Sex Games

Michael is frustrated by the sex game his girlfriend plays with him. Are sex games okay or is Michael right to be upset?

Question

When I first started dating my girlfriend I found her sex games to be a big turn-on. She would hold sex over me, telling me I might get some action, flirting all the time. I found the mystery and games intoxicating. It was like we were in a movie and I never knew how the plot would unfold.

But now her act has grown tiresome. We've been dating a few months and I'm ready for the relationship to settle down a bit, remove the games. But I can't seem to get my girlfriend to stop playing games with me. Am I crazy to want some more predictability in my relationship or should I let her continue to be this way?

Efficient German Sex Games

I first heard about Singles: Flirt Up Your Life!, a The Sims-esque life simulator from German publisher Deep Silver, a few months back when I was looking into games that were trying to mine the Sims vein. Well, now Singles has graced the pages of The Sun, and has been, fittingly, farked, so we may as well talk about it.

As in The Sims, players lord over living dolls in an effort to do things close enough to real life to create a feeling of connection, but divorced enough to feel novel. However, while the venerable Sims franchise has been described as sit-com-esque 50's middle America sandbox gaming, Singles is themed soft-core up the proverbial wazoo, perhaps making more like the surprizingly good Space Colony than Will Wright's original. Singles has but one scenario: 2 out of 12 possible archtypal characters (the eponymous "Singles") wind up living in the same apartment(!!!). Your job is to make them get it on like rats in a sock.

Yeah, buddy!

But seriously, The Sims set the bar in its first expansion pack by letting two Sims get into the "Love Bed" and do a little horizontal tango under the sheets. Singles gives us more details, fewer censor blurs, and maintains your ability to watch two female-shaped collections of polygons making out almost any time you want. On the other hand, with Singles, you're pretty much stuck with the 12 characters provided by the designers, all of whom are at least a little on the positive side of the attractiveness meter. While not humping each other like bonobos (think before you click that), your Singles will need to do more mundane tasks like working (which will buy them things to have sex on/under/with) and eating, sleeping, and other Sim-like activities.

Prurient issues aside, I'll go back to my earlier comparisson to Space Colony, which was like The Sims with fixed characters, and goals, and was a pretty good sleeper PC title. Even The Sims' console incarnations have had more goal-oriented gameplay. I think games like this, done well, have a lot of potential, and it's kind of shocking that there has been very little competition in this particular genre. If nothing else, maybe Singles will make enough waves to give some funding to some future life-sim projects.

Finally, I couldn't find a place to fit this in earlier, but I find it interesting that Singles is being packaged two ways, a pink box (girls) and a blue box (boys). These versions seem to be functionally the same, so this calls back to Black & White's ultimately abandoned idea of marketing black box and white box versions (the white box cost an extra $5, which would be donated to charity). Even their website is split into two sites, which are the same, but for the color of the background. From a marketing standpoint, I'm not sure that this is a great move (it might confuse the consumer), but from a design standpoint, what a cute little gimmick!

Posted by ClockworkGrue at February 04, 2004 11:32 PM | TrackBack