Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to research

It's almost like sex is a natural part of human existence and it being taboo is the bit that really fucks people up.

I read the following neat metaphor once: People are like sponges, and if you take away the juice from their lifes, they become thirsty and suck even more.
- One hell of a comment but true

You mean constantly displaying sexuality as evil and interest in it as sinful leads to a unhealthy sexuality? Say it ain't so
i think if less tolerance for religion became more commonplace, it might be better for mental health in general honestly.
- I think the issue is not "religion" because that's hard to define. What do you count as a religion and what not? It's kinda not clearly defined. I.e., you can "believe" in science, yet does the belief make it a religion?
  I think what's more the issue is the fact that people cling to nonsensical statements and are unwilling to look at things the way they are. I.e. a recurring theme of religion is that it absolves people from thinking, i.e. from making their own thoughts and relating those to reality. That is the thing that must be dealt with.
  In other words, people must be taught to think and analyze the world around (and inside of) them. That is what leads to wellbeing and happyness.
if someone is not able to distinguish between fiction (regardless of the medium) and reality, then the problem is much deeper than pearl-clutching religious fanatics insist on believing, and will NOT be solved by abolishing all the “bad” fiction
We've been trying to make this exact argument to the exact same group of people since the earliest days of D&D and I'm sure someone was having the same conversation about some other thing before that. 😠
- They used to think novels were bad for women in the 18th and 19th centuries bc they worried they were too dumb to separate fact from fantasy
  https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-were-bad-for-you/
not able to distinguish between fiction (regardless of the medium) and reality
religious fanatics
The line is a circle
Yeah. It's always been perplexing me that people who seem mentally okay in other ways can seem to think fiction and reality are basically the same thing.
- Glad to see this opinion organically. I have been feeling like its moving more and more toward censure. I always thought japan pretty much had it right and then they took a step back. If its not real, its not real. I honestly don't care about any fictional stuff be it writing or painting.

How dare you! You can't throw facts at puritanical arguments; that's illegal.

Isn't this just the equivalent of the "shooter game discussion" that we had a few years ago?

I.e., some people argued that playing shooter games would make the people more inclined towards gun violence and we'd see more shootings IRL. but that didn't happen, as we know a few years later.

it's quite straightforward then to assume that sexualized video games don't really lead to more sexualization IRL, i guess.

The violence discussion comes and goes every couple years. It has since the 80s at least. It's never had any ground in reality, it's just fear of whatever media they don't understand.
- RFK Jr., noted brainworm host and multi talented repeater and innovator of quackery, said that shit within the last 24 hours lol

I mean sexualized movies with skimpy ladies and jacked dudes, and smut books are not harmful broadly speaking, so I don't really see why video games would be different.

They are causing harm, but not by being sexual. By posing unrealistic standards
- I propose it's not the fiction that's posing unrealistic standards, but the people who can't tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Fiction, is by definition, unrealistic.
- I'm not sure why this is being downvoted because setting unrealistic body standards is absolutely terrible for society
- yes, sadly

It's almost like there's another reason for censorship

Skimming their data tables (don't have access to the journal outside of work), it feels like a really broad hodge pdge of semi-related studies (which the authors essentially admitted).

But it also kind of misses the point. The problem isn't titties or dicks in video games. The problem is the culture around it and what it reinforces and it very much goes far beyond video games. Big jiggly titties? You are a mature game. Dick size slider so you can rock a magnum dong that needs a monster condom? You are progressive. What? Both of those are just more male gaze?

And all of that is normalized. You won't see a significant change from the baseline because that IS the baseline.

You know what you almost never see (outside of those "problematic gay games that turn the kids into litter boxes")? A sexy twink. We all made the same joke about Lies of Timothee Chalamet being one of the better souslikes of the past decade but it is also very telling that we mostly see our twinks in full stillsuits or twelve layers of Victorian clothing. Look, but have enough chastity belts that nobody needs to be worried about being able to touch. And the moment you have a woman who doesn't have an hourglass figure? See: The Last Of Us 2.

Which is the issue. We have a cult of toxic misogyny that insists everything MUST be male gaze and the only acceptable nudity is big titty girls and guys who look like Ahnold. And any divergence from that is "ruining games" or "being woke" to the point that we don't even GET those games outside of the rare case of a game nobody cared about becoming popular (I'll always cite that Yasuke was a recurring character in Nioh long before people turned him into a culture war).

Its like saying that gas stoves cause no meaningful decrease in air quality but having every study take place in the home of a pack a day smoker.

You know what you almost never see (outside of those “problematic gay games that turn the kids into litter boxes”)? A sexy twink.
So you never played JRPGs ?
- You mean the homeboys that are almost always wrapped in about forty buckles and, at best, exist as a viewpoint character for the harem of big titty anime girls?
  But yeah. East Asian media tends to have fewer massively jacked protagonists. But it is still the fundamental male gaze. It is just that East Asian dudes tend to be less likely to spend dozens of hours a week working on glamour muscles.
Maybe we need more women working in game design. I don't know the figures, but I'm guessing they are underrepresented. We probably need more diversity in games generally. It feels like this should be obvious to studios too - the more diverse your team, the more likely your game is to appeal to a diverse audience = a larger pool of customers.
- That was always my experience. You can force people to do hundreds of hours of sensitivity training and explain to them why making the acronym for their solver "SLUR" is inappropriate. But if you just focus on increasing the diversity of your hiring pool and ACTUALLY hiring the best and the brightest, so much of that solves itself because now there is someone to explain that China and Japan may have a lot of shared culture and history but are very much not the same country or why that word is totally a slur and so forth.
  I don't know the actual metrics per studio (and most that DO report it are heavily skewed because they put the administrative staff in with the creative to juice their numbers). But, mostly, every time I think about "popular gamedev" it just reeks of startup culture. The idea that if you were part of a successful team then you should lead your own and that this game was made by one auteur rather than a giant team and so forth.
  And that has the exact same problems we see at so many startups as a whole. The person who was real good at coding is HORRIBLE at management and has no understanding of what HR is even for and so forth. Which leads to the kind of shit that was deeply frowned upon in a conference room at 3 am becoming corporate culture and leading to "cube crawls" and the institutional abuse at companies like Blizzard or Ubisoft.
  One thing that sticks with me that has only been vaguely alluded to by the more "woke" games media outlets. Ikumi Nakamura kind of became a sensation when she went full kawaii during a press conference for (I want to say) The Evil Within and all follow up interviews revealed she was a fricking genius with amazing ideas and really strong arguments for why certain features were there or not. Then she mysteriously disappeared. She alluded to it being the stress of game dev and "politics" but considering the next time we saw her (at a completely new studio) she was still doing horror but ALSO had a kid...
- Maybe we need more women working in game design.
  eardrums immediately shattered by screams of Gamergate reactionary media
- If you have a way to make (qualified) women study software engineering and other game dev related fields, please do share. I would love that.
  But you can't fix lack of women and generally diverse people skilled in game dev during hiring. We have seen the results of trying multiple times.
You speaking of the culture around is really important. That culture is part of the coomer and gooner problem which seems innocent and harmless/inoffensive to others but it is much more insidious. It essentially creates less of an actual reason to interact and a false sense of body expectations.
Essentially the otaku/neet problem japan is facing. People don't know how to interact with the opposite gender and when they do, they do so with their sexual interest as the prominent reason. Most people innately reject this forwardness based on appearances and the rejected will not understand how it is their fault they got rejected. There is little to no decorum or respect.
It's essentially a self feeding, lust-driven antisocial cycle that creates angry and dejected incels. It feeds into the other frustrations and creates a very spiteful and resentful person. I personally believe this is intentional after observing 4chan trends, as it creates easy people to manipulate. (Fappening grand invitation on Fox news, then the pepe dogwhistle to embolden those who are racist, while outraging those miscontrued - which eventually just is embraced)
Extreme emotions create easy to predict reactions, just point them at the person you want them to blame.
It's not innately videos games or media, but creating an entire culture that completely surrounds them does. Lust is one of those material prisons that is naturally inclined as it gives you good feelings. The internet overall has allowed kids to get endulged into this culture without any real risk or entry cost, long before they are of adequate age to understand the intimacy of reality.
- I just want to make it abundantly clear I am not with this person.
  Titillation is good. Masturbation is good. Sex is good (when between consenting parties).
  The issue is not that there are tits and hints of dicks in games. The issue is that there can only be the kind that caters to a very specific male gaze and anything else unleashes a holy war.
  Lust is one of those material prisons
  Sweet fucking Eothas
- So
  Lust is one of those material prisons that is naturally inclined as it gives you good feelings.
  This reads to me like a very heavily christian-biased thing. The christian bible says the original devil in the world took the shape of a snake (representing lust) that led eve to eat the forbidden fruit, and then they were kicked out of paradise.
  What you're forgetting is that lust is a part of the natural world that was already there before god existed. The christian bible says sth along the lines of "the world was created 6000 years ago" and what it really means is that humanity or the human spirit was created 6000 years ago with the rise of the first civilizations and empires.
  But the natural world did already exist way before that (nature is billions of years old), and lust was a natural and essential part of that. It is not so much that lust is a "mistake of god's creation" and kinda "sneaked in" or something, rather, god declared lust - which was already present - a sin, and by doing so, they tipped the natural balance of things. Maybe that is a thing to consider. It is not so much that lust is an invader and offender in the world, rather it is the human spirit that tipped the balance and therefore caused a millenia-old war against the serpent. And that has something to do with what you're saying, even though you're packing the arguments into very modern language.
- Look at gacha games. There's an entire industry revolving around selling anime girls, and when you realize that's what the business model is, it's not surprising how toxic their fanbases have become. I've suspected that some of these devs are even deliberately trying to filter their audience to the most desperate gooners.
A sexy twink.
Plenty in gachas, jrpgs, and such, imo.
We have a cult of toxic misogyny that insists everything MUST be male gaze and the only acceptable nudity is big titty girls and guys who look like Ahnold. And any divergence from that is “ruining games” or “being woke”
I think in heated discussions about "DEI slop" people mostly complain about women being desexualized rather than anyone else being sexualized. Do you have any examples of games where in addition to women being sexualized there were twinks or someone else being sexualized and people insisted that only women should be sexualized but not those other groups? Think of BG3 - it goes beyond regular "male gaze" but it's still widely beloved because it's more inclusive to wide range of appeals including regular ones.
- Funny you bring up gachas because in most of them the cast is overwhelmingly women.
And any divergence from that is “ruining games” or “being woke” to the point that we don’t even GET those games outside of the rare case of a game nobody cared about becoming popular
I would argue the origin is sales. E.G. the publisher wants the sex appeal to sell, so that's what they put in the game. Early 'bro' devs may be a part of this, but the directive from up top is the crux of it.
And that got so normalized, it became what gamers expect. And now they whine like toddlers when anyone tries to change it, but that just happens to be an existing problem conservative movements jumped on after the fact.
TL;DR the root cause is billionares.
Like aways.

no its the right wing influencers backed by russia doing this. they are responsible for getting men into Right wing politics, and by extension hating women is one of thier goals too.

right wing influencers are exploiting mistakes that the left did, they are filling in the role of fighters for male rights for example

As a dude, I exclusively use female characters to get gifts in multi-player games

Well, they cause me harm, because I feel that the developers are trying a cheap trick to get me to play their games. And also, popping it open in some places is unacceptable.

Otherwise, there's places for those types of games.

Wouldn't it be awesome if people cared about research and facts.

Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television. They have pushed many major media platforms into censorship already, and are just getting started.

But what if I just pirate and use VPN's? You tech-savvy kiddos might ask, getting a small thrill from feeling like anti-establishment pirates.

Well never fear, they have plans for that too! Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more "product" to sell to our for-profit prison industry!

Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television.
Wasn't the OG 80s era censorship campaign coming from Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman?
Didn't we get this whole '10s era Christian Conservative "We just want to debate! We just want our free speech on College Campus and The Internet!" campaign?
It seems as though censorship of
<insert bad thing>
is mostly just a wedge issue to put your partisan group on the side of the current popular media trend. In the '80s, it was saying you were Opposed To Satan during the Satanic Panic. In the 90s, it was saying you were Opposed to Gangster Rap and Saggy Pants and Drugs. In the '00s, we were in an ideological war against Islam. In the '10s, we were in an ideological war against Big Government Socialism Taking Over Our Lives. In the '20s its been the War on Woke Foreigners.
Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!
That's one theory.
Another is that we're trying to put together an industrial scale compromat operation, such that any given individual can be smeared and alienated from the public at-large if they oppose the current regime.
I'm sure advertising can function as a side hustle. But we've been drifting away from any kind of real consumer economy for nearly a decade. Everything is "how quickly can the government and its business interests cycle money between one another to replicate economic growth"? You don't really need end-users if all you're making is an AI-driven marketplace.
- Wasn't the OG 80s era censorship campaign coming from Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman?
  It's cute that you think Democrats aren't conservative.
- Ive been worried a bit about that compromat situation. My Internet history alone makes me easily politically assassinatable if I ever try and take up politics.
  Dont worry, nothing illegal, but it'd be enough. This guy got took out by an ill timed stealth photograph of him eating a sandwich. I'd be toast.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if people cared about research and facts.
Conservatives do care about research and facts, as long as these facts say exactly what they want to hear. (/s)
Coming from From Software:
Christian Ring.
Final boss: Jesus of the supply side order.

I was beating my meat to Natalya's (Goldeneye 64) cone-shaped tits at age 10. It may have been arguably better for me than jerking off to droves of actual tits.

...Not that I wasn't doing that also..

She had nothing on Xenia's polygonal proportions

Okay but what games are considered sexualised and how many people are actually playing them?

Cyberpunk certainly qualifies both. It's got explicit sex, and it's got a large player base. But while uncouth and perverse things happen, you can't really be party to them. You tend to show up after. Maybe your choices might lead to some, but you're not there for it. The only sex involving the player is generally wholesome. Except, you know, the ghost of Johnny Silverhand riding shotgun and not necessarily consenting to it (especially when you hook up with the cop).

Then there's Skyrim. Bigger player base but no sex outside of mods. And there are plenty of mods, but if you look at the player count among people using those mods... it's nowhere near the player count of Skyrim as a whole, or Cyberpunk, or even a lot of the other games. And from there it drops off sharply.

So... what sexualised video games?

Sexualisation is not the same as sexual content. Widowmaker in Overwatch is a sexualised character, because she is portrayed as sexually attractive, seductive and generally in such a way as to have her viewed as a sexual being. There are other characters who are not sexualised.
I'd also say the way sex is portrayed throughout Cyberpunk 2077 is important to the setting. Sex is everywhere, but none of it is particularly fulfilling. That the PC can find a healthy sexual relationship at all almost seems like a one in a million chance in Night City. Capitalism pushes forms of sexuality that can be monetized. Capitalism can get you laid, but it can't get you happiness.
(I totally get the criticisms that the game is a mediocre experience. It is, but it's not without value, either.)

now do a research on the effect of lolis (young sexualized girls) in japanese media and whether it has an effect. i wouldn't be surprised if the outcomes were similar, yet lots of people still whine about it.

Pedo alert
- what i meant that people don't always care about the facts (of whether it actually does harm) as can be seen by your response.

You hear that, sexists? It's all in you. Can't blame the games. 🙂

I mean…. It’s cringy as fuck, but harmless.

Much as I’d predict support for that conclusion, I feel like there’s room to doubt the survey process used - as has often been the case for studies on gamer behavior.

Sure, it's not a high quality study. But there is only so much effort countering this baseless fear mongering deserves. This study may already be more effort than it deserves.
The fear mongering doesn't end. Violent movies cause violent behavior. No they don't. Violent games cause violent behavior. No they don't, actually research show gamers are less aggressive. Now it's sexualized games that cause harm. And every time, they don't even really care about the research anyway.
This is meta-analysis.

Something, something, can't prove a negative... While valuable research, it doesn't prove no harm is done. It can only provide evidrnce that the harm they tested for didn't appear to happen. That is a kind of important difference.

I would think repression is worse for people but it’s neat.