Baldur’s Gate 3 has dicks and vaginas, but you probably know that already from all the fuss that’s been made about it. As is often the case around things in games that on the surface don’t really seem like they should matter, strange arguments have been made, battle lines have been drawn. JRPG fans are crying out about the injustice and hypocrisy of western gamers (or devs, or censor boards, or whoever) that they’re fine with nudity in Baldur’s Gate 3 but not fine with it in dodgy Japanese ‘fanservice’ games, while streamers are supposedly shocked, shocked I tell you, at the adjustable jangy bits in the character creator.
And to all that I say, it’s much ado about nothing. It’s not exactly fake news because, well, it’s a thing that’s happening, but it’s fake fuss. Streamers are “shocked” by the nudity? Well, that’s because they’re either a) sheltered people whose lives are largely based in their bedrooms and/or b) aware of the fact that looking aghast, being shocked, and squealing at the sight of a willy or tuft of pubes counts as entertainment. It’s a tale as old as PewDiePie: overreact on camera to things that happen in a game, and you’ll keep viewers, especially younger ones, engaged.
Whether it’s a performance or genuine shock, or a bit of both, video game streamers exist in a pretty particular bubble whose reactions aren’t exactly a gauge of society at large. Baldur’s Gate 3 is rated ‘M for Mature,’ aimed at people 17 and up. This is a game for adults, the nude characters in question are unquestionably adults, and while I myself still cringe at the hammed-up depictions of sex in most games, there’s nothing outrageous about it.
Isn’t it about time we all get a little bit more comfortable with nudity here in our little world of gaming? Don’t get me wrong, nudity can be a vehicle for comedy and horror in different contexts; I still chuckle at the unexpected dick swing in the Sacha Baron Cohen flick Bruno, while the bit in horror film Hereditary where that middle-aged dude is standing naked in the doorway smiling at poor Alex Wolff still gives me the, uhhh, well, the willies.
But there’s also plain old casual nudity—something that US cinema has historically shied away from (particularly with the male form), but that European cinema has been way more comfortable with for years. The whole gap between how the US and European ratings boards react to nudity is pretty well documented, and well summarised in this piece written at Quartz. Baldur’s Gate 3 is, of course, a European-made game, and we—yep, even us fusty old Brits—are historically a lot more relaxed about that kind of stuff.
The characters are simply standing there—they’re models, still lifes, and at no point does this nudity translate to pornography. Yes, there’s sex in the game, but it’s stylised much like it would be in a movie, and the junk you see hanging around here doesn’t really play a part in it (nope, no boners here folks). Games are telling fully fleshed out stories these days that are being adapted to award-winning TV shows, it’s about time they got a little more comfortable with nudity. As for the ‘bear sex’ scene? It’s very tame, and clearly played for comedy kicks; it’s not exactly Mr. Hands.
For what it’s worth, I have no strong feelings about the nudity myself—it’s just there—nor do I think that the romance stuff is perfect in Baldur’s Gate 3. I think including sexualities in the game or even having some characters decide that they don’t want to have sex with you makes for more interesting storytelling than making it one great big playersexual cuddle puddle, but whichever way you cut it, it all feels above-board, light-hearted, and hardly x-rated.
That’s where my pushback against the people claiming that there’s some kind of unequal treatment here between the censorship of nudity in western-made games and Japanese games comes in. Bringing our resident JRPG expert Mo into the fold, we trawled through the history of censored Japanese games in the west, and in the last decade or so, most of what I’m seeing on the sexual censorship front revolves around content that seriously flirts with sexualising minors.
Omega Labyrinth, Zanki Zero, Nekopara, Senran Kagura all had some form of censorship based around that very thing, and frankly seeing some of their uncensored versions on Youtube, I think that was a fair call (meanwhile, adult breasts in The Witcher 3 were covered up in Japan).
I’m seeing a total of 11 Japanese games over the past 13 years that got some (usually minor) degree of censorship, so even if you don’t consider the content in the above-mentioned stuff iffy, there isn’t some big pattern here. Besides, casual adult nudity and sexualisation of teens in the name of ‘fanservice’ isn’t exactly a parallel. Over in Japan, they censor more violence (and adult nudity, apparently), over here we censor teeny fanservice stuff. And that's fine.
Point being: let’s not listen to the shrieking streamers and strange subsection of Japanese game defenders, and just calm down about some naked adult bodies standing around in a character creator, shall we? It’s time games got comfortable with the human form.