posted by kellyrued on Fri 03 of Mar, 2006 [11:07]

One of the main issues facing sex in games today is that most of it is not erotic, sensual, or sexually engaging. In fact, the only pleasure most sex in games gives players is a good giggle. It's a testament to human sexual ingenuity that anyone has been able to cyber in a MMO where the visuals do very little to enhance (yet do a lot to distract) from the basic chat interactivity you can get from a simple IM program. Is this the best that interactive entertainment designers can do with all the tools at their disposal? Or is making a sexy game just not intriguing (or viable) for most designers working today (relative to making a game that evokes another base player emotion such as adrenalin-pumping fear in an FPS)?

It might just be that no one thinks erotic, sensual, engaging sex can be done well using gaming technologies. If you're here reading this though, there is a good chance that there is at least a tiny hope in you that some people somewhere are doing their damnedest to design an erotic game that is actually engaging for more than a few minutes of cheap thrills or giggles; a game that women and men of many preferences, moods, and kinks can play alone, as real life couples, or as internet-only play mates with every expectation of fulfilling their specific and personal fantasies.

That's what we've been working toward with our MMOEG, Rapture Online. The design problems we've uncovered and attempted to solve make for one hell of a humbling learning experience. Everything you think you understand about human sexuality, about eroticism, eventually gets demolished and reconstructed in such complexity that you end up with rich fractal images replacing the simplistic cartoons of what passes for erotica.

For instance, have you ever considered how much being wanted really turns you on in an intimate encounter? Is that graphically explicit in any way that could translate to a pornographic image? Is it verbally explicit in a way that could be fully captured in erotic fiction by anything more than a pale symbol? Or is it something that fundamentally requires an interactive experience- an exchange or communication- with another entity to really enjoy, to actually feel? There are powerfully erotic experiences that the expressive vocabulary of all the non-interactive arts can not communicate fully. These experiences are neither simple nor "base" but are deeply emotional, intellectual, and even spiritual. A relatively small portion of the world's population frequently uses traditional erotic materials (pornographic images, movies, and stories) but almost all of us have sexual, sensual, and romantic fantasies. What has traditional erotica been missing? It's my proposition that interactivity is the key to creating erotic works that communicate the more complex and most enjoyable aspects of eroticism.

If interactivity opens up so much potential in the erotic arts, why have the masters of innovation in interactive entertainment arts, game designers, forsaken the erotic drama in favor of the violent drama and the competitive or combative drama? I think it has as much to do with the sex-negativity of our culture (and the taint of leaving eroticism to the domain of pornographers, who've largely bungled it up for so many decades) as it does with the primacy of a narrow range of existing game genres in interactive entertainment. Another barrier to quality eroticism in games are the notions game designers learn about what experiences make something fun (hunter instincts are discussed with an almost mind-boggling disregard for what exactly pushed the hunter to hunt at all: sustaining life for mating), and overly restrictive theories of what makes an interactive play experience a game. If your whole view of multiplayer gaming is based on human versus human conflict it makes envisioning cooperative erotic games all the more unlikely.

But when you get right down to it, it's a lot harder to evoke feelings of flirtation, flattery, anticipation, courtship, romance, lust, arousal, passion, sensuality, sexual rhythm, climax, release, and intimacy than it is to simply challenge a player to a math or geometry based puzzle or target practice. With software mediated experiences, there are just some experiences that are easier to translate to algorithms and UI controls. All that erotic potential is still out there waiting to be discovered and tamed for a whole new kind of interactive entertainment experience because, honestly, it's a bitch to design erotic play mechanics with enough variety and depth to provide effective and consistent erotic experience potential.

I'm learning as I go. There are no masters of erotic game design to learn from, no "erotic game design" books or pundits, no college programs or crib notes. This doesn't mean there isn't a motherload of materials out there that can't be mined for relevant clues to solving our erotic entertainment conundrum, but there is a certain investment in time and perseverance required from everyone trying to connect these dots. So starting with my next entry, I'll be blogging here to reveal some of the biggest problems we face in erotic experience design, along with suggestions and revelations about possible solutions erotic game designers can consider, challenge, or build on to make better games in the erotic fantasy genre.

The exact details of some of our solutions might not be apparent until we launch Rapture Online (and there are 2 unique features of RO that can't be disclosed because they're far enough ahead of the curve that it would be almost cruel to tell you about them before you can just sit down and enjoy them). But I have learned a lot in the past 3 years of studying and working exclusively on sex game design and it's getting to feel like I'm not going to glean much more insight without bouncing these ideas of players, erotica fans, cybersex and ARP enthusiasts, and other interactive entertainment designers.

I don't have a complete list yet of topics I hope to cover but as I brainstorm them I'll add them below (and link them to future posts that explore them in detail). Hopefully it will spark some thought and discussion, or like the minimum hope for anything related to sex in games, maybe it will just make you giggle like an ass.

Erotic Gaming Design Problems:

Facilitating hook ups: connecting like-minded solo players online

People shopping: an in depth look at successful personal ad systems

Creating the mechanics and reward structure of flirtation

Player Identity: Giving all players painless tools to control content preferences and establish viable characters

Avatar Efficacy: Make those graphics work for the player- provide deep character customization to promote high quality role playing

Keeping offensive or repulsive content out of the UI (adaptive UIs)

Special Interest Groups in MMOEGs: erotic games need player-run groups too- maybe in more parts of the game than you realize

MMOEG mixers: Players need different kinds of social events from extremely casual to highly structured for different types of personalities

Romance as a system for solo play (with NPCs)

Romance as a system for couples hotseat play

Romance as a system for networked real-life couples play

Romance as a system for networked online-only play

Harnessing the power of nostalgia and memory as positive factors in exceptional erotic play

Exploring intimacy in online social spaces

Guided intimacy for real life couples play (hotseat or networked)

Guided intimacy for networked online-only play

Ice-breakers: Giving players tools to overcome shyness and social barriers in the MMOEG environment

Creating the mechanics and reward structure of visual sensual exploration

Creating the mechanics and reward structure of auditory sensual exploration

Creating the mechanics and reward structure of verbal sensual exploration

MMOEG skills systems: mandatory fun for the achievement-oriented player

Economies in MMOEGs: the pros and cons of introducing various forms of currency

Paid sex work in MMOEGs: managing the inevitable

Infidelity in MMOEGs: real and virtual commitments and betrayals

Marriage and commitment features of MMOEGs: managing the inevitable without trivializing its essence

Alt lifestyles support: If you think MMOEGs attract primarily vanilla players, you haven't been around the internet much

Fetish support? Do you even have to ask?

Good grief: how Ebay inspired me to quit worrying and love the griefers

Action systems pointers: yes, the nuts and bolts of putting sex acts on screen in real-time 3D with some semblance of a graceful control scheme

Action system mistakes: what everyone else is doing incredibly, wholly, disastrously wrong

Voice acting for erotic games: "more" is incredibly better- it's not that different from the premise of what makes a good MMOEG character editor

Chat feature: help your players give good text

Story system basics: give the power of erotic words to people who routinely replace letters with numbers and type in ALL CAPS during cyber

Story system advanced: give the power to design the damn game to your creative and verbally skilled players

The dark side: worst case scenarios of addiction, predators, and other abuses of erotic MMOEGs and their players

Humor: face it, sex is pretty fucking hilarious so where does humor, satire, and parody fit in a MMOEG without pulling the whole thing into the Leisure Suit Larry locker room?

This isn't porn: how to fulfill all those porn-based fantasies people have by translating what makes the standard elements of pornos work to an interactive experience (aka what they generally did wrong in all those crappy interactive FMV porn games)

Making porn is the *player's* job not the game designer's: the need for screens, movies, and stories from your player's MMOEG play and the primary uses players have for these records

Is a MMOEG even a game? People ask so I'll give it a shot (my answer is a definitive yes- making it a "world" is a bad design choice and I'll use SL as an example to illustrate the down-sides of erotic "worlds" vs. games)

That's not even half of what I got kids, so stay tuned and gimme some feedback every once in a while- I can't be the only person who finds any of this interesting.