Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to research

You mean constantly displaying sexuality as evil and interest in it as sinful leads to a unhealthy sexuality? Say it ain't so

i think if less tolerance for religion became more commonplace, it might be better for mental health in general honestly.

if someone is not able to distinguish between fiction (regardless of the medium) and reality, then the problem is much deeper than pearl-clutching religious fanatics insist on believing, and will NOT be solved by abolishing all the “bad” fiction

We've been trying to make this exact argument to the exact same group of people since the earliest days of D&D and I'm sure someone was having the same conversation about some other thing before that. 😠

Yeah. It's always been perplexing me that people who seem mentally okay in other ways can seem to think fiction and reality are basically the same thing.

I read the following neat metaphor once: People are like sponges, and if you take away the juice from their lifes, they become thirsty and suck even more.

They are causing harm, but not by being sexual. By posing unrealistic standards

Maybe we need more women working in game design. I don't know the figures, but I'm guessing they are underrepresented. We probably need more diversity in games generally. It feels like this should be obvious to studios too - the more diverse your team, the more likely your game is to appeal to a diverse audience = a larger pool of customers.

You know what you almost never see (outside of those “problematic gay games that turn the kids into litter boxes”)? A sexy twink.

So you never played JRPGs ?

A sexy twink.

Plenty in gachas, jrpgs, and such, imo.

We have a cult of toxic misogyny that insists everything MUST be male gaze and the only acceptable nudity is big titty girls and guys who look like Ahnold. And any divergence from that is “ruining games” or “being woke”

I think in heated discussions about "DEI slop" people mostly complain about women being desexualized rather than anyone else being sexualized. Do you have any examples of games where in addition to women being sexualized there were twinks or someone else being sexualized and people insisted that only women should be sexualized but not those other groups? Think of BG3 - it goes beyond regular "male gaze" but it's still widely beloved because it's more inclusive to wide range of appeals including regular ones.

And any divergence from that is “ruining games” or “being woke” to the point that we don’t even GET those games outside of the rare case of a game nobody cared about becoming popular

I would argue the origin is sales. E.G. the publisher wants the sex appeal to sell, so that's what they put in the game. Early 'bro' devs may be a part of this, but the directive from up top is the crux of it.

And that got so normalized, it became what gamers expect. And now they whine like toddlers when anyone tries to change it, but that just happens to be an existing problem conservative movements jumped on after the fact.

TL;DR the root cause is billionares.

Like aways.

You speaking of the culture around is really important. That culture is part of the coomer and gooner problem which seems innocent and harmless/inoffensive to others but it is much more insidious. It essentially creates less of an actual reason to interact and a false sense of body expectations.

Essentially the otaku/neet problem japan is facing. People don't know how to interact with the opposite gender and when they do, they do so with their sexual interest as the prominent reason. Most people innately reject this forwardness based on appearances and the rejected will not understand how it is their fault they got rejected. There is little to no decorum or respect.

It's essentially a self feeding, lust-driven antisocial cycle that creates angry and dejected incels. It feeds into the other frustrations and creates a very spiteful and resentful person. I personally believe this is intentional after observing 4chan trends, as it creates easy people to manipulate. (Fappening grand invitation on Fox news, then the pepe dogwhistle to embolden those who are racist, while outraging those miscontrued - which eventually just is embraced)

Extreme emotions create easy to predict reactions, just point them at the person you want them to blame.

It's not innately videos games or media, but creating an entire culture that completely surrounds them does. Lust is one of those material prisons that is naturally inclined as it gives you good feelings. The internet overall has allowed kids to get endulged into this culture without any real risk or entry cost, long before they are of adequate age to understand the intimacy of reality.

The violence discussion comes and goes every couple years. It has since the 80s at least. It's never had any ground in reality, it's just fear of whatever media they don't understand.

She had nothing on Xenia's polygonal proportions

Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television.

Wasn't the OG 80s era censorship campaign coming from Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman?

Didn't we get this whole '10s era Christian Conservative "We just want to debate! We just want our free speech on College Campus and The Internet!" campaign?

It seems as though censorship of

<insert bad thing>

Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!

That's one theory.

Another is that we're trying to put together an industrial scale compromat operation, such that any given individual can be smeared and alienated from the public at-large if they oppose the current regime.

I'm sure advertising can function as a side hustle. But we've been drifting away from any kind of real consumer economy for nearly a decade. Everything is "how quickly can the government and its business interests cycle money between one another to replicate economic growth"? You don't really need end-users if all you're making is an AI-driven marketplace.

Pedo alert

Something basic like the Mass Effect series helps sell the idea that you really did form a fully fledged relationship over the course of the game. As for Cyberpunk, the setting is literally designed to be dripping with sexuality. It's not necessary for the story itself, but if you removed all the sex ads the setting simply wouldn't reach the same level of "megacorporations maximizing psychological exploitation techniques".