fantasy sexless, eh?

I suppose you don't think the market is ready for a videogame adaptation of the Kushiel series? :)

The save-game mechanic in Ico-- wherein Ico would lead Yorba to a couch, and the two would sit and rest together for a brief, peaceful moment-- was by far the sweetest, most tender thing I've ever seen in a game.

In their most simplest form, games are a carrot & stick rewards method. You are punished for doing something wrong (usually with death) and rewarded for doing something right (with points/content). Surely when trying to implement an interactive realtionship in this kind of system, it is ultimately going to fall foul of people trying to get a 'high score'.

I think that intimacy is based upon trust, closeness, and shared experiences and now that we have both the technology and the power (with the increasingly growing and accepted gaming industry) we should see a lot more of it.

However, much like action movies, games are under pressure to keep a player engaged, and this usually involves keeping back-story to a minimum, and containing shallow, often stereotyped characters making mature relationships difficult.

Hopefully we'll see more complexity to these characters, and more subtle displays of sex and relationships, but I think the industry as a whole has a lot more growing up to do (and possibly needs more licence to be creative rather than ploughing on with another mario sequel) to be able to match that of Hollywood.

I'm not sure that I want (or need) the coaching. It's important to understand that games are very capable of what you're describing, only I'm not so sure many people are demanding it. I've never been one to take my romantic cues from television or movies and I'm certainly not looking for any in my games. That being said, one of my favorite genres is the S-RPG. Though many characters you gain in those games are randomly generated, I often find myself growing attached to specific ones out of the whole - not because of their stats, but because of how many battles they've survived and how far we've come together. I could care less about the unit I just accquired.

"...no one would call FF heroes anything more than constructs."

Perhaps that's a bit of an optimistic portrayal of Final Fantasy enthusiasts :P

You know what I never really resolved? Cortana from Halo. On one hand, she gets sexier with each sequel. On the other, she's a hologram...I could have sworn that she and Chief had a romantic thing going in Halo 3, but then...you know.

Tying in to what cringe said: I think it might be hard to involve that more mature/nuanced kind of sexuality in games considering the limits of interactiveness there. Visual sexuality is much more easily enjoyed by oneself, but it might be hard to get that same degree of satisfaction on the intimacy side when you know it's just a game w/ a limited set of responses.

I think intimacy is dependent on non-sexual interaction - something I wonder if guys sometimes miss.

In that sense, I think the most important pre-requisite for intimacy is that players need to be able to interact with the other character as a personality, not as a digitized sex doll. When you can get a sense of "what makes this person/character tick" by interacting rather than simply watching a cutscene, then you can start to build an emotional connection.

Given this, I submit that language and behaviour are both indispensable. By language, I mean verbal communication - something that I think the better designers already grok. (See: Persona 3 despite the disturbing overtones, Idolm@ster, Mass Effect.) Even the plain old dialogue tree, if crafted well - as with the above examples - can be quite engaging in any number of ways. If you stand Mass Effect and, say, Sakura Taisen side by side, both of them have very different yet equally brilliant ways of doing dialogue - a stark contrast with the kind of dull-as-dishwater stuff you would find in, say, Neverwinter Nights. (No offense intended to fans of NWN; Bioware's come a looooong way since then.)

As for behaviour, it's something like this: if a character comes across as e.g. laid-back and lazy in their dialogue, I would expect them to behave similarly in gameplay situations. If they behave like an RTS unit, it kind of undermines the groundwork the designer has laid when establishing their personality.

Interesting, I seem to recall quite a few past games, specifically rpgs, that have dealt with relationships and sex in a much more mature and comprehensive manner than any of the examples you described. Planescape: Torment explored a more serious side of relationships in a way that was not juvenile, but more mature than most JRPGs, and in Baldur's Gate 2, the protagonist could develop serious relationships with one of four characters, which included sexual encounters, and even pregnancy. You could also argue that games like Fallout and Arcanum dealt with sex in that female characters could use it as a bargaining tool if they chose to. Granted, none of these games show a perfectly realistic model of sexual relationships, but they are arguably a good deal more mature than some of the more recent games that incorporate sexuality into their characters. I also think that the designers and writers on the games I mentioned spent a lot of time thinking about how sex fit into the story and the world of the games, and chose appropriate responses . Baldur's Gate 2 had epic love stories, Planescape: Torment had a tragic and doomed romance that was slightly off-kilter, and Fallout's use of sex was based on the pragmatism of a society with few resources and no law. I think that a lot of game designers, regardless of what type of game they are making, could learn a lot from these rpgs with respect to mature choices. It seems that, with everyone in an uproar over Mass Effect's sex scene, people have forgotten that Bioware developed much more complicated romances that included sex back in 2000.

I agree completely with your claim that we learn more by 'what is not shown', or as I see it, the 'tension' that is created in a game.
Not just simple 'sexual tension' in the way of the Mass Effect example, but in the real sense of the word. When done well, this creates wholly three dimensional characters through the ways they 'relate' to each other, not by having necessarily a blatant relationship.

Examples that come to mind for me are MGS3 with Snake and EVA. There is real tension and ambiguity between them. One could argue some of the scenes with The Boss present some complex tension as well.

Silent Hill 2 presents a powerful, skewed and even oppressive intimacy between James and Mary, even though you almost never see her. Then, of course, there is the tension with Maria.

These are examples sexuality in games that have lasting impressions on me. I fully support the celebration of the hyper-idealized form in games, but as you say, they work best in their rightful places (fighting games, action games, etc.)

Sex in the real world isn't game-like? And by mature media, you mean Hollywood's recent wave of chick-headliner splatterhouse?

I agree that virtual intimacy is really the next step up for virtual sex, but Mass Effect should be lauded for the direction it's heading. But if you expect fantasy as a genre to be more intimate, your definition of fantasy is lacking... after all fantasy is 99% of the time just empowerment fulfillment. The courtship of intimacy isn't empowerment, it's essentially sacrifice. Therein lies true love.