The power of NSFW in games

I will admit that the number of games that manage to do this is few and far between, but that does not diminish their importance as games or pieces of art; rather, these games that manage to use pornography as part of their story and gameplay are important to analyse and improve upon instead of hiding away and banning. It’s essential to keep experimenting with what is possible in the medium within this particular subject.

Nudity, like pornography, is a hotly debated topic with some critics who want to outright ban all, or most forms of nudity portrayed in media, and some even conflate nudity with pornography. However, nudity is in and of itself simply a portrayal of the human body in an unclothed manner, and can be used in many ways, both artistic, educational, and playful. Few would argue against the artistic merit of the many classical paintings that contain nudity, and I believe that games are just as capable of incorporating nudity as an artistic statement, as educational material, or as a playful exploration. Experiments like pussy palate (Joanna Rauhut, S & Várhidi, E 2024), as I wrote about in the last blog, were an experiment in how to use a game as a tool/toy for sexual communication, this toy does contain an image of a vulva which would fall under the category of nudity but it uses it as a way of easing communication and teaching about anatomy in a playful way.
Other games like Papers Please (2013) use nudity as a way of showing the dehumanising effect of border security.

In Papers Please, you have to inspect people's passports to see if they are allowed in, cross-referencing an increasing number of rules while dealing with increased document complexity. One of the tools given is a scanner, which is used to see if people have bombs or drugs strapped to them, or in some cases, if they match the gender given in their passport. The second case especially speaks to how not fitting within expected gender norms creates issues when interacting with society and can force you into intimidating and humiliating situations.

This is the last and broadest aspect of NSFW, which is the potentially disturbing content aspect. So far, I haven’t seen these games under as much scrutiny as other games, which could be tagged as NSFW; however, that does not mean they are safe. Many of these games touch on subjects within the LGBTQ+ community and or neurodiverse community, both of which are under attack from some organisations and governments. Games like: He Fucked the Girl Out of Me (2022), Growth (2019), Get In The Car, Loser! (2021) and many others explore topics of rape, depression, suicide, anxiety, and a host of other topics using the medium of games and a lot of these games are made by and for LGBTQ+ and/or neurodiverse people who wants to share a part of their world and pain with others via the medium of games and It would be a huge loss if those voices gets silenced even more than they already are.

I don’t want this blog post to be taken as a blanket defence of all NSFW games; some are tasteless, harmful, badly made, or even unethical in nature. However, the same can be said for non NSFW games and all art in general. The freedom to express ourselves is not a victimless freedom. It is impossible to agree about where lines should be drawn, and as such, it is best not to try to draw them in the first place. There are games I wish did not exist; however, I will never advocate for the outright censorship of those games, cause if we start censoring what we don’t like or disagree with, we simply make the world smaller and less varied, and we close ourselves off from being challenged in our worldview and to my mind, that would be a shame and a huge loss for all kinds of art.