A Breast is a Breast is a Breast

There are a couple of aspects about society that will, from time to time, confuse the hell out of me. People cramming together to walk in the door of a building when there is another perfectly good door right next to it. The need people feel to make small talk to avoid a perceived uncomfortable silence. Our ability to forget about catastrophic disasters a month after the entire world rallies around those effected. My favorite however, is our obsession and simultaneous repulsion with nudity and sex – mostly the former.

I’ve recently gotten wind of something interesting going on over at Justin.tv. It seems that those who stream video of themselves playing the recently released “Dante’s Inferno” have been permanently banned without any type of warning. The reason? They violated the terms of service. Which terms you ask? No nudity is allowed on the site even if the specific page has placed a mature content warning on the feed. There is, however, nothing in Justin.tv’s terms of service which define what exactly nudity is. It is a bare backside? A bare female chest? Exposed breasts with the nipples covered? There is no way to know.

What we do know however is that the image of nude bodies – both male and female – appear quite frequently in Dante’s Inferno. I myself have not played the game yet but I certainly saw my share of pixilated breasts in the demo, which is what ties in nicely to one of my points: are animated breasts really as “offensive” as real ones?

I, of course, use those quotation marks with intense sarcasm. Call me a crazy, liberal hippe but I do not, in any way, shape, or form, find the naked human body even remotely offensive. I’m not referring here to explicit sexual imagery or pornography here, but rather the naked human form as designed by nature. Plain and simple.

Now, Dante’s Inferno does provide a unique problem because again, while I have not played it, I have read the poem and have very vivid memories of the fun to be found within the lust circle which I’m sure Visceral has taken advantage of. Basically, the images within Dante’s Inferno certainly have the potential to be offensive. It is not the content found offensive by Justin.tv though – it’s the nudity. What’s interesting to me are two underlying issues: one, that the naked human body is automatically offensive and two, that this nudity is far more damaging than the brutal and graphic violence so often found in games today.

To me, Justin.tv might as well come out and say, “yeah, play your Modern Warware and Bioshock and have fun graphically gunning down enemies and boring holes into them with giant drills but don’t you dare show a woman’s breast.” The reason for this fear of female nudity is of course the result of years and years of society taking an essential body part for which nearly all of use owe our lives and reducing it to a sexual object.

My more relevant musings (this is a video game blog after all) come from the backlash again nudity in general in video games, such as the fiasco over the Mass Effect “nude” scene. Is nudity in video games “worse” than nudity in film or in paintings? Personally, I tend to think that it is perceived as such not because it is, of course, any worse but rather because non-gamers remain increasingly hesitant to regard video games as art forms which they without question can be. Not all of them certainly (just like not all other forms of media are art) and for sure in a less traditional sense but I will absolutely argue that Dead Space was one of the most beautiful and artful games to come out in recent years. Is it beautiful like Michelangelo’s “David”? No. But is it any less of an art form? I don’t think so.

You know . . . when I started this post I had a goal in mind. I fear it’s gone into a potentially pointless ramble. I suppose I’ll just end with this question: do you think video games are judged more harshly for nudity than the average show or film? If so, why is this?