Bonnie: thanks for the additional insight and clarification on the original article. That was helpful, of course. And I’m glad I’m not the only one that gets google and yahoo hits for subjects that sound creepifying (to borrow term from firefly) as a result of writing about video games.

I think there might be a bigger issue at stake here than just what constitutes good or bad pornography or objectification, and that is a question about gaming and the storyteller’s art.

As much as we may all respect certain kinds of pornography as art, I think we all recognize that in general we don’t want all storytelling and pornography to be linked.

After all, many respected actresses don’t do nude scenes, and it generally is considered taboo for actresses to appear ‘in character’ in a nude magazine. Movies, while they may integrate visual sexuality into the films themselves, rarely encourage the actresses to appear nude in order to attract people to their movies. I believe that is wise, because the kind of attention that pornography would bring would drag the focus off the story.

Gaming is still a fairly small industry, when it comes to the number of stories we tell every year. This isn’t like hollywood where maybe 150 titles are turned out to every major theatre per year. We have perhaps a dozen well known titles that dominate each season. Do we really want the stigma of pornography associated with characters of 50% of our best-recognized seasonal output? Will that not damage the integrity of the stories we are trying to tell?

As an example, imagine Valve letting their Alyx Vance character from Half Life 2 be used for a nude spread. The very out-of-character use of that property would skew the story that they are attempting to tell within the Half Life universe.

I think the playboy spread will be detrimental to the storytelling ability of the industry as a whole, because it brings the focus off the characters and onto raw visuals.

Thanks for the debate!

Totally right. Really, I think we’re debated over two different things here. You’re contesting the claim that CGI women can be said to be more objectified that real women - and you’re bringing into question (rightfully so) the meaning of objectification as we so often use it to mean inappropriate/unfair representation of women. You say the whole concept of beauty in art vs. pornography is too subjective to pull anything useful from, and I totally agree.

The point I’m making (and my apologies if it’s not coming off clearly!) is not that naked CGI women are more objectified in a moral, judgemental sense, but in a very literal way: they are, innately, objects. It’s not my call to say what’s good and bad; my argument is just that it’s revealing that the men of the gaming community would choose to drool over naked characters who don’t exist rather than real women who do. What it reveals exactly, I can’t say. Perhaps, as I mentioned earlier, it implies that in-game females have become more real to gamers than actual women. Or maybe it speaks to the nature of our modern sexuality, in that we prefer a wholly subject-less object for our sexual energy (one that does not demand from us explanations or returned affection) - and this is just a more clearly delineated example of that phenomenon.

In short, Ryan, we agree. Really. Let’s be friends ;-). And thanks for the kind words about the site!

I just wanted to clear up one thing first, and that is where it says “female form” in my fourth paragraph it should really read “human form,” but as is so often the way in life, I guess I got caught up in the context and so it came out as “female form.”

That said, I agree with you when you say that pornography deals largely with the objectification of the sexual other. I think that the concept of “otherness” is an important one to bring up in this discussion and that it starts to address some of the issues I alluded to at the end of my response.

I think that you are really starting to get into some interesting areas when you say, “It has to do with perceptions of the sexual other, in this case one who is literally objectified in that she… does not exist.”

I think that denial of identity for the “sexual other” is definitely the topic at the heart of this debate, and maybe at the heart of this site, but I do not think (and I don’t think that you do either) that it is pornography that is responsible for creating this situation. Instead, pornography is just one more lens through which we can view it.

That said, I still maintain my previous view that no one piece of pornography can be any better or worse than another. I will concede that in some cases the objectification taking place is more easily spotted, but that this is only an affect of social conditioning.

We call a classical painting of a Venus art, but at the same time isn’t it idealizing and objectifying a certain set of values about what a body should look like? What is so different about constructing the naked form this way and constructing it from polygons? Aren’t both of these depictions “artificial.”

Perhaps it is because the Venus exhibits what we consider a more socially acceptable, although not socially desirable, body type. Her figure is far more realistic than, say, that of Lara Croft. However, this perception is largely due to a shift in social and sexual views that has occurred over the centuries. The Venus was essentially the Lara Croft of her day, and the top heavy, tiny-waisted Ms. Croft would have been seen as undesirable because of her low chances for surviving child birth.

In the Renaissance the Venus paintings would have been lust inspiring artifices of temptation, while a rendering, no matter how "realistic" of a Lara Croft-type would have been viewed as some sort of bizarre art piece of a sickly woman.

Once again, my point is that anything, and I will expand this beyond pornography here to include paintings, sculpture (see Michaelangelo's David for an instance of male anxiety), literature, or any other form of art equally objectifies its subject. The medium that is chosen and the method of portrayal is largely irrelevant and I hope that I have started to illustrate this by showing how they can be interpreted differently by different cultures.

Once again, I am not passing moral judgment here. I we can all agree that pornography as well as any art can be enjoyable both in "creation and consumption" as Bonnie elegantly puts it. I simply want to point out that the degree by which a piece objectifies its subject is completely arbitrary from one person to the next, and therefore not a valid tool to strike at the problem.

As Bonnie already suggested, it is examining the "sexual other" that will really start to unearth answers. In that we agree. I just do not see this particular case, weighing one type of pornography against another, as being a very effective one for for furthering that understanding.

(Let me conclude by saying, this is a great website, a timely website, and that it is so refreshing to see intelligent conversation on the Internet. Bravo!)