The Sims are porn

Emboldened by their success of getting GTA:San Andreas pulled off the shelves for containing a hidden sex game, which was only accessible with the "hot coffee" mod, censors are now attacking other games. The unlikely target this time is The Sims 2. While The Sims are generally well behaved and puritan, they are nude when taking a shower or bath, oh my god! And the "blur" designed to hide any indecent exposure can, you guessed it, removed with a mod. Not that there is anything to see under the blur, EA states that the sims have no genitals and appear "like Ken and Barbie". But due to the particular American sensibilities regarding full frontal nudity, this is enough for some people to call for the game being banned.

Now you need to remember that characters in video games don't actually wear clothes. In most cases they just wear "textures", that is the clothing is painted onto their body. And the files containing these textures reside on the users hard-disk, and with more or less technical expertise can be accessed and modified. Which means that nearly every video game on the PC which has humanoid figures in it can be modded to change these textures to something pink, thus showing the game characters naked. And if the video game character is an attractive looking female to start with, chances are that somebody actually bothers to do such a "nude patch", a tradition dating back to the first Lara Croft Tomb Raider game.

The surprising thing is that some people think that nude video game characters, accessible only through a mod downloaded from the internet, are a threat to the public morals. Somebody should point out to them that an underage teenager able to find a nude patch on the internet will also be able to find huge amounts of free porn there. Or that cutting somebody into pieces with a chainsaw in a video game might be more harmful than seeing a naked sim.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:20 PM Permanent Link