Video games are often a fun outlet for children and adults who like to explore, build, and create.

Unfortunately, video game creators are increasingly promoting content that gamifies pornographic, hypersexualized, or sexually coercive themes.

Games like House Party, Porno Studio Tycoon, Mass Effect: Andromeda, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and more are normalizing sexually explicit and exploitive themes in mainstream gaming.

When video games include sexually graphic and degrading themes the user is not only a voyeur but an active participant in staging the scene. As our society suffers from the consequences of campus sexual assault, military sexual assault, and rising child-on-child sexual abuse, we see that normalizing the sexual use (and often abuse) of others in video games is irresponsible on the corporate and social level.

One mainstream online video game store, Steam®, is of particular concern because it has approximately 35 million users who are minors. Yet this distribution platform facilitates sexually violent themed games and animated pornography featuring genitalia, ejaculation to users of all ages.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation is calling on Steam to remove these games and publicly commit to a more robust policy against sexually explicit and exploitive games.