CENSORSHIP

Not safe for videogames

Pressured by payment processors, games and their creators still struggle with adult material

Getty, Sean Anthony Eddy

Sex has been a part of videogames for almost as long as there have been videogames. Atari’s VCS hosted crude erotic games such as Bachelor Party and Gigolo, bootleg and marginal though they were. In the 1990s, big-budget adventure titles such as Phantasmagoria featured sex scenes, trying to duplicate the maturity of cinema with live-action actors and sets. In Japan, pornographic visual novels, often featuring convoluted worldbuilding and plots, flourished into a subculture of their own. And recent years have heralded a broader acceptance of sexual themes in mainstream games. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Hades are lauded for their romances. Parallel to film and TV, the creators of major videogames now employ intimacy coordinators to help motion-capture performers feel safe and comfortable.

Through all this history, the potential, real or imagined eroticism of games has generated controversy. In addition to Mortal Kombat, US congressional hearings into videogame violence in 1993 and 1994 cited Night Trap. The game lacked nudity or extreme violence, but had a cheap, B-movie interest in college girl sleepovers. The presence of sex scenes in games such as Mass Effect was also the subject of a brief moral panic, marked by a report from Fox News. The broader acceptance of sexual themes in mainstream games has not quieted objections.

When its campaign started in March 2025, Collective Shout, “a grassroots movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls”, had only one videogame in its sights, a pornographic visual novel called No Mercy, which features incest and sexual assault. Via a petition on Change.org, Collective Shout put pressure on Valve to remove the game from Steam, but the company did not respond. In April, after No Mercy was banned in Canada, the UK and Australia, the developer, Zerat Games, removed it from Steam itself. But by then Collective Shout’s campaign had grown bigger, targeting hundreds of games hosted on Steam and Itch.io. In an open letter to payment processors such as Visa and Mastercard, Collective Shout stated: “We request that you demonstrate corporate social responsibility and immediately cease processing payments on Steam and Itch.io and any other platforms hosting similar games”.