Online sex game

By Regina Lynn| Also by this reporter 02:00 AM Oct, 28, 2005 "I'm on a perpetual hunt for a sex game targeting women," says Brenda Brathwaite, a game industry veteran and featured speaker at this week's Women's Game Conference in Austin, Texas. She's not the only one. Sex Drive One of the questions I get asked most frequently is "where can I find good cybersex?" And one of my answers is games, with the caveat that you shouldn't join a MMPORG just for sex. Rather, games are places to meet other people who share at least one interest with you, and sometimes the relationships that arise lead to flirting and cybersex. Sometimes they don't. Yet we're finally glimpsing games on the horizon that online sex game support relationship building and sexual interaction as part of the game play. What's more, these game developers recognize that a crucial part of attracting gamers is to appeal to all gamers -- not just the half of the population with penises. "The Sims is hardly the 'No. 1 sex game,' but that game is all about relationship formation," Brenda says. "It's no surprise it's a huge hit with women." What might surprise you is that Leisure Suit Larry's early adventures were also popular with women. "Larry is nonthreatening, he constantly fails and he's funny," she says. "Games that use sex and humor are fun and funny. Other (adult) games don't work so well right now." Brenda, who just left her position as senior games designer at Cyberlore Studios, has been in the video-game industry for more than 20 years. She has worked on 21 published online sex game titles, including the Wizardry and Jagged Alliance series of role-playing games. She was also the lead designer on Playboy: The Mansion and is currently the chairwoman and chief author of the International Game Developers Association's sex blog. She has become the guru of women and sex in games, speaking at conferences and colleges all over the country about this next level of game evolution. "Erotic content for women is the fastest growing segment of the adult market," she says. "It stands to reason it's a growing segment in the gaming market as well." It also stands to reason that if you want gamers to subscribe to an interactive sex game, you want to appeal to both men and women. In fact, if you can get women to sign on, the men will follow. Two games scheduled to launch next year are taking this woman-friendly approach, although both companies are shy about describing exactly what the new games will entail. Spend The Night will offer a graphically rich space where you can meet people, go on virtual dates and have cybersex. It might be the precursor to avatar-based online dating -- or at least, online screening of potential dates. Naughty America (a working title) is so coy it doesn't have a website yet. It's a complete role-playing game in which you can choose whether to enter a "sex mode." Both games recognize that they need to offer a variety of tools players can use to online sex game meet each other, develop relationships and interact sexually. And both are bending over backward to appeal to women.

Online sex game

Frankly, after these past few years away from chat, I'm considering resurrecting my old handle Aphrodite. If these games live up to their promises, they'll provide the community bonding and the permission to be overtly sexual that cybersex veterans remember from early BBSes and IRC rooms.

Brenda sees Façade as the pioneer that many of the adult game developers need to follow. "It's the most significant step in games in 20 years," she says.

Façade is the result of five years of collaboration between two game designers, Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas. I remember Andrew's name from his work on Dogz many years ago; he's been a programmer and AI engineer for more than 10 years. Michael is an AI artist and assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Façade focuses on relationship development, emotional online sex game intensity and interactive storytelling, and the player drives the plot of the drama as it unfolds. It's free, and it's designed to "appeal to the adult, non-computer geek, movie-and-theater-going public" with an immersive experience you don't need weeks or months to complete.

Most games perpetuate the stereotype that men are visual and women aren't, so women must not be interested in adventure games, although they might kick ass at online scrabble. Yet 43 percent of gamers are women, according to the Entertainment Software Association, and they're not all out there spelling Q-words on the pink box.

Brenda has been speaking about sex in games for a while now. Earlier this year, she hosted the Sexuality in Games Roundtable at the 2005 Game Developers Conference.

"So far, the comments have all been positive," she says. "But on every panel I've been on about sex in games, there's an undercurrent of 'but how will we protect the women?' Like women wouldn't want to see it, or it's not okay for women. As if women don't have phenomenal sex drives on their own."

That's obviously not true. Just look at how many women enjoy cybersex in MMPORGs. Look at how many women have any kind of cybersex.

Brenda would like to see developers create a game where online sex game people can explore their sexuality -- especially those aspects they might not be able to try in their regular lives.

She envisions one where married couples can try new things together in a safe way, through the game intermediary, even if they're in the same room, and where players who don't know each other can interact sexually in a comfortable place.

She sees it as more than entertainment. "For years, sex therapy has been available, but many people aren't comfortable going into a room for facilitated sex therapy. Computer games can bring us that (comfortable place)."

Online sex game

Brenda applauds games that incorporate sex into the full experience of game play, citing God of War as an example. God of War includes an interactive sex game as part of the story arc. "It doesn't get tons of play, and it's not the central point," she says. "But it really adds to a great game."

Of course, gamers have long tried to make MMPORGs do things they were never meant to do. "As long as people have a chat interface, they can turn anything into a sex game," Brenda says.

America seems particularly uptight about sex in games. "In Germany, sex is not even mentioned in the rating system," she says. "I'd love to see a cultural shift -- and I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime -- where people are far more horrified by the rack of guns at Wal-Mart than they are by a nipple on TV."

See you next Friday,

Regina Lynn

Video games get very, very naughty

Friday, April 7, 2006; Posted: 10:39 a.m. EDT (14:39 GMT)

In "Naughty America: The Game," players meet, flirt and have sex.

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NEW YORK (AP) -- Online games have so far mainly revolved around the killing of fantasy monsters. The occasional fight with a Stormtrooper provides some variety.

Companies are now developing online sex game a handful of games -- though calling them that is a stretch -- designed to give players a very different option: making love, not war.

In "Naughty America: The Game," set to launch early this summer, players will assume the forms of alluring but cartoonish people who meet, flirt and have sex with other player characters.

Characters will have their own apartment, but the world will have also have "public sex zones" and themed rooms, said Tina Courtney, the game's producer.

"We've got the cowboy room, the make-your-own-porn room ... it doesn't just have to be 'Your place or mine?"' Courtney said.

Flirting and dating have been rife in online games like "Everquest" and "World of Warcraft" -- even leading to marriage between players -- despite a lack of romantic or sexual features in the games.

On the other hand, sex-oriented games like "Playboy: The Mansion" and "VirtuallyJenna" have been single-player games with no online component, and thus no interaction between players.

This new crop of adults-only games would combine the player-player interaction of the online games and the graphic sexuality of the single-player games.

Game designer Brenda Brathwaite, who has been in the industry for more than 20 years, sees the new games as a natural evolution of online life, noting that even in the very simple text-based adventure games of the 80s, virtual eyelashes were batted.

"If there were two people online sex game playing, eventually those people would start flirting," said Brathwaite, who is working on a book about sex in video games.

Multiplayer sexual games are in the works now, Brathwaite said, because Internet connections have become fast enough to make graphically rich online environments and characters possible. For the games that envision players also meeting in real life, mainstream acceptance of dating sites like Match.com also helps.

In "Red Light Center," a game already available in a test version, players take the shape of three-dimensional characters in a red-light district. They can talk to one another through headsets and microphones.

"Rapture Online," a game Black Love Interactive LLC is set to launch next year, will also have three-dimensional characters, with a lot of attention paid to anatomical correctness. It will feature a networking component similar to that of a dating site, but it won't be necessary to use that feature.

"I'm hoping couples who are in a distance relationship will be able to use this privately between them," developer Kelly Rued said.

Online sex game

Of course, these games raise the possibility of sexual predators lurking in the chat rooms. Naughty America has plans to let users pay for a background check that scans their criminal record. Users who do so would have a special tag in their profiles, identifying them to others as someone who's been vetted.

Success for the new games is far from assured, even though they plan to combine dating, fantasy worlds, sexual chat rooms and pornography -- four things that have had enduring online popularity.

A few small companies started down online sex game this road a few years ago, but have only attracted a small number of users.

"SeduCity" began in 2001 with a simple two-dimensional graphical interface and has 1,500 users, according to David Andrews at Stratagem Corp., the company behind the game. By comparison, Blizzard Entertainment Inc.'s "World of Warcraft" has more than 5.5 million users.

Ren Reynolds, a British technology consultant and writer, believes that players may prefer to continue flirting in fantasy games that aren't explicitly sexual, or they may feel that three-dimensional environments don't improve on text-based chat rooms.

"It's true that you can do more things with text than you can with visuals," Reynolds said. "Why would I want to log on to a game just to have sex with people? It's kind of a nice idea, but I see it as difficult as a sustainable business model."

With the cost of game design increasing, it can be hard to recruit investors for a new type of game. Republik Games said last week it had been unable to close its latest round of financing, forcing it to suspend work on "Spend the Night," another sex-oriented online game that was to debut this year. The studio laid off its entire production team of 12 people.

online sex game

In their favor, sex game developers point to the relative success of "Second Life," a three-dimensional online world that gives its participants freedom to do pretty much anything they want, as long as they can master the game's rather intricate controls.

The game is not designed to be sexual in nature, but about a third of the activity in its world, which has about 100,000 users, centers around adult encounters, according to its developers.

"Second Life," from Linden Research Inc., also is popular with women, something sex-game developers believe they will have to duplicate.

"At the risk of sounding incredibly shallow, if you have women in a game, the men will come," Brathwaite said. "A lot of the stuff that they're doing is directly targeting women."

Kyle Machulis, a technology consultant who runs Web online sex game journals devoted to sex in games, said developers are trying to draw inspiration from sexually charged fiction that has proven attractive to women, like Harlequin romance novels.

Another hurdle for sex-game developers is online sex game distribution. Most retailers won't sell games with the "Adults Only" or "AO" rating. Outrage and lawsuits followed last year's revelation that a sex scene was hidden in Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.'s action game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," which was rated less restrictively at "Mature."

Publishers can bypass stores by selling their online sex game games online, but exposure on store shelves is still an important part of game marketing. Specialist game stores will stock AO games that are already hits, Rued said, but will keep them behind the counter.

"I'm more interested in places where people are already being carded," Rued said. "We're trying to open up some really weird alternative channels, like liquor stores."