Has the Ultimate Marketing Tool Gone Too Far?

By Joel Enos and William O'Neal
(4/28/99)


The common wisdom is that sex sells--at least, that's what more and
more game developers seem to think. And the popularity of everyone's
favorite digital diva, Lara Croft--even above and beyond her connection
to the Tomb Raider series of games--seems to be proving them right.
From Sin's Elexis Sinclair to those gnarly thrasher chicks in Kingpin,
the marketing axiom appears to be more applicable than ever when it
comes to describing the buying habits of the hard-core gamer. Or is it?

Last year, Gamecenter interviewed nine experts on the subject, including
Gillian Bonner (on Riana Rouge) and Mark Media (on UltraVixen), two game
developers who were supposedly ushering in the next phase of so-called
sex-positive games. But where are those games now? Take a look at
Half-Life, SimCity 3000, Alpha Centauri, and Starsiege: all of those
titles continue to burn up the sales charts--and there's not a bare
midriff for miles. So what happened? Where did our sexual revolution go?

Sex, apparently, doesn't always move product. Lara Croft is a star, but
do women and girls identify with her and therefore want to get in on the
action--or do they shun the Tomb Raider games because they find them
exploitative and offensive? Is Ms. Croft just another big-breasted
marketing tool? Are men running out and buying up Tomb Raider games
in droves because of Lara?

We checked in with a varied and opinionated cast of characters to get
their takes on the current state of sex in games. Britton Peddie designed
and programmed the grandfather of "get a chick to star in your game and
it will sell" CD-ROM games, The Daedalus Encounter, which featured
Wayne's World star Tia Carrere. Spencer Jones is the director of new
media for the Christian Broadcasting Network, and although he's as
dialed-in as the rest of us, he has a decidedly different take on the
state of games, entertainment in general, and the spiritual well-being
of our society. Paul Boone is an 18-year-old game reviewer who has been
twiddling his joystick since he could talk--and he's got something to
say about sex, marketing, and teen gamers. Doug Rushkoff is a theorist
and author of Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture and the
novel Ecstasy Club; he breaks it down for us deconstruction-style.
See what each of them has to say about this ongoing controversy.



Britton Peddie was the technical director for two front-running
interactive CD-ROM games, Critical Path and The Daedalus Encounter,
the latter of which starred Wayne's World's Tia Carrere and perhaps
helped spawn the CD-ROM game heroine with sex appeal.

Gamecenter: Before we get into sex in general and where it is now,
especially in selling games, you've got to tell me about the whole
Tia Carrere thing. You guys were probably one of the first companies
to put a sex symbol into a game to gather marketing steam behind it.

Britton Peddie: When we first started conceptualizing The Daedalus
Encounter, it was after the release of Critical Path. Critical Path
also had a female lead character, but she was an unknown actress.
She did an excellent job, but Path was successful enough to allow
us a substantially greater budget for Daedalus. From the start, we
wanted a "name" female actress.

GC: Definitely a female, right?

B. P.: Obviously, first and foremost, it was a marketing issue that
we thought could significantly increase sales by drawing people to the
product via the name, and because most games at the time didn't have
a female in them. But even with the extra money, it wasn't enough for
more than a B-level actress--top 50 but not top 10. Another issue was
that this was fairly early in the CD-ROM game era and many actresses
we contacted didn't think that it would be good for their career to
play a role in a computer game. Finding talent was difficult. Then
along came Tia--still relatively new to the limelight, but good
visibility, affordable, and interested; and the rest is history.

GC: Besides playing off her sex appeal at the movies, your game was
actually an action game, with Tia acting and exploring a spaceship,
rather than being a victim or just screaming. I'd even go so far as
to say that she was not only the first big-name marketing ploy for a
game, but also the first--and dare I say, maybe even the last--positive
female lead in a game. That character, and maybe even Cat in Critical
Path, definitely paved the way for later movie-style games such as
Riana Rouge, though that has a decidedly more adult slant. But Riana
Rouge didn't sell as well, and most of those games nowadays don't.

B. P.: A number of products came out that featured even more scantily
clad vixens, all promising to immerse the player in a steamy adventure.
These games seemed to go nowhere, because there wasn't enough quality
entertainment in them, and because there was a thriving market in
real porn CDs that were far more sexual than the "games" and thus had
far greater appeal to the "sex" buyer.

GC: What about the shift away from so-called movie games in general?

B. P.: That's definitely also a factor that can't be ignored. Fortunately
for us, Daedalus sold very well over the first six months or so. But almost
overnight, the press adopted an anti-electronic entertainment attitude
and turned all the attention to the hard-core gaming market--somewhat
understandably, though, because so much of the "me too" shovelware was
terrible. It made the whole industry look bad. And it was tough for
the buyer to differentiate good games from the ridiculous on store shelves.

GC: That's about when I remember all games being divided up into
categories, like any industry that gets big enough to be labeled: kids'
games, girl games, games for gamers, and a whole separate section for
more adult titles. 

B. P.: Yeah. Even though Myst was a top seller month after month, the
gaming press continued to slam anything that wasn't focused on the
hard-core gamer. So a market segment started going to even more
sexually oriented content, maybe confusing hard-core games with the
other hardcore. The real game market became justifiably more interested
in real gameplay and immersive qualities. That's not to say that various
products don't differentiate themselves in various ways, just that sex
and/or violence for its own sake doesn't end up selling many games. Tomb
Raider is an excellent example of a game that differentiates itself via
the female heroine, yet it is the quality of the game overall that has
made it successful.

GC: So is Lara Croft a genre-breaker by nature of her popularity as
a character rather than as the lead in the Tomb Raider series? The first
pixelated pinup takes gaming back to its cross-category roots?

B. P.: It is hard to tell exactly how much a difference it would make,
but the game would probably have been a hit even without Lara Croft,
although it is fairly clear that having a buxom lead has increased the
success of the game.

GC: Exactly, but it does make her into a character that people can see
and recognize, which is the ultimate marketing tool for anything, including
games. Might there be something positive to a character like Lara--and
the same can be applied to Tia's role in Daedalus. For one, she portrays
a strong female figure in an industry that isn't usually so positive in
its views on women--at least as characters in games. She's sexy--but
she's not a victim and she doesn't take crap from anyone. And she certainly
doesn't need a man to help her out of a jam.

B. P.: Women really haven't been portrayed too positively in games, but
then again, neither have males. They are either eating lead or spraying
it, and if a hapless female gets in the way, well...

GC: That leads to another question. Maybe it's not all about the sex.
Maybe it's all about the violence.

B. P.: Actually, the game developers have a problem in that creating a
good immersive game that doesn't involve killing or being killed is
difficult, because of the tension that is involved in survival. Games
have always had the game over experience. The easiest way to end the
game is to kill the player. Racing and sports games are really the only
way to get a score vs. surviving a level. Myst just left the player
wandering around. That's so frustrating for real gamers. There are, and
have been, many good games that don't involve killing, such as the Mario
series and other platform-style games, but you still "die" multiple
times before finishing the game.

GC: What are you more apt to play? Violent, sexy, or just plain good,
without any emphasis on any catchy marketing slant.

B. P.: On the programming side, it all comes down to making good product,
and that's a challenge in any entertainment endeavor, whether it's movies,
TV, or computer games. Gratuitous sex is just that, and it doesn't really
sell in any aforementioned genre. A movie that just has sexy guys or gals
prancing around without any reason isn't going to do well at the box office.
Just look at Striptease--I mean, what were they thinking? Porn will always
be around, but it is very clearly differentiated, and there is not much
point in trying to mix porn with entertainment. Besides, no one watches
porn for more than about 15 minutes anyway.


Britton Peddie is currently research and development director at Ninth House Inc., where brings his brand of interactive
technology to the corporate training market.



Founded by Pat Robertson 37 years ago, the Christian Broadcasting Network
is one of the largest television ministries in the world. Spencer Jones,
the director of new media for the CBN, spoke candidly to Gamecenter about
sex and violence in games and in entertainment in general.

Gamecenter: Let's jump right into the fire. What is your take on the
state of video games and the violence and the sex that is portrayed in
video games?

Spencer Jones: I can give you two lines. I can give you the corporate
line and I can give you my opinion as well. [Our] corporate line is
whether it's sex in cartoons, sex on TV, or sex over the phone, all of
it is degrading in the sense that if it's outside marriage then it's
corrosive to society. My personal opinion is that pornography in general
is damaging to people, their marriages, and specifically to men. As for
games, it started eight or ten years ago, maybe when games weren't
nearly as lifelike. And here we are now where it's almost accepted that
games have quite a bit of sexual innuendo. And the games themselves have
become so lifelike that it's arguable to say that eight years from now
you'll be looking at full-motion video that looks just like TV except
that it is a game. Then where's the difference between watching the
Playboy Channel and playing a game?

GC. That's an interesting point.

S. J.: And the change is quite subtle. I don't think there was any grand
scheme or whatever, but I think it was very subtle in the beginning and
no one made the connection that as technology increases, this very
sketchy, pixelated game could actually become as real and as intimate
and as enthralling as watching full-motion video. And yet, being in the
technology business, I'm sure you know that eight years from now it
probably will be.

GC: It is fascinating because right now we look at some of the early
games like Doom and Castle Wolfenstein, which are highly pixelated, and
they look arcade-y--they look like games.

S. J.: Right. Then you try to look ahead as best you can, even though
you know you can't, and you can only imagine what games will be able
to do eight years from now. Yet you know they'll be more lifelike than
they are, and that they'll be more pornographic than they are now. And I
just think that's not good.

GC: Yeah. And there's the whole notion of kids and games.

S. J.: It's one of those things where if somebody presented where it
will be 5 years from now to the public 15 years ago, there would have
been some moral outrage to it.

Have you ever heard the analogy about how to boil a frog? If you were
to throw a frog into a boiling hot pot of water, he'd jump out. But if
you put a frog in a cold pot of water and turned up the heat, he'd boil
to death. Because he won't know when to get out, and by the time he
figured out what was going on, it'd be too late.

The analogy's obviously similar. If somebody showed us what these games
will be 8 years from now, if they showed them to us 15 years ago, we
would have jumped out of the pot.

G. C.: There's probably also a greater correlation with other media forms.

S. J.: Oh yes, across the board! The games are just...

GC: Another facet...

S. J.: Exactly. I don't mean to come across as some
super-religious-hot-on-technology-hate-everything type of person.
But still, I have a spiritual feeling that we're not heading in the
right direction.

GC: There is an ethical responsibility that goes hand in hand with the
technology that few people look at. They look at the technology and say,
"We can do this; let's do it," without thinking, "Should I do it?"

S. J.: And much like pixelation, it's so minute each step forward that
over 15 years, there's no one point where you cross over a threshold and
say, "Aha! That went too far."

You move in such a slow migration that no one can figure out exactly when
we crossed the line. But we know we have. It's like, wait a minute, we're
in a bad state, but when did this happen? That's my concern. 

And I would have to say that's a fair concern for the Christian
Broadcasting Network as well. That we have definitely crossed the line,
yet nobody knows when and who did it.

GC: What kind of things does CBN do to combat things like that as far
as getting the word out about games to parents?

S. J.: It is probably the shame of the Christian community in general
that they are technically nonsavvy and technically unconnected. And they
don't do their duty.

GC: You probably also have 14-year-old boys who know how to use computers
and the Internet better than their parents.

S. J.: Absolutely. And one of the biggest faults against Christians is that
we are not technically savvy. So we're out of our element in many cases
with regards to this kind of stuff. We're not taking any kind of stance
because we don't get it. I'm talking for an entire demographic.

GC: I understand. I was talking to my mom about this game that I wrote
a preview of. The game is called Kingpin and it's sort of the digital
equivalent of a Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese movie. And it's one
of the first games that I've seen that has bad language as well as the
violence. It was interesting noting my mom's reaction to the language.
I guess developers have to raise the stakes in order to keep people
interested.

S. J.: From a Christian standpoint it's important to be careful about
what you see. There's a phrase in the Bible that talks about how "the eyes
are the windows to the soul." You have to be diligent to not accidentally
expose yourself to certain things. You have to go the extra mile not to
look at stuff because it's corrupting. We're training up a generation
that the windows to their souls have seen everything. 

GC: Yes, they have.

S. J.: And that's not healthy.



Paul Boone started writing game reviews when he was only 15. Since then,
he has written for MacHome and is now an applications programmer for the
semiconductor manufacturing industry, a college student, and a
soon-to-be entrepreneur. However, at only 18 years of age, he's also a
prime target for the game industry's marketing money.

Gamecenter: You've been playing games for how long?

Paul Boone: I have a photograph of myself where I'm playing an
arcade-style game while wearing a diaper. So I've been gaming since
before I was potty trained.

GC: And you started reviewing games at what age?

P. B.: Fifteen? Something like that, anyway. See, I met this crazy games
editor at a homeschooling conference...

GC: My, how time flies. What are your favorites?

P. B.: Myth II, Escape Velocity, Exile III, Marathon, A-10 Cuba,
Spaceward Ho, Gettysburg, Carmaggeddon...

GC: To name a few! So, I notice that none of those are necessarily "babe"
oriented. The meat of this story is that companies use sex in games to
target, well, you. What do you think of that?

P. B.: I don't have anything against games with sex and violence in them.
Some of them I really enjoy, but not because of the sex and violence. If
a game company thinks that throwing a little sex in a game will hide how
bad the game is, they underestimate the people who actually play them.
So much game development is so contrived. People think, "Hey, Doom got
big--let's use its success to make a lot of money." It seems that
developers think throwing a little sex and violence in a game will make
it a big seller. If it's a really good game that also happens to have
sex in it, fine--I don't care. However, if they think throwing some
gratuitous sex in a lousy game will make it sell, they're fooling
themselves.

GC: So I'm getting the impression you might not be a Lara Croft fan.

P. B.: I actually do own a Lara Croft game--Tomb Raider III. But I
didn't buy it because it features a woman with a computer-enhanced
bosom on the cover. I got it because it got good reviews and it showed
off my new computer's awesome graphics capabilities. I mean, if you get
down to it, I would have still bought it if it featured some buffed-out
guy with a bulge in the right place as the star.

GC: No posters of Lara for you?

P. B.: What I love is that Lara Croft calendar with a bunch of pictures
of Lara in various sexy positions with titles like "In your dreams, boy."
Can you believe they even have these things?

GC: I wish I could say I can't believe it, but maybe I'm getting old and
jaded, because it doesn't surprise me. I mean, Pamela Anderson is famous.
Why? But let's not get into that. Let's talk about Riana Rouge. It starred
Gillian Bonner, who also was the executive producer and worked on
programming and development. Do you really think it was aimed at an
adult crowd? Last year, Gillian talked to Gamecenter about problems
distributing the game and how Eidos ended up not doing it. But they
distribute Tomb Raider with the same kind of marketing scheme that might
have worked for Riana Rouge. What are your thoughts on so-called adult
games? Are they adult, or are they really just another ploy to sell games
to you and your peers?

P. B.: I saw this title while perusing through a MacZone catalog.
I thought it was hilarious. I remember thinking, "now here's a game
that's going to really suck. "I don't know who they intended as their
target audience, but I'll assume that it has to be Playboy consumers who
don't read Playboy for the articles. I can imagine some guy saying,
"I don't play Riana Rouge for the sex, I play it for the gameplay!
Really, I do!"

GC: You're not falling for it?

P. B.: I think it is pretty hilarious. I don't think it expands their
market much. I think the people most likely to buy that sort of stuff are
the people who buy the X-rated titles anyhow. I don't know any gamers who
have even played Riana Rouge. So if they did target me and my friends,
they didn't succeed.

GC: What are the real gamers playing? Or what do they want to play?

P. B.: There are two qualities that I look for in games: freedom of
exploration and the inducement of thought. One thing that draws me to a
title is the depth of freedom you have to explore the world they create
for you. I like worlds realistic enough that you can stray from what the
designers had in mind and do wild, crazy things. Some games have some
bizarre restrictions. Like in Al Unser Jr. Racing, you can't turn around.
It ruins the game for me because it shatters the realism of the world.
What do you mean I can't drive the wrong way on a racetrack? What
universe do you live in?

GC: So it's the game itself, not the sex, or even the violence, that
gets gamers excited. I mean, I'm just clarifying for anyone reading this
who might not get it. But it almost seems like that would go without
saying. But still, there is a market for adult CDs--it's just not a
gaming market so much, right?

P. B.: Exactly. I'd hesitate to call them "games." They seem more like
new ways of eliciting sexual desire, on par with porn mags, Internet
pornography, or topless bars. When people buy adult games, they are
expecting sexual thrills, not awesome gameplay. If something is intended
more to be watched than played, is it really a game?

GC: So why the misconception--or rather, the constant attempts to
sexualize or sex up games that really don't need it? Aside from Tomb Raider,
which is, as you said, a kick-ass game, it doesn't seem to work anyway.

P. B.: Honestly, there's this major stereotype that male teenagers who
play games have no social life and can never get up the courage to ask
a girl out. Thus, these poor deprived guys need risque computer games to
satisfy all their sexual needs. This stereotype leads to the assumption
that throwing some sex in a game will get all these guys to buy their
games. But really, I don't know many guys like that. Granted, they exist,
but the stereotype is not nearly as prevalent as you might think.



Doug Rushkoff is the author and editor of many books on popular culture,
including Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace, Media Virus:
Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, and The GenX Reader, as well as the
novel, Ecstasy Club.

Gamecenter: You've studied a lot of media culture and written books on
the subject of the public being affected by different idioms and archetypes.
How do you see the role of sexy pixelated women being used to pump video
games to a teen male audience? It's almost redundant to say, "of course, it
sells," but isn't the so-called feminist power of Lara Croft of Tomb Raider
just sleazy marketing in disguise?

Doug Rushkoff: When any new technology emerges, boys and men try to do two
things with it: first, they want to know if they can kill with it. Then,
they want to figure out if they can fuck with it. The main thing teen males
do is masturbate. Period. At least, I don't think that's changed so much
since the ancient days of the 1970s. I don't see much difference in using
emulsion-based Playboy magazines from one's father's night stand or a porn
game purchased with one's father's money. The real difference, from a
McLuhanite perspective, is where the wanking is taking place. I suppose
there's a physiological difference between using a paper publication in
bed or on a couch, and sitting at one's computer. 

GC: Sex sells everything. Why not games?

D. R.: But is Lara Croft outright sex? I think of her more as something
nicer for boys to look at than the barrel of a Doom gun. The fact is
anything patently sexual online is decidedly nonsexual. The only things
that work well are voyeuristic sites and standard porn--and that's less
about genuine sex than it is about wanking, eh?

GC: Tomb Raider is definitely not porn. And sales of games like UltraVixen
show that it would probably not do so well on the market if it were.

D. R.: Exactly. The only sexy kinds of games that work for the mainstream
audience are ones that aren't so overtly sexy, but rather, kind of sexy.
It has to seem almost unintentional, I'd say, since the computer is so
innately noncorporeal, anyway.

GC: And, in a sense, there's the whole idea that even boys who play Tomb
Raider are not just looking at Lara, they are Lara.

D. R.: Sexy female images used to come exclusively through passive media
like the TV. The woman was very much "the other." Now that boys can exert
their will through sexy women, it may bring a new dimension to the way they
think about sexuality. We might see young men grow into lovers who take in
account the woman's point of view. Or we might just see more cross-dressers.

GC: Wait till the gamers hear that! And it might not be such a bad outcome
on many levels. But let's get to the next level of controversy. What about
the violence vs. sex question? Isn't it crazy to get up in arms about
cross-dressing, sexy characters, or even sex in general, when really what
games are all about is blowing people and things away?

D. R.: Our media space--games included--is just a collective dream space.
It's how a culture or society dreams its dreams. When you repress a person's
dreams, he has waking hallucinations. If we begin to repress our fictional
media space--for its violence or its sexuality--we'll start to see the
equivalent of societal hallucination: seeing sex and violence when it's not
there, or acting out bizarre sexual and violent behavior that had best be
kept in the realm of fantasy.

GC: I'm not for censorship by any means. But when you get down to
blowtorching UltraVixen's nipples...Isn't that crossing a line?

D. R.: I don't think I'd get off on blowtorching a woman's nipples, even in
a video game. But what can I say? Kids like pulling the limbs off bugs. It
gives them a feeling of power. If anything, we have to address the
overwhelming sense of powerlessness and disconnection we feel, as evidenced
by such perverse violence. We have to look at these simulations--especially
when they are popular--as if they were a patient's dreams. If a person has
violent dreams, the therapist doesn't censor the dreams; he looks at what
is going on in the person's real life. These are clues. 

GC: So that comes down to personal choice. But realistically, what's in
games, whether violent or sexual, is no different than a standard episode
of any given TV show. Any thoughts on that, or rather, is it any more or
less of an issue when the teen boy is not just watching the sex or
violence, but interacting with it?

D. R.: Interacting with violence is a bit better, I'd say, than simply
watching it. Interactivity is less desensitizing than, say, television,
which numbs the senses with repeated viewing. The advantage of repeatedly
playing a game is that the violence becomes abstracted. Lifted, if you
will, out of the real world of flesh and blood, and into the realm of
pure interface. Besides, the sex and violence isn't real. I think kids
have an easier time telling the difference.

GC: Let's hope!