Defenda Brenda

IGDA Appoints New Board Members : Next Generation

The International Game Developers Association has appointed new board members, including Tim Train, Brenda Braithwaite and Mark DeLoura.

If you don’t know, Brenda Braithwaite is an advocate for the intelligent use of sex in games, so she’s one of my heroes. I’m very happy about this!

Of course, given that the last high-profile game to deal with sex in a mature and confident way (in one cutscene of about a billion, no less), Mass Effect, was temporarily banned in Singapore and had its own Fox News mini-fiasco, don’t expect anything to change, soon. It’s sad, because when the media deplore any kind of sex in games, they don’t let the medium develop intelligently. In fact, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’s notorious hidden sex scenes (which were clothed, rather tame, and required a degree in GameShark-ology to access) were meant to introduce a bit of tenderness to the game by requiring the player to be kind to a female character for a long time before ever getting to the “hot coffee.” Sex is a beautiful and confounding human condition that could spawn a million games. If the anti-game pundits are successful, though, it will remain a childish, exploitative notion, expressed only through Soul Calibur ninjas with boobs the size of oil tankers.