Massively Overpowered has an article by Bree Royce, I think she wrote it, titled SEX, LOVE, AND MMOS in the Working as Intended column. Second Life™ is mentioned but is not the focus. The image used for the article is from Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Bree is on about the hypocrisy of those diss’ing those that role play sexual encounters in games. Also, the ridiculous concepts of putting down those RP’ing sex while playing as mostly nude female warriors slaughtering their way to the next level.Quoting Bree, “Nearly naked pretend women for eyecandy purposes are OK, but SHUT THE FRONT DOOR if two consenting adults decide to roleplay sex via text, something so normal and mundane that it’s usually boring unless you’re personally involved. (But sheesh, at least it’s not as boring as video game fishing.)” She has a point on that fishing thing.
True and funny. The point she is making is that if virtual violence is OK then virtual sex should be OK. Revival has some interesting statements on their web site about the game being developed, which I think is why Bree refers to Revival. For example:
This also means we want total and complete immersion. You won’t see ultra hot tiny women with white teeth, perfect hair, and skimpy armor running around fighting evil creatures. This isn’t realistic in the world of Revival. This is a medieval time period. It is dirty, it is gross, and the people are gross within it. Sure, you could go try to fight things in skimpy clothes and look cute while doing it – but i can certainly guarantee that you will die, and fast.
…
With that being said, you will see a lot of features in the game that you don’t usually see in a game. Some of these are things most developers won’t touch with a ten foot pole because they are scared of the backlash. These things range from taking a shit, pissing, having sex, slavery, serial killing abilities, and more. These are not features that are in the game ‘just because’. These are features that enrich the living, breathing world as a whole.
If immersion is the goal of VR… how real do we want it? The SIMS was pushing in this direction. Revival seems to be embracing it.
The gothic sandbox game Revival will feature optional “graphic sex”. O.O They are promoting that. (reference – the interesting part starts halfway down the page.) The game is not yet released.
Sex will be an optional mini game in Revival. Winning is based on… I’m not sure… they say, “…female and males are sustainable to ‘losing’ the minigame when their characters orgasm.” …Sustainable to losing? What’s that mean? Is this a language gaff? Or is this about how long you can hump? And what in the game would determine when a player has an orgasm?
They get right to the issue of prostitution and making in-game money which seems to be sort of the point. It is clear sex can be and is designed to be part of the game and to affect your characters leveling. They have provided pathways to advance your character without sex. Sex provides additional ways to advance your character.
Anyway, while it is a good example of a game addressing the issue of sex, her point seems to be we humans are making no sense when it comes to sex in video/computer games. But, that isn’t news for those of us in Second Life. It is nice to see some recent articles actually considering game sex in a mature well adjusted way.
She does have hope that at some point we will get a bit more mature about how we see sex in virtual worlds. I have less hope. I am just happy to see SL only sharing the stage rather than being the only actor.