Sex in entertainment is an unusual subject for me. I was raised by conservative parents, and before I saw a pair of boobs (on TV, film, magazine or Internet) I had seen an alien burst from someone’s chest and a man’s head get knocked clean off while fighting on top of a subway train. In fact, I’m pretty sure my first reaction to seeing breasts was “those sag a lot more than I thought they would”. So while I’m more comfortable with violent imagery in games and film, I can still squirm a bit when a film parades a topless woman across the screen (especially if I’m watching it with family).

After playing Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Heavy Rain I had come to the conclusion that I will never be comfortable seeing two digitally rendered characters getting it on. It looks more unnatural than that one scene from Team America: World Police, as if two blow-up dolls suddenly came to life and tried to go at it.

Then comes along Catherine. For a game about sex, there is a shocking lack of the hibbidy dibbidy dance. Even moments leading up to “the protagonist is now getting nailed” seem to pale in comparison to the games above. It isn’t that everything necessarily happens on screen. The title character, Catherine, straddles herself atop protagonist Vincent while completely naked (naughty bits tastefully hidden from view). She continues to tease and flirt while he uncomfortably tries to reject her without bluntly saying “no” and pushing her off. It has the sort of recipe to make me uncomfortable playing it while family members are home.

Yet I wasn’t embarrassed or uncomfortable at all. I didn’t quite understand why at first until reflecting on a post of my brother’s. In his reflections on the fantasy genre in the past decade, he notes that comics like Watchmen handled content like sex and violence, but imitators approached similar material with an adolescent mindset. In the 1990’s comic books became a childish parade of blood and semen trying to play grown-up games, like a bunch of children playing house and conveying what they think it means to be adult.

What is lost is the purpose in Watchmen. Yes, even sex has a purpose in that story, even if the film took it to creepily softcore bordering-on-hardcore levels (I mean, damn). I guess I should caution spoilers below.

The first elephant in the room when it comes to Watchmen is Dr. Manhattan’s giblets swinging around for everyone and their mother to see (and feel inadequate in the presence of). This is perhaps the most tasteful aspect of sexual content Zack Snyder handled in the film translation, as it certainly conveys a simple aspect of Dr. Manhattan: he is no longer human, and the sort of concepts and ideas that might have once bothered or concerned him are no longer important. In his state of mind, the human body is just that. Everything has its own practical purpose, and to cover it up is silly. He walks around in the nude, sure, but the film never acknowledges it as being unusual. This was the perfect manner in which to handle it. The film treats his junk as Dr. Manhattan does. An unimportant thing that exists. It may as well be any random item in the background.

What makes viewers (or comic readers) uncomfortable is how they are used to treating nudity. People are used to either being sexually turned on when seeing naked skin, or… well, that’s about it. Nudity (in America at least) is only truly handled when characters are about to have sex. In this regard, Watchmen handles Dr. Manhattan’s willy-wang in a truly mature nature while the audience recoils or giggles like an audience of middle school children learning about reproduction the first time.

Later on Dr. Manhattan is “gettin’ jiggy wit” the Silk Spectre II. The iconic moment is when you start to see multiple of Manhattan’s hands caressing her, completely freaking her out and ruining the mood. This scene is used to show the emotional disconnect between the two characters despite their relationship. The point is further driven home when Spectre realizes Dr. Manhattan was still working the entire time they had been sexually intimate. For Dr. Manhattan, the approach is practical. More copies of himself attending to Spectre’s body would be better, and as he had enough concentration available he could continue work while diddlying her. Yet for an emotional human, the experience was humiliating and even disturbing. In other words, it wasn’t a gratuitous sex scene. Instead, a sexual experience, an often emotional moment between two people, was used to drive home an emotional wall between the two characters. It is a moment that informs and builds the actions of the characters later on.

Later on Silk Spectre is beginning to get romantic with Nite Owl, but he is unable to have an erection. It is a humiliating moment for him in the midst of so much inner conflict. At the time he is uncertain of whether he should be a costumed vigilante or not, and more uncertain of his own identity. It is only after he and Silk Spectre don their costumes and rescue several civilians from a burning building that he has resolved his internal conflict and accepted that, yes, he is a costumed vigilante. That he and Silk Spectre are able to have sex without difficulty shows that all of his earlier doubts are gone.

Of course, in the comic it wasn’t nearly so uncomfortable experience as it had been in a crowded theater full of nerds.

The point is, we’re already used to violence being used to be a physical representation of a character’s inner conflicts. We also know that senseless violence can be dull and meaningless, no matter how flashy or fancifully choreographed. Just compare the difference between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace. Yet it is also possible for sex to carry similar meaning, and when a pair of breasts are seen bouncing across the screen for no other reason than for there to be boobs, any emotional significance is lost. It becomes nothing but shock value, an effort to be “edgy” and to cause a knee-jerk stir in the masses.

With video games becoming a medium challenging the likes of Hollywood more and more, the topic of sex and violence in video games is becoming more and more important. Are these games simply violence without meaning? I don’t completely think so. Considering how the nuke was handled in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, I’d say they wanted the player to have an emotional reaction that put all their actions and all that violence into a new perspective. In Halo there is a sense of loss towards the end rather than a feeling of being a super bad-ass. There are even games such as Bioshock or No More Heroes that have their own commentary towards violence in games.

Sex, however, hasn’t really penetrated (bah-dum-PSH!) into gaming culture that much. Sure, we have plenty of skimpy outfits and cleavage, but that’s more sexuality than sex itself. Of course, there could be some official definition out there that means “sexuality is sex”, but I don’t quite go for that. Sexuality, to me, is more about teasing and enticing. Sex itself, well, that gets a bit more complicated. It can be romantic, it can be confusing, and it can even be harmful. Thus far, games have either dealt with sex and sexuality as humor (Leisure Suit Larry) or possibly as an end result to romance (Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Heavy Rain, even the Hot Coffee mod).

Then along comes Catherine, a game whose central theme is sex and the complications that arise from it. Is it just some fun? Is it a special and intimate moment? What does it truly mean to cheat on your partner? How do you handle such a situation? What about marriage? Children? As you progress through the game these issues are constantly brought up, and throughout you meet a variety of characters who each have a different perspective on love, life and sex.

It’s startling to find a game tackle the sort of subject matter you’d expect from a Chuck Palahniuk novel, only with less misogyny (or as much? I guess it depends on how you play the protagonist). Yet not one of the characters seems unreasonably proportioned. All of the females are believable, have some level of personality and dress as you may see women in the mall dress. In fact, I’ve seen scantier clothing at the mall than in this game.

Suddenly, looking back at Dragon Age and Mass Effect, the sex scenes seem unusual. It’s almost as if they are offered as a reward for completing a love quest. “Congratulations! You got all the answers correct! Now enjoy your dirty dance of seduction”. Is this really how games ought to portray such a thing? Should we approach it with the mentality that it is a reward for good behavior? In fact, isn’t that a very juvenile perspective that you’d expect to have as a sixteen year old male?

In Catherine, when the young blonde lays naked on top of Vincent, there is more going on than just what we see. His entire perspective on relationships is being challenged. Should he be loyal? Is he even happy in his current relationship? Does he love Katherine enough to marry her, or does he just want the sort of time Catherine is offering? (In case you’re not familiar, yes, there are two C/Katherine’s in the game)

Catherine is, perhaps, the first truly mature and adult game about sex. As such, there’s no sense of feeling dirty or embarrassed while playing it. There’s no sense that the developers were giggling the whole time like a bunch of pre-pubescents drawing boobs in their text books in the middle of Algebra. Sex itself has meaning here, and it has elevated a puzzle game into being something much, much more.

I honestly hope we don’t see another Watchmen scenario out of this. I hope that, if Catherine is a success, we don’t see people trying to recreate games with high sexual content but without the meaning. Just as comic books in the 1990’s saw the violence and sex in Watchmen but didn’t notice the meaning behind it all, it is possible future video games will see box art where a man has fallen between a woman’s cleavage and just go off with that. No sense of meaning, no sense of what ideas it is trying to get the player to truly think about.

Not everything needs to be “mature”, no. But it would be nice if Catherine elevated how gamers, as adults, can handle sex in their games. Not as a reward, not as some forbidden fruit. Just as an aspect of life that has its own consequences depending on how you act.