On 14 July 2004 Sam Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games, sent an email to a staff member outlining the various types of sex he wanted to include in the company’s forthcoming game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

“Full sex (multiple positions),” he began, in a vivid bullet-pointed list. “Dildo sex (including being able to kills [sic] someone with a dildo), Whipping (being whipped) and Masturbation (one of the characters is compulsive; this MUST be kept).”

The email is an extreme example, but it raises an issue that simmers beneath the surface of this huge creative industry. Since the beginning, video games have embraced, explored and celebrated violence, but sex has always been less common. Houser, in the company’s boldly defiant and ridiculous style, wanted to challenge this. “We want to include sexual content, which I understand is questionable to certain people,” he continued. “But [it is] pretty natural (more than violence), when you think about it.”

Houser’s team did eventually produce a series of interactive sex scenes for GTA: San Andreas. In the end, however, they were locked away unused within the game code in order to avoid a sales-limiting adults only rating in America. Later, hackers discovered and released the scenes, and the game’s publisher, Take Two, was forced to pay out more than $20 million in damages in a class action suit.

Sex, it turned out, was a costly taboo in video games. It is also, seemingly, something of an impracticality. Whenever sex slips into a video game the sight of two polygonal mannequins rutting up against one another usually works against the intended effect. It’s either laughable or actually terrifying.

Sex matters

But the development team behind forthcoming fantasy adventure title The Witcher: Wild Hunt seems unfazed by either moral or technical concerns. The game, due for release in May, contains sex scenes constructed from over 16 hours of motion capture data. There may not be any of Houser’s dildo sex in the George RR Martin-esque fantasy plains, but there is a Hugh Hefnerian amount of lovemaking. It comes quickly, too. Within the first 15 seconds the camera droops to linger on a woman’s fulsome posterior, moments after dismounting the protagonist, the white-haired monster hunter, Geralt of Rivia.

“People might think we’re putting sex into the opening scene for no good reason,” explains senior game designer Damien Monnier. “No, no, no. We are establishing that your character was intimate with this woman recently in order to plant in your mind that, at very least, he must enjoy her company.” In subsequent moments we see the pair gently flirt in an atmosphere of easy-going post-coital familiarity. Their secrets have been spilled and now, as she freshens at the mirror and he tousles her hair, a deeper affection between the characters is established.

“Through sex we have shown that this is a person who Geralt would be compelled to chase after if she went missing,” says Monnier. Five minutes later, the drama shunts into the future, a time when the woman, Yennefer, has disappeared. Your goal as lovelorn Geralt (accompanied by an older witcher named Vesemir) is to track her across the Skellige Islands. “Sex is the quickest way in which to establish the relationship and provide a justification for the player to pursue this woman,” he continues. “We couldn’t just tell you to go find someone you don’t know or care about. It wouldn’t work.”

The problem of openness

One of the most incisive criticisms that can be made against so-called open world games, in which the player is free to pursue goals of their own making, is the equality of importance that’s placed on plot missions and side-quests. In The Witcher, the primary story always attempts to instil urgency, but the player is free to help the local townsfolk with petty errands. One mission asks you to help an elderly woman recover her favourite frying pan from a locked house, while another has you track the arsonist who burned down the blacksmith’s home. We always know that, until we arrive at the crucial location to trigger the next major story event, we are free to loiter. And with this freedom, pace, plotting and verisimilitude can break down.

“I believe we have solved this problem,” says Monnier. “For example, we tell the player that Geralt’s lover Yennefer was recently seen in the area and that you should look for clues. This framing gives the player permission to take on other quests while still feeling a vague pressure to continue the search. It’s a writing challenge that is almost unique to video games.”

Warsaw-based developer CD Projekt Red has been battling a cavalcade of these new challenges. Previous titles in the Witcher series (based on the fantasy novels by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski) funnelled players down a metaphorical corridor, fighting monsters, romancing villagers and casting spells within clear and broadly immoveable narrative lines.The Witcher: Wild Hunt is the first instalment to offer an open world, where you are free to explore and set your own pace.

“It’s been a massive challenge,” says Monnier. “Before, players would follow the story as in a novel or television series, moving from A to B to C. Now players can go A-D-B and we must ensue that the story makes sense regardless of the order in which it’s approached. It’s incredibly complicated.” This complication is compounded by the fact that the player has agency to alter the world around them by way of their choices. In one chapter later in the game, Geralt must investigate a series of brutal murders at a banquet (it’s a scene reminiscent of the vivid and terrible Red Wedding in Game of Thrones, a series with which The Witcher shares both a tone, aesthetic and, in Charles Dance, an actor). The player must choose which character to carry out the investigation with, a seemingly mundane selection that causes dramatic alterations to the story and world.

“Your choice changes the balance of power in the area,” says Monnier. “Some characters may die and be removed from the world because of your choice. Other characters will become more or less warm to you as a result.” These changes are what make managing a non-linear storyline so challenging. “Maybe something you did in D will change the way that characters in B react to you,” says Monnier. “So you have branches that go back on themselves. It’s mentally exhausting trying to work out all of the potential repercussions and permutations of these choices, the people you cause to live or die, the romances you enter into.”

Suggestion not direction

Because of the challenges Monnier and his team faced with The Witcher: Wild Hunt, they developed a newfound respect for Rockstar and the other creators of open world games. But the team, which is now famous in Poland (one team member boasts that, on three separate occasions, his colleagues were let off speeding tickets by Polish police when they revealed that they worked at the studio), is not without criticisms of their rivals. In particular, Monnier dislikes the nagging map markers so liberally used in Ubisoft titles such as Assassin’s Creed which show the player the vast number of side-quests and activities available within the world. “It’s overwhelming and discourages you,” he says.

By contrast, The Witcher: Wild Hunt has almost no mission markers on its dynamic map. Occasionally a point of interest lights up when you visit an area, but otherwise it remains oblique. “I believe that our approach encourages exploration,” says Monnier. “We haven’t created the world for nothing. This way, exploration becomes a reward in itself; you know that if you don’t explore a particular area then you might miss out on new stories, new items and maybe even new lovers.”

The hunt for lovers, new and old, has always been a part of the Witcher’s appeal. Geralt is promiscuous and, like the novels on which the series is based, the writers don’t shy away from exploring this. Unlike in Sam Houser’s plan, sex in The Witcher is never interactive. You don’t tap “X” to thrust.

But its inclusion, even as an adornment in cinematic interludes, is welcome, not least because it’s presented in such a natural, unforced way. In the second game in the series, Geralt trips over while hurrying to remove one of his boots as he follows a naked lover into a pool. The camera coyly turns away before the subsequent kissing becomes something else, but this note of domestic humour is rare in video game representations of sex, which usually either titter at their own (misplaced) sense of transgression, or become, as in the first-person scenes with sex workers in the most recent Grand Theft Auto, grimly dehumanising.

Sex matters in The Witcher, not just because it establishes a link between two characters in order to provide justification for a quest, but because it rounds out the fiction and adds to the veracity of the open environment. A human world without sex is either a world viewed through a child’s eyes, or an entirely dishonest one.

For decades blockbuster video games have omitted sex, perhaps because of worries over age classifications, perhaps because of the medium’s association with play and, behind that, childhood. But beside the quest for power, sex is a primary human motivation; through games like The Witcher and last year’s Dragon Age: Inquisition, which elegantly facilitated sexual relationships of all varieties, perhaps game designers are finally becoming more honest about that.



Simon Parkin attended a Witcher press event in Stirling, Scotland, with transport and accommodation paid for by Namco Bandai.

