Cyberpunk 2077 Clocks The Highest ‘Curse Count’ Of Popular 18+ Games
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Swearing has become a very normal thing you hear in video games nowadays with most game scripts using profanity, especially in the 18+ genre. Despite the age restrictions, we all know it doesn’t limit players below that age playing these games, so there can still be a lot of controversy around games using bad language.
We wanted to discover which of our favorite games have the most instances of cursing, and as such, may be the most appropriate/inappropriate to play (depending on your age) – although we always encourage parents and guardians stick to age ratings when letting younger gamers play.
Conducting the study into IMDB’s most popular 18+ video games*, we began working our way through each video game script, counting how many times some of America’s most offensive swear words were used.
Words we tallied include ‘f**k’, ‘m**********r’, ‘c**t’, ‘b***h’ and ‘s**t’, and variations of the obscenities.
After a lot of reading through scripts we’re pleased to reveal our findings with this list of the world’s biggest games with the most profanity (all listed below with the total number of swears in parentheses)
The top 15 most popular video games with the highest ‘Curse Count’ are:
Cyberpunk 2077 (722)
Grand Theft Auto IV (691)
Grand Theft Auto V (669)
The Last of Us: Part II (523)
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (501)
Until Dawn (393)
Red Dead Redemption II (347)
Detroit: Become Human (331)
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (277)
The Last of Us (84)
Batman: Arkham City (26)
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (22)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (17)
Borderlands 3 (14)
Batman: Arkham Knight (5)
Of the 722 swear words in the action role-playing game ‘Cyberpunk 2077’, more than 60% of the swear words used were ‘f**k’ and variations of it being used 449 times, followed by ‘s**t’, which was used 208 times in total in the game’s script.
Looking at all the games it’s clear from our research that the word ‘f**k’ (and variations of it) is the most common curse word in video games, since when we looked at all 15 video games, that word had been scripted a total of 2,073 times – whereas ‘s**t’ took second place with 1,862 instances of the word across all 15 games, and ‘b***h’ third with 336 instances.
And although it doesn’t make the shortlist of IMDB’s most popular 18+ video games, we do also want to give an honorable mention to the OG game with the highest ‘Curse Count’: Scarface: The World is Yours. The 2006 game holds a Guinness World Record for the most swearing in a video game. It contains 5,688 instances of the word f**k out of 31,000 lines in the dialogue.**
Conducting this study to find the ‘Curse Count’ of our most popular games has been really interesting.
We hope the findings can be helpful to any parents who may be worried about the use of bad language in the games their children play – and likewise also interesting for gamers who just aren’t fans of cursing (or the opposite).
