What makes a video game “horny”? Surely, it doesn’t simply require an outright depiction of sex. But it seems silly to suggest that handsome and/or scantily clad characters are enough, either. If they were, fighting games would be obvious candidates, with massive personalities and physical clashes at their heart (Fellas, is it gay if we are both guys and fight in a Chun-Li mirror match?) But they obviously don’t, in any explicit terms, deal with sex. Along those lines, but with significantly less charisma, are the ilk of 2024 character action game Stellar Blade, which features a “sexy” female protagonist as an object of player control. Games like Hades and Baldur’s Gate 3, meanwhile, have been presented as clear alternatives: They feature explicitly queer characters, a greater diversity of attractive designs split between men and women, and innuendos aplenty. But they also can’t venture into the waters of genuine eroticism, featuring only glimpses of skin and fade-to-black sex scenes. These games represent a binary of how we talk about sex in games. Everything is caught between the objectification of Stellar Blade and the “proper” horniness of Hades or Baldur’s Gate 3.
Let’s start with Stellar Blade, a classic example of video game “eroticism.” It pulls on the designs of T&A-heavy games like X-Blade and Tomb Raider (albeit with less charm than Lara Croft’s pinup girl energy). The protagonists are meant to be looked at, not identified with. A couple of articles groused, when the game came out, that it was impossible for its main character/primary eye candy, robotic warrior Eve, to be a sexy character because she has such a slight personality. But this is exactly the point: A shell with a “perfect” body is more than enough to land as sexy for many men. All that bothersome talk and personality would just get in the way. In practice, blank characters like Eve can work in more complex ways. Women can, and have, identified with them. Far too often, though, this line of critique results in a prudishness about showing skin, or worse, around “overly sexual” female forms. But those things don’t actually contradict the basic feminist critique: Perhaps even sexy women should be more than objects.
As for the other side, Baldur’s Gate 3 and both Hades games have received outright and exaggerated praise for their handling of sex. It would be reductive to say these games are not horny. However, their actual eroticism is threadbare. Baldur’s Gate 3 is an RPG based on Dungeon & Dragons. In it, you construct a character and go on a swashbuckling adventure with a party of other heroes, battling your way through a dense fantasy world. Hades concerns the son of the titular god, Zagreus, who attempts to escape the underworld. With each attempt, he gains new power, enabling him to further ascend through each layer of death. In short, both are games principally about violence and power, which also feature romantic relationships and friendships.
These games are not about sex. They feature both those things, but they are side tracks, optional distractions (even if BG3’s cast does want to jump your bones all the time). BG3’s horniness is isolated to one-off lines and individual scenes. It is, admittedly, rare for a game to allow sex with a human transformed into a bear, or for characters to luridly cheer on the main character as a priest whips them. However, beyond these surface touches, Baldur’s Gate 3 does not explore its world’s sexual mores. Its characters lack explicit sexual orientations. Its romances have less friction as they go on, starting prickly but becoming secure over time. It’s difficult for them to capture the actual push and pull of romance, much less sex.
This is perhaps fair in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3, which must focus on the initial rush of love due to its limited time frame. But Hades has lots of time: Endless routines make up its core loops and narrative frames. Still, sex is the culmination of romances, totally excluded from the game’s repetitions. There are no ill-advised one-night stands, no quickies before a work shift. There is only a clear, regular romantic arc, which culminates in a singular sex act.
Any sufficiently large video game fandom produces enough pornography for it to be a cottage industry on its own. Hades and Baldur’s Gate 3 are obvious contenders. Overwatch got a PBS Ideas Channel video (RIP) about exactly this. Though developers profit from the existence of this material, they cannot officially sanction it or make it themselves. Fan smut acts as advertising. It brings in new players, encourages re-visitation, but is also underground, even taboo.
The simultaneous cultivation and rejection of smut has resulted in a phenomenon one might call “wholesome horny” games. Fields Of Mistria, Spirit Swap, and Date Everything! are all examples. None of these games have sex scenes, but feature attractive characters and innuendos aplenty. They feel ready-made for other people to make smut about them, but are ultimately skittish about being erotic themselves, beyond a little cleavage, a shirt tight across muscles, or a wink to the audience. Even more than games like Hades or Baldur’s Gate 3, which do feature sex, they retreat into a strangely sexless horny zone. Sure, you’ll find hot people here, but for erotica, apply elsewhere.
The problem, of course, goes well beyond the artistic choices of individual developers. Anyone looking to sell legitimate smut on Steam or Itch must contend with a sea of low-quality offerings. Games which constitute a sincere engagement with sex, like much of Robert Yang’s catalog, are still verboten on streaming services like Twitch. Even Baldur’s Gate 3 got some players temporarily banned on Xbox for recording its (tame) romantic scenes. It is difficult, even for massive games with huge cultural pull, to escape the ambient prudishness (and homophobia and racism and misogyny) of tech culture.
But the presence of obstacles does not mean there is no point in trying. Oddly, the uneven Cyberpunk 2077 gives the most hope here, in particular the romance between main character V and Judy Álvarez. Judy is a lesbian, a filmmaker who shoots and edits VR pornography. She’s not exactly a sex worker herself, but most of her friends (and two of her exes) are. She is, in other words, in a community, which shapes her in both loud and quiet ways. Judy is one of the few queer characters in mainstream games that feels real, the kind of person one could meet at a subway stop or at a party. She has a sexual history, a life outside and beyond the player character, even after they enter their romance. When Judy and V have sex (only the one time explicitly) it is a genuine emotional culmination, and hot besides. At one point, Judy and V trade a cigarette, an easygoing intimacy that contains all of sex inside it: breathing together, trading pleasure, tasting each other. Cyberpunk 2077 is overwhelmed with juvenile humor, and many of its sex scenes are less successful (to put this generously). But Judy is a total achievement, the kind of character video games can use far more of.
Of course, the best path forward is still found at the margins. Smut games like Hardcoded offer diverse characters and actual sex scenes. Independent criticism like Adult Analysis Anthology offers critiques that take pornography seriously. This work is already being done. But we could stand to do it more, and to give more money to the people already doing it. Not all games concerned with sex must be literal pornography (though less prudishness would be welcome). But there is a lot of space between the coy, proper “horniness” of Hades and the “sexy girl” objectification of Stellar Blade. More games should take that space and celebrate it when they do.
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