Panties

Overview

Panties, a form of women's underwear, are meant to be worn as undergarments and are commonly included in games as a form of " fan service". Their implementation can range from being simply an aesthetic bonus (showing a character in a state of undress) to being integral to the gameplay (such as being required to remove them from a character or being tasked with retrieving them from a location to complete an objective).

History of Panties in Games

Since the beginning of time, predating even the aroma of freshly baked pumpkin pie, the sight of white cotton has quickened the pulse of men and boys alike.  Panties have been present in every artistic medium throughout the ages, from carved stone to oiled canvas, from 18th century examples of dress-up paper dolls, to modern virtual reality raiding-simulators used for Olympic training.  The earliest attempts at recreating the delicate curves of VPL using a sine-wave oscilloscope left many a computomathmaticist clutching their slide rules in dissatisfaction. 

During the golden age of computing, early attempts at vector renditions of "smalls" were among the first 3D polygons generated, as the basic inverted triangle shape lent itself well to rotation along the Y axis.  Once the standard ASCII character set was established, it soon followed that the backslash-slash combination: \/ was a universally recognizable marker amongst devotees.  This evolved quickly into larger resolution stick figures that could be animated at the press of a button, and creative minds with fogged glasses patiently compiled near-photorealistic images - indeed spanning several 80x25 screens - sent across the digital ether to university labs the world over.

With the rapid advent of rasterized “pixelets” in monochromatic hues seldom seen in real life, such as amber and radioactive green, the race was on to generate the first truly unmistakable rendition of ladies’ gotch.  Historians still debate the exact timing, but the common consensus is that Leisure Suit Larry came first (as usual) in bringing the appreciation of digital lingerie to the masses.