I was not going to bring this topic up. . . and I ask that none of you make any knocks on specific belief systems nor any personal attacks, as I didn't make this thread for it to go the way of that other one, i.e. into a locked state. But looking at some of the answers in that other thread, about advlt ratings, and propriety for teens. . . I just had to take a step back and say, "what the hell. . . two hundred years Queen Victoria has been dead (no disrespect intended to Her Majesty), and here we are still labouring under Victorian prudish foolishness." :rolleyes: :shakehead: :facepalm:

A few points:

1. :grad: Nudity is a normal facet of life. Much more common and normal than violence in fact. We enter the world sans appearal, etc.

2) ES is a game series which deals heavily in customization and verisimilitude. Now, I completely understand that this is not going to extend to any truly risque depictions or features, nor should it. But something as rudimentary as the revelation of basic buttock or briast . . . it really isn't that outlandish.

3) For all the talk of preserving the moral propriety for the sake of the Teen audience and not getting an advlt rating (in a game where you can murder, assasinate, and be party to acts of torture), rare indeed is the teen who has seen nothing of nudity, and who does not have at least a basic knowledge of what an unclad body looks like. Without getting too much into the details of my teen life, I will suffice it to say that I knew what a nvde body looked like, and so did most other people in my age group. :grad: Indeed, in most states and nations the consent age is 16 (don't ask "consent for what" either, we all know and there is no need to spell such things out), so the perception of there being peril for people in that age group to partial nvdes in a video game is beyond bizzare.

4) :read: There are already games rated Teen or M which feature partial nudity. The God of War games, Conan and the teen rated Dead or Alive games. Indeed, the DOA game included a nvde shower clip, and was rated teen, so I do not know that the argument that partial nudity would instantly equal an A rating is legitimate.

5) And, admittedly this is a damnation of cultural idiocy as much as anything else :poke: . . . in a game with the heavy violence content of ES, in which there are scenes depicted of torture, of desecrated and mutilated bodies, of corpses that are both nvde AND mutilated (have you SEEN what was done with some of the corpses in Oblivion and in the dungeons of Necromancers? Does mention of Vlad The Impaler bring any imagery to mind?). . . what is the big deal about nudity on a living character? It is so inane it is hardly to be belived. I don't think there is anything inherent to basic partial nvdes in "live" characters that would merit more censorship or a harsher rating than the violent depictions already in the game merit. If the matter even came up for rating or legal arguments, it could be easily one on lines of logic.

To be candid, I don't have to have nudity in Skyrim, nor in any other ES game I play. It is not a HUGE deal to me. However, I find it ridiculous that the topic is so controversial, especially in light of the dark and relatively mature nature of the game. Developers and moderators seem to go bug eyed at the mention of the word naked. . . all the while overlooking the unclad corpse I saw dangling from a noose outside of every cave in ES IV with a Worm Acolyte hiding out in it. I don't think the inclusion of partial, basic nudity would merit an advlt rating, and might not even cause an M rating. And if the ratings boards tried to force one on foolish grounds. . . whatever happened to standing up to these oligarchal boards on legal and logical basis and saying, "That is BS for the following reasons, and we are challanging it in a public forum." :slap:

I just don't understand it. It is about as native and natural as drawing breath, yet industry types walk around it on egg shells like it is plague. Do a pack of hypocrite politicians and moronic commities really frighten them that badly?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Blame the Puritans. Or the 1950's. Or the children (yes, I know the refrain is "think of the children" - and so I blame the children )

Even longer answer: Publishers are the ones who are worried about the nakies. And the six...ies. Different cultures are even concerned about the violence (see Germany). You can't please everyone, so they try to please the biggest audience, I suppose. Bethesda could simply publish the game without the ESRB's rating... but that would bring back memories of 1992. I'd much rather see the games industry rate games versus teh guv'ment regulate them.

Your error is trying to apply logic and reasoning to the hoi polloi. Which, with everything I've learned from my study of psychology, people are neither logical nor reasonable much of the time.

I understand. And I very much agree about the last part. Yet I think the industry allowed the Government to overreach, and I think it unfortunate that they did not tackle the government more on the hypocrisy, the illogical trains of thougth, and the many inconsistencies in some of the paramaters that the government (essentially if not officially) set. There are Maurice Sendak children's books and Public Broadcasting cartoons that show buttocks (not to mention a horde of National Geographic specials), but in a game specifically marketed to people over the age of 13, and loaded with violence, gore, torture, corpses etc. . . a naked buttocks is just a bridge too far? It is madness. And I think it speaks ill of the industry as a whole, and is a mark of unfortunate cowardice, that they backed down from the Government on so many of these fights. Everyone knows how inconsistent and in many cases idiotic some of the ratings policies are. . . but no one dares to say so for fear of stern but hollow and largely illogical admonisment from Federal Authority figures trying to make a name for themselves by claimaing a larger moral authority than the law actually allows them.

Mafia II has nudity and it is rated M.

Not sure how they did that, I wonder what the guildlines for it with ESRB are.


The thing about nudity, especially in a game like TES is that it's always going to be sort of tacked on, and the undergarments really serve the same purpose. For something like backside, though.. if it was context appropriate I don't see a problem; but I don't see such a situation where that could be used.

Uhhh.... great?

The problem is that many people get squicky about nudity - whether it is in video games or otherwise - and their children. I could go into detail about the psychological aspects of it all, but the short point is that any particular government has that authority because the people give it that authority (in democratically elected places, at least). This line of reasoning, while interesting, is veering sharply into the politics territory. So I'll refrain from speaking further about it.

On the other side of things, selling AO rated games is a sort of death-kneel for retail stores (especially the big box ones) and they won't touch it. A heavy combination of gore, which Oblivion had, and nudity, which probably won't appear in vanilla Skyrim, would utterly tank Skyrim's sales.

I am not sure if the game needs nudity so much, but anything could be better then the over sized nappies that the characters had in Oblivion. Overall in the west, Censorship is just over the top, if you look at Japanese culture they have things in shows meant for 13 year olds that we'd be talking about if it's approriate for 18 year olds... Nudity is fine, but nudity for the sake of just having nudity is tacky and doesn't really add anything to a game.

If not nudity for the sake of nudity, why violence for the sake of violence? Impaled skeletons serve no real purpose other than to immerse the player. The same can be said of nudity.

I've never understood it, really. Even my own parents would shy away from anything concerning nudity.. and yet I was able to buy or watch anything featuring obscene violence. Doesn't seem quite right.

Well... I'm a teen and I don't want any nudity in my game. I don't mind the new, brutal combat because it fits with the whole Nordic setting. But no nudity thanks.

Some people :no:

Who says nudity will get an AO rating? The witcher eventually released a nvde patch with no ill effects, and the witcher 2 will have a lot of nudity and six but it still an M game as far as I know, which will be interesting to see how people react. Nudity will NOT automatically create an AO rating(god of war, the witcher, etc), I think we have finally moved beyond that point. Its just that it was a hot item for a while and publishers are a bit skittish. However, I do not know why, That is the best publicity you can get, the worse than can happen is family groups will try to get the game banned at wall-mart, but thanks to digital distribution getting more and more popular, I think developers can start pushing the envelope again with less fear of reprisals since people can buy the game digitally(what are parent groups going to do? Stop buying steam games? HA!). With that said, I really doubt family groups will still be on this bandwagon. They like to jump from hot topic, to hot topic and its time for something else to hit the news.


Lets review a brief history of controversy:

Fictional book material like Dracula (too violent at the time)
comic books (leads to violent)
rock and roll (leads to violence and debauchery)
DND games (leads to devil worship)
Movies (leads to violence/corrupting youth)
Cable TV (leads to violence and corrupting youth)
pormography (leads to rampage men who will become fiends)
Internet (violence, fiends, devil worship,)
Video games (leads to violence and corrupting youth)
Nudity in video games (leads to corrupting youth and fiends)

See a pattern? They were all blamed for the worlds ills and were boycotted by family/religious groups at the time, now they are just about all considered tame and nobody looks at them much anymore. Oh, we have a few brief flare ups during slow news cycles or a politician is trying to get votes(silly since the average gamer is an advlt now and the old guard is dying off), but it always goes down after a while. Like I said, I think nudity has fallen off the radar mostly, as soon as some new convenient scapegoat comes around, it will be something else turn.

Yes, there was no nudity in the viking era, and that [censored]ing, pillaging and slave taking was only rated M for mature

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudity_in_sport


Granted, this is a fantasy game.. but you do have to draw some parallels from time to time. It isn't as if the developers created the Nords from nothing but their own imagination. Also, if I recall correctly, there are various articles in-game and in-lore that reference sixual acts, so it isn't as if nudity or six are foreign to the ES universe.

I'm just saying that they're will be plenty of mods that add nudity. We don't need it in the base game. If you have it on the console, too bad, you cant see nudity everytime you accidentally remove the wrong item in your menu. Sorry for (not) wanting something.

And I'm saying (and Im sure people will agree with me) that I don't care enough about nudity to download mods for it, but since Im not an insecure man-boy I can handle seeing a but-cheek in my game of intensely violent face-mashing without losing any sleep.

"Aww yeah, crotch mutilation finishing moves, that's AWESOME. OH NO, A nipble!"

The Witcher (uncut edition) is rated AO by the ESRB.

Buying Steam games requires some sort of credit card or PayPal. Kids generally do not have either, what with the whole lacking a bank account and such (and yes, I know there are ways of getting money onto PayPal without a credit card). And even then, parents who give their kids a credit card usually look through the statements.

The funny thing is, all of those things you list are still controversial today. Tom Sawyer, 300, Marilyn Manson, video games, etc, etc, are all still controversial in some form or another.

And I think you are incorrect. You are examining the situation from your own viewpoint and not taking into account the (much larger) mainstream culture - let alone world culture - that heavily, heavily frowns upon such things as nudity, especially female nudity. I can't get into specifics, but the issues surrounding nudity are not simply going to go away anytime soon.

And what of those who object to violence or gore? Are their opinions and beliefs any less important than yours? If the argument for simply avoiding Skyrim altogether can be applied to them, why can't it also be applied to nudity and you (as well as any others who think the same as you)?

It isn't that I don't understand why nudity will never find itself in any TES game. It's that I don't understand how arguments can be used for why it shouldn't be included, while any others for various other features are either ignored or "solved" by "solutions" that require extra work on the part of those who disagree with their inclusion.

i'm pretty sure RDR had like three dangly bits in it over the course of the game. other games have nudity here and there.

the difference between those games and Skyrim is that in Skyrim you'll be able to [censored] around with and pose ragdolls, and if they're naked it'll lead to a lot of awkward moments where parents walk in on their kids playing Skyrim and dragging corpses around like barbie dolls, which in turn would lead to Bethesda getting sued/boycotted/something.

yeah the game's rated M but nobody follows ratings. until there's some actual standardized regulation regarding having to card people buying an M-rated game there's no chance of uncensored nudity in games becoming in any way commonplace.

there's no use having this discussion at all really because there's nothing Bethesda can or will do about it. wait for the inevitable nvde body replacers with huge bouncing briasts,

I go through my days working and playing and shopping with neighbors, coworkers, friends, and passersby and don't have a care that I never see them naked. I play a game and suddenly not seeing people naked is supposed to matter to me? Why?

Exactly.

I wake up, slip on my leather armor and I wander through the streets with a longsword and bow dropping poisoned apples and backstabbing people for sithis-cred. Never on my days agenda do I ever see out of place nudity.

I dont really care about nudity in a game. I have a wife and thats better than anything in a videogame.

Where do you live!? ('cause I wanna stay far, far away...)

Stupid, but true. So, so true. I wish, for once, an attorney would just turn around and charge the parents with child abuse for neglecting their children and trying to pin it on others whose hands are tied.


Do you go through your days working and playing and shopping with neighbors, coworkers, friends, and passersby and not have a care that you never see them launch flaming balls of magic at each other, or bash each others brains in?

I do not understand the want to see violence in a video game, but not nudity. One isn't exactly more tasteful than the other.

Short answer: yes.
Long answer: yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!

There have been some recent examples of games that have included nudity in some form or another, and got away with only an M rating, so it certainly isn't correct to assume that nudity in itself automatically means an AO rating. Still, society does seem to attach some negative stigma to nudity, and this sort of thing does not die easily. I don't really think it's logical either, I mean, I'm certainly not going to object to pormograophy being illegal for minors to view, but nudity does not automatically mean pormography. I've seen paintings or sculptures depicting nvde people on display in art galleries and those aren't pormography. I saw anatomical drawings in textbooks I studied as a teenager that showed human genitals and no right-minded teacher would try to keep us from seeing those. I think part of the problem here is thinking nudity automatically means six, in reality, nudity can occur in a lot of contexts which have nothing to do with six, but still, when it occurs in entertainment, people often seem to automatically assume it's pormography, and I doubt that attitude is really helped by the lack of oportunities to be exposed to nudity in an entirely non-sixual context.

Certainly, not every game needs to have nudity, but I do believe that, if developers decide that nudity would benefit their game in some way, they should have as much right to put it in as they would to have dismemberment or blood. I would say that violence should logically be seen as worth than nudity shown in an entirely natural, non-sixual context. Violence brings harm to people, and is not something you want people imitating, that can lead to people getting hurt or killed. Nudity, on the other hand, is not really in itself harmful, unless you go naked out in the cold, of course, but if you're child does that, I think having seen a nipble in a game at one point is the least of his problems. But really, I think both things can have their place in games, and that developers should be allowed to portray them, if it will help them make the game they want to make. Regardless of whether nudity is appropriate for children or not, if we can have violence, drugs and swearing in games, I don't see why we can't have nudity. If ESRB doesn't think it's appropriate for children, then they're free to raise the rating.

On a side note, though, since the nvde corpses in Oblivion were brought up, those don't count because they don't actually show anything. There's probably something wrong with the fact that it's apparently better to show a corpse with a whole where those parts should be than to show a living person with a healthy, intact body showing those parts too, but that goes back to the whole "Violence is more acceptable than nudity" thing.



I don't usually see other people in my life naked either, because I live in a society where being naked in public would not be seen as acceptable, however, I see myself naked every day.

Regardless, though, I also don't usually see people getting killed with swords in every day life (In fact, I'd venture to say I've never seen that.) but that doesn't mean I don't expect to see it in Skyrim.

All things aside, though, I think Bethesda will avoid nudity in Skyrim.That was their stance in Oblivion, and I see no reason to assume they've changed it. Avoiding an M rating or not has nothing to do with it as lots of games that are rated M have absolutely no nudity.

Maybe it's not violence for the sake of violence, it is a major part of the game mechanics, it is part of the game play. It does something for the game, unless nudity actually DOES something for the game play, other then "oh nakid peoplez" then I am saying it's pointless, if it does more then that, then it's fine.

Violence and killing are part of the mechanics because the developers designed the game that way. They could just as easily have made it so you talked every opponent into submission.

Just as you expect someone to die when you cut off their head, I expect someone to be naked when I remove their clothing. That's real. That's immersion. Having one without the other defeats the purpose of a "realistic" game.