DISCLAIMER: the following content is meant for The Bedroom.
THE LIST is the most hallowed form of internet content. Far from the lowest-common-denominator appeal we think of it today: the list was once the most exciting part of the internet.
You’d pay once a month to some small cable provider or internet service. A website would offer ten or five whole things you’d get to read about. This wasn’t an excuse for them to put a new update on the front page. What could once seldomly be celebrated as the kind of content that’d make us content, here’s five whole videogames.
Someone would have to put a real amount of effort into it! This wasn’t a time for fucking around. Sure, at the end of the year we’d get “The best Playstation 1 games” but every month inbetween left space for stuff like A Link To The Past: The Ultimate Guide To Women, Dating, And Love
Today we’re here to give you content. At the behest of your gaping maws and outstretched claws, we’re looking down from the tower and saying “yes.” That’s a little bit of referential humour for you, the #1 thing that a list featuring at least #5 of things needs to have.
What are we listing? Five videogames, our common denominator: the lowest. What’s a guy gotta do to get a stable job writing around here? Freelancing money is the lowest on record it’s probably ever been.
So here it is: longly awaited.
DEEP-HELL PRESENTS: THE VIDEOGAME INDUSTRY IS AFRAID OF SEX AND I CAN PROVE IT
5. GRAND THEFT AUTO
The most damning cultural event for videogames in the playstation two era was when it was discovered a vulgar cultural parody had been so afraid of a bad sex minigame they dummied it out of the disc.
The next most damning cultural event for videogames was that anyone still plays Grand Theft Auto. A series so awarded for the quality of its writing that the only funny thing it ever has to say about two people fuckin’ is that sex kind of looks funny if you end up having to watch it.
Grand Theft Auto is so not-horny that the only time it uses sex for anything is if it’s meant to show how vile and disgusting someone is. Sex happens because one character will fuck any addict in his trailer park, sex happens out of view because one character is being cuckolded.
Grand Theft Auto always indulges in the idea that sex sells. We’re told that the series is supposed to be sexy by the way players can (still) pay a sex worker to fuck them in a car in the woods. Close up on some dead-eyed 3D model in a car: the most shut-in dating sim fan would be offended.
You can’t really have sex in Grand Theft Auto games. It’s the one taboo the series naively attempted to break once, and got pulled into a media campaign that never really ended because of it. Sex as a Sacred Cow. When you can’t make anything hot, you have to make it funny.
4. THE WITCHER
Everyone after the conjunction of the spheres is incredibly horny for Geralt of Rivia. One of the few men in a videogame who can claim to even be slightly sexualized. A year ago I would have used this as an excuse to post the DEEP – HELL Geralt Bathtub photo. I am much better of a person now.
The Witcher is the videogame series that most sums up the thought that even with our high-definition graphics, I still expect the sound of clonking wood when I see two people kiss in a videogame. Sex in the Witcher series evolved from one installment to the next.
In the Witcher you collect literal trading cards followed by ugly cinematics of marionettes getting down. Geralt of Rivia was available to every single (and single) woman in the world, especially the attractive ones. Isn’t it cool to play such a free-love feeling stud? You truly had a sword for every encounter in the original Witcher.
Sex is finally a little more than a collectible in The Witcher 2. It’s used the way every other videogame on this list uses it: to consummate how much flirty dialogue you’ve had with an NPC. This is the step all of these RPG’s tend to take. Have enough flirty dialogue with someone and you might get to see half of a nipple. Afterwards, the relationship goes back to normal for the rest of the game. Left in the players imagination is that dirty feeling they’ve just seen something they shouldn’t.
It’s not like The Witcher 3 changed anything. Sex just went from a collectible to a definable end point. If you’ve (I didn’t) stick with the series from the original installment to now and haven’t picked someone to fuck, it’s now or never. Will it be the dramatic relationship following the story of the novels? The power is truly in your hands. It’s no wonder there’s a legion of gamers upset that women just talking to them doesn’t mean they want to fuck them: sex, no matter how arbitrary, is still used as a mechanic for end-game character improvement. A stop gap before the real important parts of the story get handled.
3. DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION
All of the best Western RPG’s let you Fuck. This is of course part and partial to the genre. For a country that basically only understands sex through pop culture, what the hell else is the point of my party members anyway? If I don’t get to fuck Solas when I think our narrative has reached a certain crescendo, why am I invested at all?
Romances and sex in Dragon Age all follow the same formula. Follow through on enough dialogue options with a partner and they will want to fuck you. The trick lies in exploitation of relationships: you’ve gotta find out who your chosen Fuck likes the least and not bring them around. Do some other arbitrary things enough and a little “heart” will appear.
The following scenes wouldn’t be enough for a PG-13 teen comedy, let alone something as dire as late night HBO programming. While all games have started to embrace sex Dragon Age: Inquisition is at the forefront of “games that are extremely reluctant to show a single male buttcheek” even though one of the most commonly remembered romances is about a big dude with a huge dump truck ass and horns on his head.
Dragon Age: Inquisition wanted the characters to be sexy. After all, what would be the point in a million dollar videogame featuring boinking if every character possible wasn’t up for grabs?
Every member in your party is down to freak. Allured by your charm. People in twine stories talk about power imbalances in relationships, but they don’t talk about them when one party is key to saving the world. The greatest uh, power exchange in Dragon Age: Inquisition is when the text subtly implies the hero of all kingdoms might be a little submissive in the bedroom. 
2. INDIGO PROPHECY
David Cage is both strangely attracted to and confused by the bodies of women. he is alternatively covetous of them and simultaneously ashamed of his attraction to them. Don’t take it from me: play a David Cage videogame and think about how he explicitly uses women as disposable sexual objects. Indigo Prophecy isn’t here because of that though. It’s here because it has something rare: a game telling a single narrative with a fixed cast that has a sex scene the player directly participates in.
“Participating” is giving the developer the benefit of the doubt. Indigo Prophecy like all David Cage games is a game meant explicitly for voyeurs. Higher than even Grand Theft Auto itself, Indigo Prophecy indulges exactly once in the game when the protagonist is literally a dead body. You play some fake-nickelback to “set the mood” and in three or four scenes time you’re pressing up on the left joystick to thrust inside of your partner.
It’s sex reduced to a mechanical flourish. You’ve been watching and directing every scene in the game, taking the burden off of the shoulders of the director himself. Failure doesn’t just mean finishing too early. A quick fade to black, an experience between two individuals reduced to a check-point meant to be revisited upon failure. It is impossible to be bad at sex in this game: the handsome protagonist being a bad lay would be an unforgivable mark on the fiction.
Rockstar North could not make me adequately fuck in Red Dead Redemption 2 and David Cage couldn’t even hope to make something worth making me uncomfortably turn off the Playstation 2 if a parent walked into the room. In fact, the most erotic thing that happened in the former game was when I was in a bathtub by myself.
1. MASS EFFECT
Mass Effect has sex scenes shot like dialogue scenes. Mass Effect depicts itself as a far-flung science fiction romp about the ethics of race, morality and technology set against a backdrop of political intrigue where the fate of the universe is at stake.
Mass Effect is also a far-flung science fiction romp where all of the fucked up aliens are hot and human , and they all have sex in the missionary position with the lights dimmed. Occasionally the series goes for pure shock value: it’ll let a woman be ontop.
Even in countless hours of coy dialogue, the series works the same every other videogame does. It is possible to game every possible story among the opposite and same sex in a way that you can hit a sex brick-wall. Everyone on the Normandy throwing themselves at you: you just have to go down and pick the manual option for engaging in consensual monogamy with one of them.
The neon-future of pan galactic boning is that even the whole species dedicated to lubing up every other type of alien in the galaxy is extremely interested in penetrative sex in the missionary position. There’s no Asari – on – Krogan sadomasochism despite the setting being rife with the implication that that’s what everyone really wants to see anyway.
The most scandalous thing that can happen in a bedroom is only freaky because it’s with a woman you haven’t game-married and cant. Shocking that the liberated sexual future is somehow more conservative than television in the 1970’s.
And really you’d think, you’d think a game all about people in latex outfits sharing close quarters on a sweaty spaceship might be rife for a little sexploitation. You’d think there might be a few close-up encounters when tensions flair, but there’s nothing.
I go into these games knowing that no one will confidently pin me to the mess hall table after crew-quarters hours have hit. I go there knowing the most scandalous sex I can buy isn’t available. I go there knowing often times, these games sell themselves on realistic sex and romance that gets used as a bullet point to upgrade your parties final abilities.
When sex isn’t being made fun of, it’s being pushed off to some dark corner and taped off. I might get a character lifting their leg in a silhouette while they’re kissing someone. I might only get a coy line of dialogue referencing that the champion of all was “a little tied up” the night before. Nobody is going to see it in these kinds of games, because the sex here is to purely get an audience’s rocks off.