Does Every Game Really Need a Big Titty Mod?
The essay too HOT for your timeline!
During my freshman year of college, I learned two valuable life lessons. One: 5-hour energy is a potion for inducing kidney stones. And Two: never laugh at a lady’s Sims mods. Modern-day boy-meets-girl story: we shared a few glances between classes before she invited me to her dorm on Valentine’s Day to “play The Sims.” Now, I had been playing video games my whole life, so that arcane knowledge made this invitation a bit contradictory.
Upon booting up her laptop, she carelessly launched into The Sims, forgetting she had curated what seemed like a Costco warehouse’s worth of body mods. Sculpting virtual humans in the image of the damn Venus of Willendorf.1 Embarrassingly, she turned to me as I lay on her bed, suffocating myself into a laughing fit. Sadly, she would never speak to me again after that night, and honestly, I deserved the ostracization. Funny enough, teehee’ing my way outta titties and chuckling my way outta coitus would later become a motif for my life going forward. Although something about that moment of immaturity iron-branded my cerebral cortex with the question of “what purpose do digital boobs serve if they refuse to alter gameplay?”
Believe me when I say, I am no prude. I’ve been shoving the guys complaining about sex scenes in movies, yelling at women to wear more clothes, or kink-shaming your favorite mommy-dommy ASMR roleplaying streamer into lockers since high school, and I will continue to until behavior improves. But, I feel like that famous EDGE Magazine 1994 review of Doom when those Brit fucks said, “If only we could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try to make friends with them.”
They were a little confused about Doom, but they got the spirit when it comes to this shit. Thus, my compulsory love for the medium of video games has once again hurled me into the ‘thinky chair’ with another goofy ass question. In a medium where we can do ANYTHING, is settling for jiggle physics the peak of EVERYTHING? This time on BPM++, we explore the gap between “Interactivity and Interact-titty.” (That one kills, you don't have to tell me, I'm fucking NICE at words).
PART 1: Grandpa’s Poker Prizes
On my walk back to my dorm, I reflected on my actions and kept arriving at a self-cynical question: “Why does anything sexual related to video games feel tasteless to me?”
Give a fuck what Princess Peach doing, but if our goals align by the time I stomp this talking lizard for the hundredth time, then cool, let's hang out. Pompous as I was at the time, I knew the gaming industry was (and kinda still is) so immature it might as well be 3 ten-year-olds in a trench coat, but to me, games had become a superior art form that didn’t need cheap lust…right? These technological wonders couldn’t be as unsophisticated as those Marlboro-stained arcade poker machines with lingerie women plastered on them, right?
WRONG! What I was feeling was fucking pretentiousness at its most grandiose. Regardless of what I thought at the time, sex is a part of everything, and especially great art. While I’m not bout to defend ya Grandpa’s idle titty clicker, I am gonna give them their deserved credit and Scottie Pippen Slam City2 anyone’s superiority complex. As games have evolved, so have the armchair auteurs. Fixated on declaring to interested parties as to “where the art begins in gaming.” I show you the image above, and you'd say: “No fuckin’ way I'd spend my time playing that shit. It's got no roguelike elements, and YOU CAN'T EVEN SEE THE LADY!”
Now, what if I told you the lady was actually a shy blue alien, and you were playing poker for the safety of her entire alien race, and you got the illusion of sex afterwards? Y’all would call that game of the fucking year, or a Mass Effect side quest. I’m just joking. But honestly, it ain’t far off.
Your grandpa's desire to see digital titties at the end of his virtual poker hand is the same neuron activation fuel you get from the flames going off in Balatro. That freshman art school pretentiousness starts to crumble even further, after learning that Capcom’s survival was attributed to Akira "AKIMAN" Yasuda and producer Yoshiki Okamoto’s strip Mahjong game, which they cooked up in hiding. Mahjong Gakuen 1988 drops in arcades, and tons of awooga tongue lapping salarymen are dumping Yen in that bitch like my badass little cousin trying to win a pair of Yeezys from a Keymaster machine. The shit was so popular, it saved Capcom from going KAPUT!3 Without Mahjong Gakuen, would Street Fighter II exist? What about Resident Evil? What about Ōkami?! For the sake of my argument, Imma say probably not. AND YES, Monster Hunter fans, I didn't mention y'all, I'd throw y'all into a pit for Ōkami, that's just facts.
So, while we aren’t that far off from our ancestors playing games for the hypothetical promise of some lusty prize, it still read to me like jingling keys. If anything, this was Interact-titty in its purest form, static rewards of sexual content that felt like cop-outs for engagement. It’d be like carrying around an image of a pretty anime lady on my phone and looking at it every time I didn’t swear at someone for cutting me off in traffic. That wouldn’t make driving a more engaging experience; if anything, I’d probably wreck my whip and have an embarrassing phone conversation with Geico later that night.
However, I knew that a genre of games existed that took some lessons from those 'win-a-titty games' and built to something greater. In my quest to understand what the difference between Interactivity and Interact-titty even was, I read the hiragana on the wall and dove headfirst into the void of those Japanese sexy visual novels, the ones that look real cool in those PC-98 Tumblr gifs. But… Fuck. In no way was I prepared for this descent.
PART 2: Playing For The Plot?
Now, I'm an honest man, I'm not finna sit here and pretend I dove into Japanese erotic visual novels fully for academic reasons. MOST of these games were exactly what you'd expect: waifu collector simulators that made me the Moneyball4 Brad Pitt of sexy ladies, winning bit-crushed moans as my championship ring. If researching and playing 'win-a-titty' poker/mahjong games felt like stepping into a puddle, the vastness of 80’s-90’s Japanese erotic games felt like drowning in an endless ocean. These were the games that lived in the minds of "enthusiasts." Ones that exist imprisoned behind glass in eccentric Akiba5 basement shops, where gaijin6 stumble over Japanese as they blow their return flight money for a selfie with the boxes. But somewhere between the pixel perversion and questionable translation patches, I uncovered something the Western industry wouldn't figure out until years to come.
Japan’s adult pc gaming culture of the 80’s was facing a renaissance, but companies like JAST, Elf Co., Ltd, and FairyTale were about to shake up the market with one simple question: “What if there was gameplay surrounding the sex?” Leading to a slew of lusty visual novels with loose gameplay, and fantasy RPGs sprinkled with sex scenes like an impromptu DnD campaign AT the orgy. Programmers were more than happy to flip the ‘choose your adventure’ framework and materialize customers' fantasies while stacking cash off the effort. However, if patrons could choose their adventures, some wanted to see their deepest desires mirrored on their screens, and while those carnal desires transformed the underground erotic industry into mainstream players, it created a runaway petroleum trailer barrelling toward a brick wall.
That wall turned out to be a junior high school student in Kyoto caught shoplifting Fairytale’s ‘Saori - The House of Beautiful Girls’ two weeks after its release. TWO WEEKS! That’s how long it took one kid’s five-finger discount to expose an entire industry to a public that either had no idea they existed or was already on edge and HATED these guys. The shit triggered police raids of multiple erotic game companies, some that weren’t making anything close to Saori, got Fairytale’s company president locked up, and forced the Japanese government to pass legislation requiring R18 labels on erotic games by April 1992. Look, I’m not bout to sit here and act like Saori was misunderstood art, that game WAS dark as fuck, unlike in most Japanese adult games, Saori has zero censorship of genitalia, and a whole lotta triggering topics that I’m not finna mention. But the government’s response was less ‘protecting citizens’ and more ‘we just discovered the wild west existed and lost our entire shit about it.’ Was it heavy-handed? Obviously. Was it necessary? Unfortunately, yeah. Because without some law and order, this industry was headed somewhere nobody was prepared to follow.
Gaming’s horny industrial complex had officially become a matter of national security, and somebody had to build the damn sheriff’s office. Turns out, the deputies were the outlaws themselves. Faced with being censored out of existence, the big players - ELF, Fairytale, Alice Soft, and Gainax (Yeah, Evangelion! Y’all Love Evangelion, right?) formed the Ethics Organization for Computer Software, essentially writing their own rulebook before the government could write it for them. In the end, the wild west didn’t get a sheriff’s office; it got a damn homeowners’ association.
However, cleaning the streets came at a cost. Strip the sex out of these innovative erotic games, and they became an identity crisis showcasing remarkable character art and subpar RPG mechanics. While the Big Four: ELF, Fairytale, Alice Soft, and Gainax pivoted to flirty point-and-click adventure games, sharpening in-game conversation and decision systems that designers would steal for decades (Hideo Kojima fans, do your homework), the ‘talking to girls’ genre was still on shaky ground. The public was monitoring any slip now, and the feds were ready to strike at any sign of a lusty payoff. Enter Konami, bleeding money, watching the subculture crash out from a distance and noticing a through-line that bypassed other industry giants: people kept coming back to these games, even after the sex, because they wanted to talk to these characters. So they bet the house on an outlandish gamble. No erotic content. No lusty cutscenes. No bit-crushed moans as prizes. Just a game where you talk to girls and try to win their hearts. It shouldn’t have worked. It shoulda absolutely bankrupted them.
Konami’s Tokimeki Memorial drops and STRAIGHT UP POSTERIZES the ‘win-a-titty’ industry. Tokimeki wasn’t revolutionary because it was clean. It was revolutionary because it figured out what all those erotic games were accidentally proving: people didn’t just want to sexualize these characters, they wanted to KNOW them. You weren’t grinding stats to unlock some lewd scene; you were spending time with a character until you genuinely gave a damn what happened to them. The relationship WAS the adventure. Konami proved that gameplay surrounding lust wasn’t enough; you needed interactivity that made characters feel real, with emotions that weren’t just para-social lust for the player, but rather compassion, vulnerability, and confidence. THAT WAS THE SYNTHESIS: not sex, not titties, but genuine engagement between player and character. Konami didn’t strip out the interactivity and leave you with nothing; they made the interactivity the entire point and proved that in this medium, the most powerful thing you can give someone isn’t the promise of sexual content but a reason to care. The west looked at all of this and said, “Yeah, cool, but what if we just gave them titties that didn’t look like anime, tho?”
PART 3: Sex, Boobs and The Cocaine Goblins!
Slipping deeper into the void, a sound rang out, pulling me back to my senses like ammonia jolting my nervous system. An auditory hallucination that sounded like Nu metal, and I fucking hate Nu Metal. The opening riff of BMX XXX’s soundtrack smashing through my psyche only meant one thing: I was back, and it was the West’s time to shine. The American game industry of the 2000s had no fucking idea how to handle any topic with nuance; cringe hadn’t been invented yet. It was a culture of American teen boys on a collective adrenaline coma mission. As we smashed into the concrete, our Taco Bell paychecks spilled out and lined the pockets of cocaine-fueled goblins disguised as game designers and MTV executives. We DEMANDED virtual versions of anything EXTREME: sports, violence, sex, and all to the soundtrack of System of a Down.
Acclaim Entertainment answered the EXTREME call back in the 90’s blessing arcades with Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam, so this new market of teens seemed like a SLAM DUNK. BMX XXX, paraded onto the scene promising gameplay so EXTREME that you could make a woman character ride around with her boobies out, and as edgy teenagers, we told them “SHUT UP DICKWAD, Viva La Bam is on!” In less than two years, the game’s financial failure, coupled with Dave Mirra suing Acclaim7 for trashing his name and deterring him as the rightful heir to the Tony Hawk throne, paved Acclaim’s road to bankruptcy. But one bankruptcy wasn’t gonna stop these EXTREME cocaine goblins, who in a frenzy screamed: “QUICK, GIVE EM’ MORE BOOBS!”
The goblins then deployed their horniest soldier with Jeff Spangenberg, the same man who founded Retro Studios, the studio that caught the eye of Nintendo's baddest boy Shiggy Miyamoto8 to produce Metroid Prime. Right up until Nintendo bought out his ownership after catching his dumbass hosting a side site on Retro Studios servers with images of him flexing his playboy lifestyle with ladies in hot tubs.9 Jeff dipped with the settlement cash and created “TopHeavy Studios,” the team that’d make their magnum opus 'The Guy Game,' aka 'Sexual Scene It?' A trivia game released for consoles featuring real women flashing the camera. A concept so aggressively stupid it could only exist in 2004. Turns out, not only was it stupid, but also ILLEGAL, as one of the women featured in the shipped game was a minor.
Ultimately, the game got pulled from shelves, lawsuits started flying, and American teens couldn't be bothered to look up from 'Pimp My Ride'10 just long enough to watch the entire thing collapse. Back-to-back L’s sent the EXTREME cocaine goblins into a freefall. They had recently dropped a Sims 2 knockoff titled ‘Playboy: The Mansion' that was such a failure that episodes of 'The Girls Next Door'11 didn’t even wanna advertise it during commercial breaks. Not to mention, Rockstar's 'GTA San Andreas' was suffering from an “accidental” leftover sex mini game12 that allowed CJ and various women side characters to simulate sex the same way kids slam two Barbie dolls together.
The US was on a generational run of embarrassment, spending a decade comitting crimes and calling it content. That was, until a Canadian video game studio famous for DnD RPGs came along and did the bare minimum. BioWare had no reason to drag Western gaming out of its embarrassing hormonal fever dream. Mass Effect isn’t even a great example of romantic interactivity, let’s be honest. Dialogue and cutscenes were clunky, and the actual ‘sex’, if that’s what you wanna call it, was the same ten seconds of side-boob required for PG-13 movie ratings, but that wasn’t BioWare’s end goal.
Like Konami with Tokimeki Memorial, BioWare got right what every cocaine goblin before them missed, making you CARE first. Mass Effect wasn’t interested in carrot- dangling sex. Instead, you spent forty hours fighting against insurmountable odds side by side with these characters, learning their history, understanding their worlds. The interactivity of these relationships built between player and character turned out to be the real motivator all along. This was the West’s way of fumbling toward synthesis: bad execution but the right instinct. Inevitably, Fox News turned out to be America’s junior high school klepto.
Conservative America looked at thirty seconds of side alien titty and RANG THE ALARM! Mass Effect was called to task on national television under the headline “SEXbox?”13 and slammed on charges of corrupting the nation’s youth. An alien woman’s bare shoulders were about to be the final nail in Western civilization’s coffin. That is, until the Doritos Pope himself, Geoff Keighley, appeared live on the panel, explaining that Mass Effect was the furthest thing from pornography and forced every panelist to publicly admit they hadn’t played a game since Pac-Man. As the industry began dragging its knuckles toward maturity, one man in a donation store sports coat looked conservative America dead in the eye and said, pipe down.
“This isn’t about sex this is about the evolution of a relationship with characters.” - Geoff Keighley.
BioWare’s success with Mass Effect was the killing blow the West needed to drive the cocaine goblins back underground. We found our spines; now the synthesis was next.
PART 4: Interactivity VS Interact-titty FINAL ROUND
As I climb outta the thinky chair, I keep reflecting on how Mahjong Gakuen feels like the original titty mod. Something thrown in to ogle at because the game needed excitement, and naked ladies were the easiest answer. You couldn’t talk to these women; they didn’t know you, just the feigned lustful desire of matching tiles correctly. The industry realized they could hook people in and, for a moment, let Interact-titty take the wheel.
Today, I can scroll through Steam by tags of ‘Story Rich’ or ‘Choices matter’ and discover my next favorite digital masterpiece. The required history lesson made me realize it took crashes, technology evolution, bankruptcies, and public outcry to even get close to the character interactivity of today. But with those industry learned lessons comes a bittersweet side effect. Baldur’s Gate and Cyberpunk built characters that people devote their hearts to; Dragon Age and The Witcher trilogies have changed how people process love. Atlus makes sure you can’t even progress in their games without building friendships. While VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action and Date Everything have made me cry and laugh at their genuine portrayal of emotions. All these titles contain characters that felt so real, so specific, so genuinely human that, as players, we fell in love with them. And every single one of them has a big titty mod.
Look, I’m not here to tell modders or programmers what to do with their time, but for a moment let me bare my soul. I grew up with Tifa Lockhart and Aerith Gainsborough. Not as pixels, not as character designs, but as people. They felt like real friends to me. I watched them sacrifice everything in a story that broke my heart at nine years old and has never fully healed. When FF7 Rebirth dropped, and I jumped back into that world, I felt that same warmth I feel when I link with all the homies I came up with. Then I saw the mods. And my reaction wasn’t excitement. It wasn’t moral outrage. It was just... confusion. The sentence “Those are my friends. And they don’t look like that” jumped out my mouth, and a sense of embarrassment washed over me for caring. Why do I care that somebody thinks these characters are hot and wants them to have the biggest tits on earth?
I cared because the connection anyone had with these characters proved interactivity worked back in 1997, so you didn’t need the Interact-titty now. Squaresoft figured out how to make these little chibi toaster hand characters feel like humans, so they didn’t need to reel you in with no win-a-titty scheme. Rebirth understood the assignment and gave us more time, more dialogue, more of those little moments that made us care about these characters in the first place, rather than provocative thrills.
It’s corny to underplay sex in relation to any art form. Great art involves sex. When Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, the human body was central to the work. Sexuality, sensuality, vulnerability, all of it was PART of the art. Nobody looked at the Sistine Chapel and said, “Cool ceiling, needs more clothes.” That realization made something else click. Like all great forms of art, video games had to mature as an art form, even if it meant taking multiple L’s in the process.
From the salarymen of Mahjong Gakuen to Tokimeki Memorial proving that people would play a ‘talking to girls’ game with no sex and call it a phenomenon, from the EXTREME cocaine goblins doing crimes in 2004 to BioWare accidentally stumbling into synthesis with a shy blue alien, the lesson was always the same. People want these characters at their fullest, their flaws, their quirks, their strengths; they want to talk to these creatures.
So the question: Does every game need a big titty mod? Probably not. But not because titty mods are bad, but because games are finally giving us something better, someone to care about. And if you’re gonna mod them anyway, and I get it, I’m not judging, just ask yourself if you’re adding to what’s already there, or replacing it with something superficial.
Thus, I stand here with a refreshed mindset and remorse for my actions. To the lady whose Sims mods I laughed at freshman year. I owe you an apology. It took me way too long to understand what you already knew at nineteen: that sex and body and identity are a part of all great art. I didn’t know anything about your Sims stories. Maybe your characters were just finally built the way THEY wanted to be built, living in a digital world and loving their bodies on their own terms, outside of what the default slider decided they should look like, and that’s actually kind of beautiful. But also, you coulda’ warned a guy.
I love you Robert Pattinson, but it’s not a love triangle, and I love Zoë Kravitz for calling out the bullshit. Tifa and Aerith are my friends and so are all of you! Tell me a video game character you’ve fallen in love with below in the comments, and I’ll tell you why it shoulda be Karlach from Baldur’s gate 3. Love all yall. Stay Silly. - BPM++ (Yes, That’s two pluses)
💻 Sources, references and Fun Stuff 🥳
Reference: Moneyball: is a 2011 American biographical sports drama, Where Brad Pitt successful attempt to assemble a baseball team on a lean budget by employing computer-generated analysis to acquire new players.
Reference: Akihabara (秋葉原), also called Akiba after a former local shrine, is a district in central Tokyo that is famous for its many electronics shops and has also gained recognition as the center of Japan's otaku (diehard fan) culture
Reference: Gaijin (外人; [ɡai(d)ʑiɴ]; ‘outsider, alien‘) is a Japanese word for foreigners and non-Japanese citizens in Japan, specifically being applied to foreigners of non-Japanese ethnicity
Reference: Japanese video game designer, producer and game director at Nintendo, he’s mister Mario.
Reference: The Girls Next Door (also known as The Girls of the Playboy Mansion) a reality television show that focused on the lives of Hugh Hefner‘s girlfriends who lived with him at the Playboy Mansion.
Source: The Famous Fox News Mass Effect Interview
FUNNY: The BMX XXX AD
FUNNY: Casino Strip a LaserDisc Strip Poker Game Attract Mode Video
SONGS I LISTENED TO THE MOST WRITING THIS ESSAY:
You turned "does every game need a big titty mod" into a genuine cultural history essay and somehow made it heartfelt by the end. That's talent right there.
Ass Effect for the Sexbox 360 has lived rent free in my mind since that segment aired. I played Mass Effect when it came out, and when the sex scene happened it was so short and tame that I wasn't even worried that my parents would walk into the living room while it was happening. They'd probably be more offended at the fact that I chose the blue alien thing to get with.
Awesome article. Loved the historical context.