Sex sells. And when it comes to video games in the twenty first century, there’s no better method for shifting units. I can’t be the only who noticed these adverts cropping up on the web recently, can I?

In all my hours of diligent research *ahem* I have yet to discover a tangible link between between a free to play MMO and this woman’s exposed cleavage.

But let’s take a look at something a little more subtle. After all, these free MMOs are obviously competing with the WarCraft juggernaut and therefore a little gratuitous nudity and the promise of Elven booty in their adverts is quite understandable. Let’s instead look at the newly released box art for Final Fantasy XIII:

On first glance this rendering of lead character Lightning appears innocuous by comparison. But let’s look a little closer. Her pose is in fact very sexually provocative. There’s a somewhat gratuitous positioning of her legs, spread, with her inner-thigh and dark underwear on display. Just browsing the internet forums for the game will lead to discovery of such topics as ‘Lightning is amazingly hot for a redhead’ and discussions about the possibility of her physical relationship with other female characters in the game. The cover art clearly panders to these crowds (did you notice the extruding nipples?), however there’s also a feminine strength that many gamers have failed to recognise. While the pose is clearly suggestive, the artist has ingeniously offset her provocative stance with the way she holds her sword, seemingly across her body, guarding her sexuality. The image then is of a woman in complete control of her body, and physically able to defend it. She is desirable but ultimately unobtainable, and anyone who has noted the incredible popularity of the Twilight vampire movies and novels will recognise the power of such a formula.

So is Lightning a strong female character in charge of her sexuality or an unobtainable sex symbol? Both, it seems. The Final Fantasy series has always been enjoyed by men and women in equal measure over the years and to my mind this cover art effectively caters to both groups, offering young girls a powerful role model and young men the temptation of her sexuality coupled with the lesson that they must first emotionally ‘disarm’ such a woman before they may know her physically.

But a little provocative posing and exposed inner-thigh is only the tip of the ice berg. Even before its physical release in 2007 Mass Effect, from studio BioWare, provoked a media frenzy when it was revealed players would be able to engage in scripted sexual activity with other members of the cast, including a blue alien called Liara. The conquering of alien women, taking unfortunate cues from the colonial period, has been a fantasy of teenage boys since the rise of the astronaut and the sensationalist reporters of the Fox News channel brought the issue into the mainstream with a considerable dose of outrage. Yet they did so notably without ever actually playing the game in question, lending to the widespread opinion that heavy criticism of sex and violence in interactive entertainment comes predominantly from an uninformed but extremely vocal minority. When gamers eventually got their hands on Mass Effect they found the sequences to be, in reality, exceptionally tame – even artistic.

While Mass Effect provoked its own storm in a teacup, no game has ever come close to the controversy generated by Grand Theft Auto. Already controversial for allowing players to embark on crime sprees and massacre virtual civilians, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas received a huge amount of negative press after it came to light in 2005 that players could unlock a hidden portion of code to engage in a sex mini-game. The code was apparently the remainder of a deleted sequence, exposed by hackers and made available to all players of the PC version with the ‘hot coffee’ patch. It is important to remember that the game designers were not responsible for the exposure of these graphic interactive sequences, yet the blame fell at their doorstep once again for not removing the content in its entirety before shipping their product.

With each iteration of Grand Theft Auto, vocal opposition to its release has grown. It reached fever pitch in 2008 when Grand Theft Auto 4 hit store shelves for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in April. The outrage stemmed from the discovery that a popular technique of players was to sleep with a virtual prostitute to recover their life points, then quickly kill her to recover their money.

The lawyer Jack Thomson, since disbarred in the state of California, was a prominent opponent of the game, stating that minors were allowed to engage in these acts unsupervised, which degraded women and, he claimed, could lead to more shootings like that which occurred on the campus of Virginia Tech in 2007. The point Thomson misses is that the Grand Theft Auto series provides players more with a sandbox and a set of tools than a stringent path to follow. Nowhere in the game is the murder of a prostitute required nor endorsed. It is the choice of the player how to use the tools that he or she is provided with, and in what combination. The point about school shootings may drift more into the topic of violence in gaming than sex but I will simply add firstly that no respectable empirical study has successfully demonstrated a causal relationship between video games and violent activity, and secondly that it seems fairer to assert that the instability of the individual is more responsible for their actions than the content of their chosen form of entertainment.

Since the court ruling of 1933, surrounding the question of obscenity in the novel Ulysses by James Joyce, modern art forms have enjoyed the freedom to express sexuality without fear of reproach. And yet, here we are again, debating the presence of sex in video games. If you subscribe, as I do, to the view that video games are indeed a form of art, then the entire question of sexual content’s presence in gaming is redundant and often targets the wrong people. The true problem here appears to be the way in which adult-only content consistently finds its way into the hands of minors. Given the fact games like Mass Effect and Grand Theft Auto are rated Mature or even 18+, this is clearly not the fault of the game companies but rather the retailers and, dare I say it, the parents (a difficult pill for the parent lobby groups to swallow, no doubt). The solution in my opinion lies in the clear and free debate, proper understanding and enforcement of our age classification systems, not in suppressing the content itself.