Virtua tits
That’s the kind of title that really grabs ’em, I say. Yep, I still got it!
You played The Witcher 2? I have. Or, well, some of it. It’s pretty fun and all, but that’s not really what I came here tonight to talk to you about. I came to talk about sex.
As you may recall if you’re the type of person who listens to me, the first Witcher shipped censored, and I was pretty annoyed about that (a later "director’s cut" patch was issued that removed the censors). The second one sure isn’t — or at least not as severely — so you won’t hear me whining about that this time. Which, of course, means it’s time to whine about something else instead. The rest of this post shall henceforth be known as NSFW, so don’t follow the jump if you’ll get in trouble for it. Also don’t follow the jump if you’re offended by the female body for whatever reason. You know who you are.
Welcome back. I’m assuming everybody still reading this post is aware of what women look like, yes? I’ll even go one step farther and assume you know the basics of how women behave as a physics object in a 3D world. by which I mean this:
You can tell this is erotic art and not porn because it’s in black-and-white and has deep, mysterious shadows. But, anyhow, the point gets across: this is how the female form — which I’m using here as a euphemism for tits — behaves. When a woman lies down, her breasts sort of smoosh out like that, because they’re soft and pliable and don’t really contain any rigid skeleton like they do when you model them in Maya. What they absolutely don’t do is stick straight up into the air in perfect little diving buoy semicones.
Yo ho! What are those things made of? Concrete? It looks like CD Projekt was at least aware that the whole mass of the breast should probably tip to the side, but didn’t quite recall that maybe it shouldn’t stay so… erect. I mean, damn, Triss. I expect your décolletage would come in handy if I had some walnuts I needed cracked — or a coconut, perhaps — but perhaps you should tone down the levitation enchantment just a hair.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m well aware that video games are fantasy, and that the women are disproportionately likely to look like Nilson Kerr, and the males like The Rock. I have no problem with that. All I’m saying is that you video game people send me endless tech demos showing off what your fancy-pants 3D renderer and physics engine can do, and in particular you’re always talking about fluid simulation, and yet you never manage to extend the concept to breasts. They should not behave like a rigid body. It’s weird and distracting and not very sexy.
Let’s take a moment to reflect on the reasons why you’d be putting a nude scene in your game to begin with. Really there are only two: for erotic stimulation, or for the purposes of admiring the human form in a completely non-erotic way. The primary difference between these two reasons, incidentally, is the amount of lying involved, but never mind that; let’s instead focus on what they have in common, which is this:
Whenever you use nudity in art, it sends a powerful signal that the subject of the work at hand is the body itself, and not the person it represents or the trappings it’s surrounded with. This is why amazing plasti-breasts seem so out of place on the nude model, but don’t really cause as much consternation on a clothed model. If you’re going to put naked women in your game, it’s worth a little extra work to make them resemble the naked women we have here in the real world. Or is that what women look like in Poland? I guess I don’t know for sure.
