Last week, I got a look at "The Sims 3" for the first time.

To be honest, I hadn't played "The Sims" since the release of the "Nightlife" expansion pack* for "Sims 2"; it was then I had the sudden realization that I should go outside and experience a real "nightlife."  (This is coming from the person who would later become a regular "World of Warcraft" player, so you can guess how that prospect turned out.)

Anyway, during a demo at a PR office in New York City, associate producer Lyndsay Pearson, ran down a few saucy, new details about the game that makes staying inside seem worthwhile: Read more...

"Alpha Protocol"'s dialogue system doesn't just offer a variety of ways for player-character Michael Thorton to get missions.

It can also help him pick up women. That is, if you select your responses wisely.

When I saw "Alpha Protocol" at E3 last week, senior producer Ryan Rucinski told me that there are "a lot of love interests" for Thorton to choose from. There are several factions in the game that you can ally with or fight against, so the women Thorton meets can become collaborators or enemies. As a government operative, the player can acquire missions and assistance from the ladies Thorton's wooed. But piss them off -- by dating other girls, for instance -- and there's hell to pay.

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There isn't much in the way of "Adults Only" content on consoles. Games dealing with sex and drugs are most often left to the indies on PC.

That doesn't look to be changing too much, even with Microsoft's new Community Games initiative. Microsoft told me they aren't setting rules, but the ESRB's guidelines are a good rule of thumb.

"It's not exact, but a way to think about it is anything that would have been M-rated I think we're fine with," said Chris Satchell, Microsoft's new chief technology officer for Xbox. "Things that would have been AO…that's probably not what we want from the service. That's just not what our platform is about."

He didn't rule out games with edgy themes, though. "There's an awful lot of breadth there, and it's really just about accurately describing what's in your game more than saying we can't do it," said Satchell.

What Community Games titles definitely won't have access to, however, is achievements. "Achievements is currently not available to the Community Games," said new XNA head Boyd Multerer, before teasing possible future plans. "We'll always be looking at ways to improve the service."

Do you think the Wii sex game that Stephen talked about yesterday would fly on Community Games?

Did you hear about IGN's "Grand Theft Auto IV" montage that exclusively featured clips of the game's lead character having sex and shooting the women he had sex with?

You won't see it on IGN any longer. The gaming giant says it messed up and is taking it down.

"IGN's goal is to show our users all aspects of popular games on the market," an IGN spokesperson just informed me by e-mail. "In this case, we crossed a line in how we portrayed some aspects of the game and we've taken this video down."

Yesterday, I discovered that IGN had made a video called "Ladies of Liberty City: Very Bad Things" that showcased just two elements "GTA" is notorious for and that some critics say is entirely what the game is about: sex and shooting women. This is how the video was teased on the site:

The video was a collection of "GTA IV" gameplay scenes. It starts with a montage of pole-dancing and lap-dancing. That's followed by the drive-by shooting of a woman, then a visit to a strip club.

Footage of an acrobatic lap-dance is immediately followed by a scene of the game's protagonist, Niko Bellic, gunning down a scantily-clad woman in the middle of the street.

Etcetera.

Why would IGN make a video like that?

• Did they think sex and the killing of prostitutes is an excellent combination for a video?
• Did they not think that but think their audience would give a video like that a lot of hits?
• Were they simply reporting the facts?
• Were they being ironic? ("Enjoy" the working girls, indeed.)
• Or did something just go wrong?

I reached out this morning to a spokesperson for Fox, which owns IGN and, after several hours while the video remained online, was told it's now been removed.

IGN has made many other gameplay montages of "GTA," but this is one I didn't expect them to create. It already was making a poor impression (clips of the now-removed video can be seen at those links).

What do you think? Did IGN just do critics of the game a favor? Or was this pure "GTA" reflected back, warts and all?

We've seen society's reaction when a game seemingly steps over the line (see: Hot Coffee). We've also watched legislation to restrict video games come and go.

Adam Thierer, First Amendment champion and director at Washington D.C. think-tank The Progress & Freedom Foundation, believes the industry should show caution when introducing games rated AO by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) into the mainstream.

But what would happen if Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo suddenly allowed Adults Only-rated games to be released? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria?

"Whether any of us care to admit it," said Thierer in a recent blog post, "the fact that AO-rated games are currently kept off the major consoles and off the shelves at some major retailers (ex: Wal-Mart and Target) is probably the most important thing holding back a full-on legislative assault on video games."

The aggressive legislation proposals in the wake of Hot Coffee weren't a "full-on legislative assault on video games" in Thierer's eyes.

And is he suggesting that game makers disregard the potential of adult content out of fear?

"I am in no way advocating that the industry hold off in terms of allowing complete creative expression," Thierer told Multiplayer in an e-mail exchange.

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Want more sex in your games? More violence? What's culturally acceptable here might not be kosher somewhere else. But that pendulum swings both ways.

I recently spoke with CD Projekt, the folks behind "The Witcher" about sex in their PC game.

As a follow-up, I've been talking to more game developers about their reasons for pushing for more extreme content or holding back.

Gearbox Software's Randy Pitchford proved the most outspoken of the bunch, and suggested a bigger issue was at play: territorial differences in their reactions to sex, violence and language.

This presents an interesting challenge to developers interested in having their games appreciated on a world stage, and one not very different from the obstacles CD Projekt faced in bringing their adult-targeted RPG to the United States.

"My experience has been that different audiences and territories seem to have very different tolerances for content that tests their standards of decency," Pitchford told me in an e-mail exchange covering everything from sex and violence to "Samba De Amigo" and monks playing "Counter-Strike."

Pitchford's company has been best known for the "Brothers in Arms" series of World War II-based shooters. While they don't feature much sexual content, there's violence and colorful language abound. That may fly in the US, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world necessarily comes running with open arms.

Every country has its own idea of what's acceptable, said Pitchford.

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First there was "Mass Effect." Next there was the Fox News' report on the game's alleged "Luke Skywalker Meets 'Debbie Does Dallas'" themes. Then came the subsequent fallout.

So at Game Developers Conference last month I asked the founders of "Mass Effect" developer BioWare how they'll handle love and sex in future games

Their response:

Here's an excerpt for people who can't watch the video:
Read more...

It's no secret that American culture is a little touchy when it comes to nudity of the female variety. Funcom was taken aback during "Nipple Gate," and it hasn't been that long since gamers were taking Fox News to task about "Mass Effect."

Games usually avoid sex. It's largely an American taboo, however, so it doesn't necessarily follow that developers don't want to explore it. We asked Michal Kicinski, CEO of CD Projekt, the European studio behind PC's "The Witcher," to discuss his experiences designing a game with sexual elements and bringing it to the US.

"The Witcher" isn't a very sexual game -- it's about chopping up monsters -- but it does allow player to have sex far more often than the singular encounter in BioWare's tale.

"In Europe we are quite used to see many forms of sexual expression in fine art, books, films and even on television," said Kicinski in an e-mail interview with Multiplayer. "The games are not seen much differently then. In order to see sexual references or various forms of sexual acts (although softer ones) we never had to cross over into pay-per-view TV or head off to the seedy part of town."

"If we stay within the limits of good taste, without being explicit, we had always known that whatever we showed in The Witcher would be acceptable for our target, mature audience without banning us to some kind of 'porn' games ghetto."

Game developers preparing a game that includes sexual content for release in America face difficult options. On one hand, they could produce the sexually explicit content and hope it sails through the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, but that's risky and potentially expensive. On the other hand, they could practice self-censorship and accept the nature of American culture. CD Projekt tried a little of both with "The Witcher" and produced a unique version for the US that removed full-frontal nudity.

The US isn't the only place that requires censoring, however. The version of "The Witcher" released in Germany, for example, featured toned down violence. The demands in each territory are different, as well. "The European version was less censored and in Russia, for example," said Kicinski. "Journalists were demanding even more nudity!"

Gamers probably wouldn't argue with that kind of logic, but read on to find out why Kicinski believes more censorship may be in store for "The Witcher."

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Funcom's upcoming M-rated MMO "Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures" caused quite a stir last week when the game's community manager said the US version wouldn't feature nipples, due to legal reasons.

The studio later flip-flopped, however, and declared the announcement a miscommunication; the US version would, indeed, have nipples. More specifically, players could choose to remove everything above the waist on their female avatars, thereby exposing their breasts (complete with nipples, obviously) to the other human players in "Age of Conan."

Gamers may have rejoiced at the prospect of virtual titillation, but Multiplayer wanted some basic answers: why even bother putting nipples in "Age of Conan"? After "Mass Effect," is Funcom risking a mainstream backlash? Did everyone read "nipple" in the headlines and overreact?

For more, we contacted Funcom Product Manager Jorgen Tharaldsen, who also works as a freelance journalist. He just returned from a vacation to Iran covering extreme sports. "Since the very first meetings we had about where to take Age of Conan we were extremely clear on the fact that we were NOT about speculating on sex and violence. We wanted to be about bringing the true Conan experience to the gamers out there, and we have always been clear on that," said Tharaldsen in an e-mail exchange with Multiplayer.

He has a point. Robert E. Howard's mythical universe is filled with scantily clad women -- case in point, the vast majority of "Conan the Barbarian" comic covers feature barely clothed damsels in distress. Conan's not wearing very much, either.

"This is the most hardcore Conan story of all," reads an Amazon.com review of "Conan the Barbarian" novel The Conquering Sword of Conan. "Dr. Freud would have field day with this. Graphic violence, deviant sex, sadomasochism; all are here in full display."

Tharaldsen takes several opportunities to point out that if such displays of nudity are par for the course in the Conan world, their appearance in a game based on that material makes sense, too. Nonetheless, he readily admits Funcom practiced restraint when implementing nudity into "Age of Conan," and expresses some frustration over the United States' response to what Funcom internally refers to as "nipplegate."

What does he mean by that? Read on to find out.

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It is amazing how a few recent gaming announcements have had a unique effect on me.

No, it wasn't the fact that the Xbox 360 HD DVD Drive was price-dropped (again). And, no, surprisingly it was none of the recent leaked info on "Mario Kart" for the Wii. It was actually news about a genre that seems to fade a little more each and every year, as well as the characters within it...

By now most gamers are aware that "Street Fighter IV" has been announced. If you happened to miss yesterday's leaked Famitsu news, a few more original characters have been added to the roster: E. Honda, Dhalsim, and Chun-Li, the last of which was extremely important for me to hear. Why?

Because Chun-Li matters.

You see, my dear Multiplayer friends, I have had an ongoing infatuation with Chun-Li since I first laid my hands on a SNES controller (I was too young to be hanging around at the arcades back in those days). Chun-Li was my first gaming crush, and she has shaped the way I look at and play fighting games ever since the early '90s.

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