You may be wondering, how can male nudity in video games be good for the industry? Well, young Padawan, sit down and I’ll tell you how. In short: mainstream acceptance. For the past several years, a war has been waged against our beloved pastime that claims games will never be considered art, with even mainstream figures like Roger Ebert writing treatises on how and why they never will be. Now this may be understandable if we were talking about Custer’s Revenge with 8 bits of genocidal rape rage, there’s nothing artistic about that.
From an outsider’s perspective, it’s easy to dismiss video games as art because they don’t appreciate how far they’ve come. Starting with a Commodore 64 and growing older with the industry, I can recall that there was virtually no history in the early days of video games. “Thank you Mario. But our princess is in another castle!” It’s not exactly Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5. But, as the years have passed, our industry has matured along with its audience and started developing games that contain stories that rival the writing of movies and TV shows.
One such developer that goes above and beyond in more ways than one is Rockstar, the famous developer of the Grand Theft Auto series. GTA 4 has won numerous accolades for its writing and overall excellence. In the recently released expansion, (The Lost and Damned), there is a scene that contains full frontal male nudity. Now, being a male of the heterosexual persuasion, my first reaction was; “Really? That’s not necessary at all.” After some more thought, I came to the conclusion that sometimes letting it all go is the best way to move forward in a move. For example, when Mortal Kombat was first released, it was criticized as incredibly violent and, in my opinion, totally unbelievable. If you haven’t played Mortal Kombat, the game includes “finishing moves” that allow the avatar to perform amazing feats of martial arts expertise, such as removing the head along with the spinal cord, thereby killing the opponent. Legislative happy mothers of the day, including Tipper Gore, lobbied Congress to remove those games from the shelves and opt for legislative parenting. This is, in my opinion, an extreme overreaction. When my parents saw these totally unbelievable moves, they were horrified too, but then they started playing with us…for hours. My parents made sure we understood that these acts in all their gleaming 16-bit glory weren’t real. This is what parenting should be people. The government should not decide what is acceptable for children to watch. Parents should because that’s what true parenting is all about. I’m digressing
I think part of the hesitation of experts in labeling video games as art is that it takes an entire team of developers, often numbering more than 40 people, to complete a game. To that I answer this: it takes as many, if not many more, to create a movie, besides that, who says art has to be created by one person or a small team? It frightens experts that art can exist outside the confines of its frigid paradigm. Continuing this train of thought, since we consider much of what makes up a game a microcosm of art (technical artists, concept artists) and still don’t accept coding as an art (many would argue the virtues of beautifully written code), we write of the entire final product as a whole because a part of it is not “art”. I would say that videogames CAN and many times they are art. Just because some games are pure crap (X-men 3: The Movie: The Game anyone?) doesn’t mean the rest should be dismissed as snubs. If we did that to the movies, ‘Transformers’ would have ruined it for ‘The Departed’ (sorry, Michael Bay, but don’t leave as many plot holes in the sequel and you might not notice them). This all seems fair enough, right?
Going further is essential to gaining acceptance in a category; this is the wonderful part of art. We don’t need talking heads to say “OK, I said this is so and now it is.” As long as we ourselves see and understand that our chosen hobby is many things to many people, we can see them as whatever we want them to be. If a person can look at a pile of trash and claim it’s a social comment, then we can also say, “Hey, maybe Mario never found the princess in the castle that the damn mushroom said she was in was a metaphor for the perseverance in the face of adversity.