Here is an uncomfortable truth: nobody actually cares who designed God of War's sex minigames. What people care about is having permission to keep them.
When Alanah Pearce, a writer at Sony Santa Monica who worked on God of War Ragnarok, revealed during a recent livestream that the original trilogy's notorious sex scenes were "designed by women", the news rippled through gaming circles with the force of a scandal solved. A mystery answered. A moral problem neatly disposed of.
Strip away the rhetoric and ask the simple question: does the gender of the designer change what is on screen?
Pearce explained that she worked with one of the women who designed the scenes, and that they were largely worked on by women on the development team. When Kratos enters Aphrodite's chamber in God of War 3, this was designed by a group of women to look like a labia. Pearce highlighted the work of Ariel Lawrence, who was said to be very proud of the scene.
Pearce's broader argument deserves serious consideration. She points out that sex is a natural part of life, and believes one of the reasons it doesn't appear much in video games is because directors find them too awkward to make. Fair point. Games remain squeamish about sexuality in ways that cinema and television abandoned decades ago. The awkwardness is real, and it's worth examining why a medium can depict ultraviolent evisceration without flinching but colours up at consensual intimacy.
But this is where the argument slides sideways into something murkier. Pearce argues the scenes should be in the remakes, acknowledging "it's a little silly the way it was in those games," but saying she doesn't think it was disrespectful to women and that the games are quite critical of who Kratos is as a person, with his rage clearly not fulfilling to him.
The intent is honourable. The game does critique Kratos through his behaviour; his casual cruelty to women serves the character arc that culminates in his redemption across the Norse saga. You cannot understand the man he becomes without seeing who he was. That argument holds genuine weight.
Yet something nags at the logic. If a scene is problematic because of what is depicted, does its creator's identity resolve that problem? If the same sex scene were designed by men tomorrow, would it become unacceptable? Would removing it become a moral imperative? The claim that women designed it feels less like an argument for inclusion and more like a rhetorical shield.
Both sides of this debate are partially right, which means both sides are substantially wrong. When a gaming audience was polled, 70 per cent of readers thought the minigames should be kept as they were in the PS5 trilogy remake. Most players simply want the games as they were; the gender of the designer is almost irrelevant to that impulse. Yet some legitimate concerns about tone and excess persist, regardless of authorship.
The God of War Trilogy Remake was announced during Sony's State of Play presentation in February 2026, with the project in early development. Santa Monica Studio has time to make its choice, and it need not hide behind design credits to do so. If the minigames belong in the remake, they belong because they serve the narrative and the character's journey. If they don't, they don't, because the tone has shifted and the new games demand something different.
The real scandal isn't who designed the sex scenes. It's that we need permission from the right people to engage honestly with contentious creative choices. We deserve a better debate than this.