Adult video games
Adult video games are video games which have significant sexual content (like adult movies), and are therefore intended for an adult audience. Adult games can fall into many genres and have diverse gameplay.
PC and console
In console gaming, the genre can be seen as early as the Atari 2600, such as Custer's Revenge. In PCs, the genre can be first seen in adult text adventures, and later with graphical adventures, including one of the most recognized and mainstream adult adventure game series, Leisure Suit Larry. Arcade games have received few adult entries in North America.
With CD-ROM and multimedia based games in the 1990s, most adult games featured video clips with limited interactivity. Both pre-rendered and realtime 3D graphics were also used. While most games could be considered nothing more than pornography, some attempted to include actual story and plot. This can be seen in some games with less explicit content, equal to an R or PG-13 rated movie.
Modern console publishers often have policies against depictions of nudity and explicit sexuality, particularly Sony with its PlayStation brand of consoles. Some titles featuring nudity, such as BMX XXX and Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude for the PlayStation 2 were censored, while versions on the Xbox and GameCube were not. However Sony allowed nudity in the title God of War, which was also developed by Sony.
A new generation of adult social games has emerged that bring multiple users together in sexual environments. Examples include Red Light Center, Singles: Flirt Up Your Life and Playboy: The Mansion. While it is not explicitly intended for purely adult-oriented entertainment, the virtual world of Second Life, which is made up almost entirely of player-made content, has a very exotic array of adult entertainment including nudity and full-on sexual activities.
Adult games may take the form of bootlegs, circumventing mainstream publishers who may have policies against such games. Patches or hacks to mainstream non-adult games may add sexual and pornographic themes, mostly for humor, especially when sexuality was never intended in the original game. Examples include the Tomb Raider computer games, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' Hot Coffee mod, Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion (which has multiple such mods) and ROM hacks for console emulators. There is also a mod for World of Warcraft showing nude features.
The Internet has allowed adult games to receive wider availability and recognition, including amateur games in Flash or Java. It has also allowed amateurs to create and distribute adult text adventure games, known as "Adult Interactive Fiction" or AIF.
Nudity in games
Games that use nudity and partial nudity while not being considered adult games include Fear Effect, Fahrenheit, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, God of War, The Sopranos: Road to Respect and others that maintain content consistent with M or T ratings by the ESRB. Nudity may be removed in localized versions, such as the Japanese version of God of War. Nudity may be removed for specific systems, such as Sony consoles which have an anti-nudity policy.
The popularity of adult "video games"
Due to the small amount of distribution for games rated Adults Only, there are few adult video games available. An Adult Only title guarantees that some of the world's biggest retailers of video games like Wal-Mart will not buy or distribute that particular title, relegating them to the fringe of retail. Of the thousands of video games created across all consoles, they account for less than 1% of the market share. Still few "Adults Only" titles are particularly famous. Adult video games seem to sell far better when marketed for personal computers (where such content is closer to the norm, as on, e.g., the internet) than for consoles.
Links
- MMOVSG.NET Review and ranking of adult games.
- SpeedStrip Adult Video Games
- Sexy Memory - The sexy game
- Adult Interactive Fiction
- Digamour Adult RPG Video Game
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