A Neogaf User found an NPC with a fully rendered vagina, and subsequently captured & posted screenshots using the ingame camera, posting the pictures to Twitter. By doing so, he found himself suspended from PSN for a full month.

Shortly after this whole situation blew up on Neogaf, Ubi released this statement:

We’re aware that one of the NPC models in Watch Dogs 2 is rendered in a way that is particularly explicit. While Watch Dogs 2 is a mature-rated game, we apologize and will update this NPC model to make it more consistent with other NPC models in the game in a patch to be released this week. We also are working with our first-party partners to ensure that players can continue to play and share all content from the game within the bounds of the first parties’ respective codes of conduct

Apparently nudists are a part of the game, so there are fully rendered penises as well. I am definitely interested in seeing if/how this story develops any further.

If you would like to see the Neogaf thread in question, here is a link (for clarity, you can find the NSFW picture in there; but I'm providing the link for context, not titillation).

Edit: Just to get my opinion in on this, I think Sony is very much in the wrong on this one. The user used an official tool provided by Sony in a game they approved. He posted the screenshot to express his surprise that it was even in the game - seems like the whole point of the share system to me. It's only made worse by the fact that they extended his ban from a week to a month for (seemingly) no reason.

Huh. The story here seems to be about Sony not really being ready for having nudity shared through their platforms, even if it's in a game running on one of their systems.

They need to clarify their position on this. I guess they will say something like 'We allow nudity to appear in titles on our platforms but we do not allow users to share nudity of any form through direct capture from in game tools'.

I imagine they are having a hard line on the issue to try and stop people just capturing and sharing porn through PSN tools.

Saw this earlier. The bigger deal is Sony's response, IMO, since it's something they allowed on their platform but won't allow to be shared...on their platform? Their inconsistency in enforcing those rules isn't surprising, but is certainly stupid.

Proud of Ubisoft for apologizing and moving prompty to fix their game.

Vaginas and penises. Just shameful.

whee this might get ugly. inb4lock.

Sony has been real trash as of late.

I have no problem with either penises or vaginas in my videogames and the biggest part of this story is Sonys reaction to the whole thing. The way the nudity manifested in this specific instance was kind of weird though... (out of context at least).

Can humanity or (America) move on and be ok with Nudity in media ?

I do love how sex and genitals are still a huge deal in a market populated by what can sometimes be quite adequately described as "gore-porn". Just earlier today in the Dishonored thread I was reading how people were disturbed by one of the ways you can "eliminate" an assassination target by handing her off to an obsessed stalker. In a game where you can brand someones face with a hot iron, or electrocute someone else in a ghastly contraption it's the mere implication of sexual abuse that has everyone flinching with unease.

Also bonus points go to Sony for really taking a hard stance when it counts.

With this news we Walk another Step down the Thorny path of Hellfire and stinking Sulfur!#& and Demons come to Earth.

Watch Dogs_2 is a game created by vaginas of all cultures and nationalities.

@humanity:I think it's a bit different in that Dishonored situation though. It's not 'nudity vs violence'. It's 'potential sexual violence vs violence'.

Sony sure is being dumb.

I feel bad for the dude that got banned but this is kind of hilarious.

@paulmako: I was merely pointing out that violence with sexual undertones is deemed worse than basically any other type of violence. They're both equally bad, but we've become extremely desensitized to one.

@humanity: In the real world there can be justification for violence in some cases, it's hard to imagine a situation where sexual violence could be defended.

When I played Tearaway, I made a penis shaped crown for the squirrel in the early parts of the game and uploaded a screenshot of it to the game's servers. Sony sent me a warning and threatened to ban me from PSN. Maybe if I was REALLY good at cutting penises out of cardboard paper, Sony would've IMMEDIATELY banned me.

Just an aside, but the dick joke potential in Tearaway (vita) is pretty great.

As someone who has encountered humans with vaginas this is very upsetting.

@warlordpayne: In the real world yes, although violence is still violence so we are speaking of a lesser of two evils. That said this is going off topic from what the thread is about. My main point is that sexual content is still very much taboo which is something that a lot of people have already pointed out.

@andrack: hey, saw you on Eurogamer

I know very little about the game development, and so I wonder:

Are there one or two folks on the dev team that had to spend a few days (weeks? I don't know!) thoughtfully crafting some CG genitals? Was there concept art? How does one react to such a task?

I wonder how they are going to fix the models. Just remove the nudists altogether or make them have no genitals?

U.S. has always had a strange relationship with obscene violence and sex. I want to say that there was an episode of Hannibal where the production team found it funny how the studio was ok with the dead couple with their skins peeled off to form wings and covered in blood but they since they were naked they had to film it at such an angle as to avoid some minor nudity.

It's a shame to hear that they're going to update this out, I was glad to hear about this seeing on how Rockstar broke the seal on rendered video game dicks

Everything about this is weird.

I don't think Sony are in the wrong actually. I think there's a perfectly clear distinction between having mature content in a game and sharing that content online. The key difference is that the game is approprietly labeled, approved and rated, while online interactions are not.

There is violence in the real world that's never justifiable, however. Sadism, torture, violence against the innocent. Those types of violence are almost omnipresent in many if not most mature rated games. Sexual violence is the only type of unjustifiable violence that for some reason is often branded as over the line.

Besides, the vagina in question wasn't sexualized at all, neither by the developers nor the user who discovered it.

They show it?

This always makes me wonder how the cert process actually functions. How thorough is it? Is it different for an indie dev with no previous engagement with Sony and doing cert for a big dev like Ubisoft that has released hundreds of games on Playstation platforms? Do studio's have to point Sony towards all the content that might be 'too much' or is Sony relying on the cert team to find all that stuff on their own?

Yeah, check youtube. Naked lasses hoola-hooping in a back garden. Complete with rendered vagina.

@humanity said:

It's kinda distressing having "scandals" such as these reveal just how desensitized years of violent movies/games have made us, at least in terms of the constant presence of violence being accepted and even comfortable. Seeing how quick a person (myself included at times) can shift from being okay with something to being completely disgusted once something remotely sexual comes into play is fascinating.

As for the image in question, I'm wondering just how the PS4 upload to Twitter stuff works: does the #PS4Share hashtag automatically get added to the post? Can you remove it, or is it something that Sony forces on you? If you truly can't remove it, that seems like more of a fault of Sony to me.

That's pretty much where I am with this. Sony have allowed the nudity to be in the game, so people can't really accuse them of 'censoring the artistic vision' or being anti-nudity or whatever. Like you said, it's the sharing of that content in an open environment they're not OK with.

I have a friend who is a teacher and their class is mainly 6 year olds. Apparently one of them mentioned to a teaching assistant that they had been playing GTAV Online. The teacher was then required by school protocol to to give a class talk on internet safety because they could potentially be interacting with strangers. That's kind of influencing how I see this. If Sony are aware that plenty of children are using PSN services (you need to be age 7 to make a sub-account) then it becomes easier to understand why they would want a blanket 'no sharing sexual content' policy for their services.

So this seems to come down to the whole ' acceptability of Sex vs. Violence' issue. It is an interesting topic but it is much bigger than Sony. Sony are a business. They have to follow the wider social norms on this. They won't get points for 'challenging perceptions' on sex and violence through Twitter screenshots.

Get these vaginas and penises out of my video games please. The last thing I want to see after dragging motorists out of their cars and burning them on a big pile are accurately rendered vaginas and penises. Completely kills the mood.

Yeah. An art gallery can have an exhibition on 19th century Japanese erotica, that doesn't mean they're prudes if they don't allow tentacles and vaginas on the posters hanging outside the building.

Pilot a drone into a strip club, drop multiple blocks of C4, and then fly away as they detonate and murder everyone in the building? Fine by me, but God help you if there are actual renders of genitals and breasts underneath the strippers' blurry pixel splotches! That's a line I'm just not prepared to cross. For shame, sir! For shame!

Odd world.

In video games, shooting someone's head off is fine, and a nude body is wrong. Do not question this. Do not question anything.

The worst part of this story is that Sony banned this guy for a week, and then the ban was extended to a month after he already had no access to the PSN account. So... the only thing that could have caused the extension was a person extending it because they thought a week wasn't long enough or as retaliation for him posting about the ban.

I get that Sony has to keep some things in check with their sharing services (For the kids!), but Ubisoft having to go back to edit their content is lame. The ESRB rating states that Watch_Dogs 2 has nudity in it, and yet they are going to tone it down with some of their NPC models? Rockstar never got shit for Max Payne 3 which had a gangbang scene you can walk into.

Watch your mouth, sexpest.

It's fine for ultra-popular mainstream shows like Game of Thrones, but not for video games, apperantly. Hell, this is way more benign compared to all the literal fuckery going on in GoT.

You know, I just wanna take a moment and point out how far we've come on this stuff. Back in the day GTA having nude models available only through hacking lit the country on fire. Nowadays it results in a frustrating inconvenience (assuming those users get their accounts back, which they really ought to) and an embarrassed apology from Ubisoft. I don't even think they should patch it out (SF has got plenty of naked people), but I just want to appreciate how much better the reaction is these days.

Sony backpedaled on the ban.

No-one is saying it isn't fine for videogames. Ubisoft made a game with nudity and violence and drug use, the ESRB rated it M 17+, and Sony and Microsoft allowed it on their platforms.

This story is not about people being upset there is nudity in the game. It's about the apparent surprise that Sony won't allow video-game nudity to be shared through their services. The nudity in the game itself wasn't the problem.

Oh no, not penises and vaginas! Won't someone think of the kids?

@ulquiokani said:

I hope they add the biggest bushes you've ever seen in order to completely obscure the visible genitalia. That's the funniest way to achieve it, anyway.

I always use the Battlefield 3 example of characters in multiplayer screaming "we're getting our shit pushed in!" as an example when it comes to the difference between violence and other objectionable content. I would be fine with a hypothetical child of mine in their early teens playing that game, but I would not be fine with the language. Similarly, I'd likely be fine with Watch Dogs 2, but I would not be fine with the nudity. Violence in video games tends to be about fantasy, and nothing is realistic about it. That's not really the same situation when it comes to excessive profanity or nudity.

However, just because a game contains something I wouldn't want my children to see or hear, that doesn't mean that I think Ubisoft or EA made a mistake by including it in their game. It's up to parents to make those decisions, not various pressure groups demanding that publishers make those decisions for all of us. Ubisoft was either wrong to not properly examine the content of their game before it was released--in which case someone should probably be fired--or they were wrong for instantly folding at the first word of complaint, and helping to continue the idea that video games are for children, and video game media needs to be treated differently than movies or television.

As others have said, Game of Thrones makes this look like a joke.

The first rule of Sony Club is you don't talk about us having nudity in our games!

so you're saying... this is Doomguy's origin story?

I remember there being a lot of nude people in Mafia 3. Granted I didnt zoom in to see if anything was fully detailed but i'm surprised nobody took a pic and got banned there. Shouldnt there be some kind of mature content filter for mature games when you share images and videos? Seems like an oversight on Sony's part. Ubisoft shouldnt have had to react to this.

e: meant this as a creepy jeff joke but it probably went too far ....