This is fourteenth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Croomfolk

From Sex in Video Games (2007) by Brenda Brathwaite:

At the “Sexuality in Games: What’s Appropriate?” roundtable at the 2005 Game Developers Conference, one developer noted that he had no real problem with sexual content in games provided that it wasn’t “just sex for sex’s sake.”

“What’s wrong with sex for sex’s sake?” asked another developer. “Why else have sex?” she continued. “That’s the best use of sex.”

This essay is a look at a moral panic that took place around late 1993 – a panic surrounding, among other things, the release of Night Trap, a non-adult videogame that nonetheless sparked a massive public discussion on the place of adult games within the industry that still has effects to this day, having directly led to the creation of the ESRB, the content rating association still in use by the North American video games industry. Through it, I hope to offer some insight on specific brands of puritanism and their impacts on the games industry.

In Sex in Video Games, the author identifies three purposes of sexual content in games:

a. To stimulate & entertain (as is the case for all pornographic games, but not just pornographic titles – in other words, this would be “sex for sex’s sake”).

b. For education (as is the case with Planned Parenthood’s browser games created to promote safe sex and provide information on sexually-transmitted diseases to a teen target audience).

c. For realism (as is the case with, for example, RPGs that seek to simulate a fully-fledged, grounded world; or social simulations that seek to accurately convey all possible forms of interpersonal relationships).

The story told in this text arose due to the common attitude of deeming sex for sex’s sake as deplorable in video games. A secondary discussion surrounding which sexual content is or isn’t “gratuitous” is often inextricable from this, but that cannot be fully covered here in a satisfactory way, and so is omitted – Sex in Video Games is a very relevant source where those interested can begin a search for more sources on that topic.

However, a claim I now hope to defend is that the arguments seemingly taking issue with sexual content ‘only for its gratuitousness’ are in many cases made in bad faith, because the contents of a videogame bear so little correlation to its censorship or distribution in the market that meeting these arguments on their own terms is unproductive.

As a final note before looking at some historical comparisons in the history of the games industry, this essay’s history and legal precedents are mostly focused on U.S.A. history, legal precedents, and entities. This choice of focus is not a passive acceptance of U.S. institutional overreach, but simply writing about the industry’s conditions as they were and still are. I am not from or in that country, but like most of the world, I am forced to endure the consequences of its pressure groups, financial institutions, and moral panics. In the future, it would be very interesting to see detailed comparisons between the U.S.A. and other legal systems less tolerant of violence in media, such as Germany’s, from the point of view of the adult games industry.

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Between 1993 and 1994, a series of congressional hearings in the United States were held over the matter of “violent and sexual content in videogames”, as well as their supposed effects on children. The hearings were primarily centered around the releases of Mortal Kombat, a game where characters get their heads and spines ripped out of their bodies or still-beating hearts pulled from their chests; and Night Trap, a Scooby-Doo-esque game with no nudity, gore, or sexual activity, explicit or implied, about capturing vampire ninjas. Feel free to read that sentence again.

The hearings, as stated, may have been focused on the lack of a ratings system for video game releases, an issue brought to attention by the release of these games, but it could be argued that for the people present, they were about anything but the games themselves. On one side, you had the man primarily responsible for calling the hearings as well as heading them: Senator Joe Lieberman (today remembered mostly for his tireless work in support of the ‘War on Terror’ military campaigns as well as his Internet censorship bills of the 2010s). Lieberman claimed that the player’s objective in Night Trap was trapping and killing its cast of female characters – in reality, less than five minutes of playtime are required before the objective of protecting the women and capturing their assailants is revealed. Despite these statements, the Senator claimed to have “personally examined” the game. On a seemingly unrelated note that, dare I suggest, shows a certain pattern, Lieberman would claim to minority constituents in 2000 that he supported the 1996 ballot proposition that banned affirmative action in California because he ‘didn’t understand its intent’ at the time.

The controversy surrounding these games was not started by Lieberman – Mortal Kombat had been released to arcades on August 1992 and been controversial basically since the moment it was born, with the United Kingdom banning Night Trap‘s sale to children back in May 1993 (the panic was not universal, and as usual, quickly forgotten – for example, New Zealand’s censor body approved the game and all its promotional material for an unrestricted launch in August 1995). While the contents found in Mortal Kombat were specifically brought to Lieberman’s attention by a colleague, tracking down where the controversy surrounding Night Trap began is difficult, which clouds his motives for selecting the latter game beyond the reasonable assumption that Lieberman simply selected whatever games were being mentioned in circles of quasi-paranoid hearsay at the time – perhaps the most iconic and influential type of U.S. cultural gathering during the 1990s. Without looking at it, Lieberman’s commission described Night Trap as promoting a “culture of carnage”, of being a “disgusting and offensive game”, and of being a threat to civilised society.

On the other side of the Congress floor, you had the industry representatives called to testify; this can be summed up as representatives of Nintendo and Sega, because even though several other developers, interest groups and advertising associations played a part in the events of December 1993, at the time those two companies controlled over 90% of the U.S. video games sector.

The bitter rivalry between both companies had previously escalated from disruptive price cuts to targeted or mocking advertisements, taunting poems published during press releases, and intense poaching of third-party developer companies. In the end, the duel led both companies to those hearings: the Children’s Advertising Review Unit had warned both companies that they were under government scrutiny, and a basic systems rating (flawed as it was) had been developed by Sega – but Nintendo refused to adopt anything developed by their rival, and both companies’ leaderships stated plainly that they would not work together on creating a standardised one unless forced to. Which, of course, they were.

The show put on by the companies’ leadership during those hearings matched Lieberman’s – the first day amounted to little more than mutual finger pointing as they attempted to make each other look bad, with few qualms about distorting facts in the process. Sega of America had, for some time already, advertised itself as an edgier publisher with an older target audience, a fact much exploited by Nintendo during those hearings as it sought to distance itself from the controversy and affirm its commitment to a family-friendly image. Nintendo said Night Trap would never be on their console for ‘not passing their guidelines’ – to Robert Fulop, the game’s designer, this was a reference to the Nintendo systems not supporting CD-ROMs, but deliberately obfuscated in order to make the game sound like it did not pass Nintendo’s ethical guidelines.

This may or may not have been true – plenty of similar obfuscations and outright lies happened during that hearing, but Nintendo’s written content guidelines, which were notoriously strict, would potentially still have precluded a Night Trap launch on the company’s platforms if there were no technical incompatibilities. Wherever the answer lies, those same guidelines were shockingly malleable anyway when it came to releasing highly-anticipated titles, rendering the company leadership’s moralising claims impressively hollow. During the first hearing on 9 December 1993, Howard Lincoln’s (then-senior VP of Nintendo of America) exact words were:

“Some very violent and offensive games have reached the market – and of course, I am speaking about Mortal Kombat and Night Trap. And let me say that, for the record, I want to state that Night Trap will never appear on a Nintendo system. Obviously, it would not pass our guidelines. This game, as you’ve indicated, promotes violence against women – it simply has no place in our society.” — Man who had personally worked to license and distribute Mortal Kombat

What were, anyway, Nintendo’s content standards at the time? A few minutes earlier, he listed them as including:

• Sexually-suggestive or explicit content
• Random, gratuitous or excessive violence
• Graphical illustration of death
• Excessive force in sports games
• Ethnic, racial, nationalistic or sexual stereotypes
• Profanity or obscenity
• Use of illegal drugs

As this was a company defending before the US government that their content policy was reasonable and family friendly, I claim that this is what a legal and corporate team judged to be the mainstream of public opinion. Note that violence is blocked when it is “random, gratuitous or excessive”, while sex and even suggestiveness are banned outright. Even back then, appeasing political forces meant rejecting sexuality in media to a larger extent than violence.

This is anecdotally obvious to anyone who has paid any attention to media in the past decades, but it’s still interesting to point out the U.S. Supreme Court decision cited in page 186 of Sex in Video Games, where violence in media is protected as its removal would raise people to be “unequipped to cope with the world as we know it”. I don’t question this reasoning, only the drawing of borders that include in it violent content while excluding any and all sexual content from it under a protean First Amendment that had to invent a specific exception for “obscene content” (while trying and failing to define what that would even be, as per Brathwaite pp.178-185) in order to do it.

Two weeks before Christmas 1993, Night Trap was removed from Toys R Us and Kay-Bee’s store shelves after numerous phonecalls complaining about the game (Mortal Kombat, meanwhile, remained being sold by both chains). A seemingly minor line in a 1994 issue of GamePro Magazine talking about these events is, three decades later, an eyebrow-raising echo of history: a spokesperson for Toys R Us believed the phonecalls were orchestrated, an organized pressure campaign. As I write this, it’s been less than a year since Australian TERF/anti-porn group Collective Shout claimed responsibility for an organized phonecall campaign that led Steam and itch.io to delist thousands of games over “violent sexual content”, the vast majority of which did not contain sexual violence, and many of which did not contain explicit sexual content at all (Valens, 2025). A few months after that episode, the videogame Horses was refused a release on Steam due to allegedly containing “sexual conduct involving a minor” (the game does not include such a scene – in fact, despite its heavy focus on sexual and violent themes, it does not include uncensored nudity or violence at all.)

Eventually, one has to throw their hands up and ask: how much more do you want? Both SEGA’s and Nintendo’s versions of Mortal Kombat were self-censored prior to release, to no reduction of the controversy they found themselves in. Night Trap not only featured no blood in a game about vampires, but also goofy devices resembling claw-toys used by the villains, because the developers created it from the start under a strict code of featuring no “reproducible” violence. Again, the efforts and self-stunting of the team had no impact on the controversial reception of the game. Horses pixelated all its nudity and cut away from most extreme scenes, besides changing or removing many of its story beats before even being released, and still faced a post-release landscape where the studio was forced to go on an indefinite hiatus due to the crushing reality that is attempting a release outside of Steam’s quasi-monopoly. This is not even getting into older examples of even more extreme, or some could say cartoonish, attempts at censorship, such as attempts to ban Project Gotham Racing 2 in Australia over dangerous driving (Brathwaite, 2007).

This story doesn’t have a nice moral or tidy ending, as it is, in a sense, still ongoing. It is expected that companies, especially massive ones, follow the mainstream. But I leave you with one final rhetorical question: for independent collectives or individual artists, in a landscape where a game’s content has no relation whatsoever to the controversies surrounding it, what is the point of anticipatory obedience?

Croomfolk is a digital nomad and vibe orphan, allegedly involved in the fields of visual art, game dev, and archival work. They can be found wherever ephemeral media and at-risk grey literature coalesce, usually chipping away at illustration (as with the OpenTaxa project), open-source writing and translation (as with the Portuguese edition of Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality), and digital archaeology.

Bibliography

Brathwaite, Brenda (2007). Sex in Video Games. Charles River Media.

Kent, Steven L (2001). The Ultimate History of Video Games. Three Rivers Press.

U.S. Senate Committee (1993). Video Game Violence. Citations especially at around 1:24:50. Via C-SPAN.

Harris, Blake J (2019). Content Rated By: An Oral History of the ESRB.

GamePro magazine (March 1994). Issue 56, p. 184. Via Internet Archive:

Interview with Robert Fulop in RetroGamer magazine. Via Internet Archive:

New Zealand Office of Film and Literature Classification (August 1995). Night Trap. Via Internet Archive.

Valens, Ana (2025). Group Behind Steam Censorship Policies Have Powerful Allies — And Targeted Popular Games With Outlandish Claims. Via Internet Archive.

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