Hot New Book for Gamers, Geeks and Pop Culture Addicts: "Porn and Pong"

Longtime tech columnist Damon Brown has released a new book, “Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture," and it's a must for gamers and pop-culture addicts.

The book uses video games as a prism to see how American sexuality, technology and pop culture have changed over the past 35 years. Both sexy and nerdy, “Porn & Pong” begins in the summer of 1972, when the movie Deep Throat and the game Pong started the modern pornography and video game industries, and follows the two phenomena as they intersect and influence each other through the decades.

Below is a brief excerpt from Closets, a chapter on LGBT characters in video game history.

"Closets" (BRIEF EXCERPT from "Porn and Pong")

In 2000, Showtime cable channel started Queer As Folk, the first major gay soap opera. Will & Grace, an NBC comedy about a gay man and his straight female friend, was a top-five prime time hit. MTV launched the gay-focused cable channel Logo. Another new basic cable channel, Bravo, began several gay-friendly shows, including Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a makeover program where five gay men help a hapless straight man improve his couture, grooming, decorating, cooking and social skills. The so-called fab five appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, cut an official single and video for its theme song “All Things (Just Keep Getting Better)” and, perhaps the biggest pop cultural measurement at the time, were parodied on the satirical cartoon South Park. Showtime launched the lesbian drama The L Word, which became another hit for the network. Unlike most pornographic films or mainstream movies, these programs were not created or written by straight males, but by people intimately familiar with the cultures. Based on Nielsen ratings and cable data, millions of Americans were watching gay and lesbian-focused shows, letting a previously unknown subculture into their living room as easily as they observed the four straight single women on HBO’s popular Sex And The City.

  Websites such as GayGamer.net began representing the gay and lesbian video game community. Players were affectionately called gaymers. A Nottingham Trent University study at the time found that 54 percent of male gamers and 68 percent of female gamers preferred to create game avatars, or online personas, of the opposite sex – women to avoid “unsolicited male approaches” and men because they found themselves being treated better by other male players. Just a decade earlier, Nintendo refused to allow Capcom to release its seminal arcade brawler Final Fight on its Super Nintendo system. In the fighting game you beat up drugged-out street urchins, Mafia bosses and crooked cops. You also defend yourself against two women, Roxy and Poison. Depending on the version of the game, the two sisters have long pink or purple hair, tiny cut-off shorts and half t-shirts that barely hold their breasts. Handcuffs hang from their shorts.

Their tight t-shirts rise when you hit them. According to Game Over: Nintendo’s Battle To Dominate Videogames, the game company told Capcom abuse against women was against its content policies. Capcom told Nintendo that Roxy and Poison weren’t always women. They were transgender. Final Fight was released on the Super Nintendo in 1991 – sans Roxy and Poison. (A rare home port, for the Sega CD, reportedly has the sisters. Later Capcom games would feature them in less revealing attire.) The topic was discussed enough for Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono to explain Poison’s gender years later. “In North America, Poison is officially a post-op transsexual. But in Japan, she simply tucks her business away in order to look like a girl.”

Atari, which now only released games, not systems, published Dungeons & Dragons: The Temple of Elemental Evil. Based on the popular pen-and-paper games from the 1970s, The Temple of Elemental Evil was a role playing title geared towards hardcore gamers. In one point in an otherwise straightforward game, you and your merry party of men met a slave named Bertram. The slave says that if you can defeat his master, he’ll repay you by marrying a male party member. Beat Bertram’s master and you’re treated to a wholesome same sex marriage ceremony. “And Elemental Evil isn’t the only place where gamers can find gay romance,” tech journalist Clive Thompson wrote on the website Slate. “Players of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic discovered that while playing a female Jedi, they get hit on by another female Jedi. Later this year, virtual gay wedlock will hit the mainstream when The Sims 2, the long-awaited sequel to the most popular PC title of all time, allows marriages between same-sex Sims.”

The Sims 2 became the first major American video game to allow gay marriages, but the series had always allowed gay couples. There were no press releases. No special The Sims: Gay Edition. You just made your Sim flirt with someone of the same sex and build a relationship from there. “The inclusion of gay relationships in The Sims and other games reflects the Will & Grace effect,” said Wired sex and technology critic Regina Lynn. “For the majority of the gamer generation, there’s nothing more provocative, political or puerile about homosexuality in The Sims – it’s simply no big deal.” This may have been easier to swallow since The Sims had no on-screen sex. (Later editions, such as The Sims: Hot Date, introduced heavy petting.) When the Internet-connected The Sims Online was released, the gay magazine The Advocate wrote that the game had the potential to “bust down antigay barriers around the globe.” When The Advocate asked one of the game designers about the inclusion, he responded that “[o]ur decision was not to put artificial limits on behavior. We’re here to make games, not push any moral agenda, so [allowing gay Sims] seemed like a no-brainer.”

The first major moment in online gay gaming didn’t happen with Sims people, however, but among elves and orcs. While The Sims Online came and went, 100 players gathered in a major virtual city, put on their digital pink shirts and staged the first virtual gay pride parade in World of Warcraft, the largest massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). The parade was prompted by Sara Andrews, a transgender woman from Nashville. She wanted to create a LGBT-friendly (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) club within the WoW universe. Anti-gay slurs tended to fly faster under the anonymity of a computer screen. It was not unusual for established virtual worlds to have gay-friendly cliques for comradely playing. WoW developer Blizzard Entertainment told Andrews she couldn’t create the club and, if she used the LGBT acronym within the game, her WoW account would be canceled. In a later statement, Blizzard said its goal was to “promote a positive game environment for everyone and help prevent… harassment from taking place.” Lambda Legal Defense, America’s biggest LGBT rights organization, joined Sara’s cause. Lambda announced a potential lawsuit, WoW players organized a gay pride parade and Blizzard retracted its decision all in about three weeks.

Within its first two years more than six million players joined World of Warcraft, and in those 700 days Blizzard’s duty switched from providing fresh dungeons and monsters to managing the social dynamics of a world more populated than Los Angeles. After the pink parade, the legal threat and the bad press, Blizzard Entertainment called the club rejection “a misunderstanding” and said it would give more sensitivity training to the online game managers – the modern day Dungeon Masters – monitoring the everyday happenings of the virtual world. Talking to the San Francisco Bay Times, a Blizzard spokesperson told people not to expect a miracle. “We can’t do everything,” she said. “It’s a very big world.”
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Grab “Porn & Pong” at Amazon by clicking here, and visit www.damonbrown.net to find out when Damon’s "Porn & Pong" book tour will be hitting your city! 
(Damon Brown, pictured above).

(Images courtesy Electronic Arts, Derek Rothchild and Getty)

Comments

[albertjohn]

...Very interesting and excellent game and thanks.................
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albertjohn
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[Eremeeff]

Not sure that this is true:), but thanks for a post. Thanks