and hung like a horse.

[lizard81288]

They should totally make a video game staring me, because thats how i roll, i am super buff, has great strength, survived zombie attacks and can cast magic spells and i use guns and swords too.

[Liuqahs15]

Very true article.