Think of almost any teen comedy—Can't Buy Me Love,Weird Science, American Pie. Picture pretty much all the novels by the mid-century literary vanguard—Philip Roth, John Updike, Richard Yates. Return to the whiny emo music I stupidly worshipped as a teenager at the turn of the century. Video games are no different, and open-world games in particular have a tendency to treat sex as purely transactional. Obviously, this must change—at any time, but especially during this moment of reckoning in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
But, like many open-world games before it, Witcher 3 falls into the trap of treating sex as a purely transactional activity. There are seven women the player can sleep with if they fulfill certain objectives, and the worst of these are purely transactional flings or one-night stands. Early in the game, the player meets a sorceress named Keira Meitz. The game requires you to work with her for a short while to progress the story, but afterward, you can opt into two additional sidequests helping this sorceress stranded far from home. There's a flirtatious back-and-forth between Keira and protagonist Geralt, but these quests are far from romantic. You explore a haunted cave side-by-side or venture alone to an island to rid a tower from a curse. Complete these simple adventures and bam, Keira invites you on a date and the game cues up a fully-rendered sex scene seemingly plucked from a steamy paperback romance.The rhetoric is simple: complete Keira's tasks, and you're entitled to sex.
One instance of transactional sex would be bad enough, but the game falls back on this tired trope over and over again. Enter a card tournament in a brothel, and you can sleep with Madame Sasha. Defeat Jutta An Dimun in a friendly bout of hand-to-hand combat, and she offers you sex. Pursue Syanna in the Blood and Wine DLC, and her final wish is banging Geralt while the two of them float through clouds. You can even get a doctor drunk at a wedding, but she will puke mid-coitus in a rowboat.
The concept of sex-as-reward is deeply rooted in our culture and the belief that men are entitled to sex and that if they spend enough time doing whatever it is they think a woman wants, they've earned a sexual reward. This sentiment is prevalent in so many video games, but it's obviously not just a video game issue. It's embedded in the fabric of our society.
http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/the-problem-with-transactional-sex-in-open-world-games/
