Video game characters do not have great sex lives. The sex in Cyberpunk 2077, one of the biggest releases of the decade, was lambasted by PC Gamer as “horrifying” and “truly awful” for its weak writing and general clunkiness; character models designed to run and shoot just look strange when made to contort in moments of intimacy. But while Cyberpunk was criticized for its bad sex—and for flubbing LGBTQ+ representation—the erotic indie title Hardcoded was gathering praise for its explicit, queer-friendly sexuality set against a dystopian cyberpunk backdrop.
Sex has been part of gaming from the beginning—Atari 2600 owners could buy Custer’s Revenge, a heavily criticized rape fantasy that sold 80,000 copies—but for most of the medium’s history, any sexuality was aimed at straight white men with all the subtlety of a horny sledgehammer. It was seen as a mark of maturity for the God of War franchise when its 2018 installment abandoned the subject entirely rather than return to the cringeworthy “Here are some tits, you rube” minigames of previous entries. Indie games, and LGBTQ+ developers in particular, are filling that vacuum.
Dream Daddy, which was released in 2017 and starred a single father looking to romance other solo dads, featured in a Markiplier video with 6.8 million views, a sign that LGBTQ+ friendly romance games were starting to push into the mainstream. Meanwhile, thin lists of gaming’s “most sizzling” sex scenes unintentionally reveal the sad state of big budget titles by continually repeating aging games like Mass Effect and The Witcher. Not every game needs sex, but for a subject that’s fundamental to the human experience, mainstream gaming lags well behind other mediums in portraying it seriously and credibly.