Emergent Sex
» Amorous Scholarship
Brenda Brathwaite’s long awaited Sex in Video Games has been published. About.com’s Cory Silverberg has written one of the first reviews.
Emergent sex, or the sex that happens beyond the designers intent, is a rich concept, encompassing everything from flirting to fetishistic edge play. Sex in Video Games offers dozens of real life examples of users building sexual possibilities into game environments that don’t explicitly promote sexual behaviors. In this way Sex in Video Games is a wonderful primer that will hopefully generate more discussion and research on emergent sex.
Following a detailed history of sex in video games, Brathwaite examines issues of censorship, self-regulation inside the video game industry, as well as how sex and video games plays out across cultures. There is a brief but important chapter, written by Deborah Solomon, covering issues of obscenity.