'Fortnite' Erotica Says A Ton About The Future Of Gaming
While exploring the fine nuances of your browser's incognito mode, you may have recently noticed how much video game content is showing up on various pornographic hubs and tubes. Well, it's not just all in your (dirty) mind. In 2018, the world's most popular porn video sharing service, Pornhub, reported that Overwatch ranked #20 on its list of the most searched terms. And Fortnite came in 15th.
This means a battle royale game without any plot or notable characters to speak of beat off perennial elder statesmen like "big tits" and "creampie," which clocked in at #18 and #19, respectively. This actually marked a sad drop for Overwatch, which in 2016 managed to outscore "anal."
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Anyway, these results revealed that it truly is a brave new world for those committing the foul sin of Onan while bathed in laptop and phone glow. Sure, video games have been sexualized since the early days, when General Custer's blocky wang threatened the virtual virtue of a pixelated Native American maiden. And the Rule-34-ing of pop culture is so commonplace that you, while reading this, knew exactly what "Rule 34" meant without having to look it up. And when the walls between those two phenomena erode, you get an age in which you got to see Pikachu's pokeballs years before you got to see him in a live-action film.
Advances in video game technology, combined with the willingness of developers to allow players to get creative with that technology, has resulted a large toolbox to work with. Which means we can expect every hot new game to get this kind of hot nude makeover. And they will be just as plentiful and readily obtainable as the multi-page NSFW results you could expect from typing "MILF" or "sad clown" into Google.
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The "Machinima scene," a subculture in which people use existing graphics engines from games to turn game characters into Brazzers stars, while not new, is improving in quality by the day. Instead of merely shoddily removing clothing and inserting naughty bits like their pornfathers, today's pornographers can create and edit scenes wholesale, making what was once unthinkable into reality. We can only hope that the upcoming ToeJam & Earl sequel doesn't get too hot, as the incongruity of a generation masturbating to cartoon alien rappers who look like wiener-based sea creatures might play havoc with the space-time continuum.
The fact that Overwatch makes frequent appearances in porn makes a certain amount of sense, as all the characters (many of whom are sexy women) are fleshed out, with a clear effort put into making them all likable and distinct. Fortnite, on the other hand, requires no emotional investment, and makes zero attempt to create any depth in its characters. This may actually reflect one of the worst developments in the porn industry.
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Namely, think of how old dirty movies at least tried to tell a hilariously poorly acted story of some sort. In contrast, today's porn mainly consists of brief, straight-to-the-point scenes that are purely utilitarian for your genital-wrestling needs. Such is the case with Fortnite porn, taken from a decidedly unsexy game in which players buy skins for the characters they create, but which have no story arcs or real personality behind them at all.
The company behind Fortnite, Epic Games, doesn't seem to have any desire at all to be titillating. In fact, when one of the female skins unintentionally had a bit too much jiggle physics going on, it was promptly removed.
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As long as nobody's getting hurt, there's nothing inherently wrong with whacking it to a digital NPC, we guess. But video game porn isn't always so innocent. We haven't even mentioned the games that let you create mods, and how that freedom's getting the weird/awful sex treatment. Indeed, it seems that for every cute one that lets you fiddle with gravity or swap character faces with Nicolas Cage, there's one that turns a game into a functional rape simulator.
And remember the burgeoning Machinima scene from before? Well, one of them unleashed the "Lara Croft In Trouble" video, which is exactly as non-consensual and disturbing as that name implies. There's nothing to prevent this sort of thing yet, as it's all just so new.
We're not suggesting that the government get involved where video game porn is concerned. Heck, in many ways, it could be viewed as more ethical than the current state of traditional pornography, what with the emergence of monopolies, deepfakes, and business models based on IP fraud. But we thought that you should be mentally prepared for the near-infinite amount of DIY CG smut on the horizon. Because a lot of it's not going to be pretty. Not by a long shot. Because if you put an infinite amount of code monkeys at an infinite amount of keyboards, eventually you're going to wind up with something like Detective Pikachu: SVU.
E. Reid Ross has a couple books, Nature Is The Worst: 500 Reasons You'll Never Want To Go Outside Again and Canadabis: The Canadian Weed Reader, both available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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