Summary
I am going to do a second part about Project Sex… Watch for it.
I started out thinking Project Arousal was on the expensive side. Then I was a bit ambivalent about the cost. Now I think it is a decent price. We get a lot for our money.
Teasing the Boys
I have found that few know how to do interactive sex in SL. At the height of Xcite! is was common to hit Ctrl-Alt-T to show the hidden stuff people were wearing. OR we just clicked on people to see if we got a menu. That no longer is true. I don’t remember the last time I met a clicker…
So, this 2015 system (with a series of and recent updates) while great fun has not taken off. That shows in the Xcite! (thousands – still) and Caeil’s (600+) group’s member counts. That may be because of the poor naming of Caeil’s Support group. If it had been named more intuitive, Project Arousal Support… Project Sex Support… (ya think?), I might have more confidence in the numbers.
I do know that in its day it was never hard to find someone wearing Xcite! I have yet to stumble into someone wearing Project Arousal.
Whatever the case, this is a rather fun toy.
I’ve only just begun testing this system. It’s a bit distracting and tempting to fall into the trap of treating SL sex as a sort of “twitch” video game. You can click-and-hold on your play-partner’s goodies and rub or drag until your hand gets sore ; sending him or her into a paroxysm of climaxes. While this is fun once or twice, and you can certainly play like this all the time, your play partner will more likely be bemused than actually aroused.
But the HUDs allow the players to set their arousal level independently, and this is a strength. Sex RPers can choose to emote their avatar’s arousal or their own through this tool and make RP more interactive.
And then there’s the API available through the developer’s kits. This allows you to build devices that communicate with PA-equipped avatars and send information about stimulation from sit-on devices, hand-held toys, etc. Again, this can easily take control of an avatar’s arousal away from the player, but it can be used judiciously to make suggestions that inform role-play. I’ve used this to modify a few bondage devices my partner likes to automatically raise and hold her arousal level when she sits on them.
I picked this up last night for my partner and she and I spent a few hours experimenting. It eats up four attachment points if you want an interactive avatar’s body, but I think, for some styles of play, you can use just the HUD. If it works well, I might try to put up affiliate vendors for it and deploy it around my sim.