Poke the Doll— And Then What?

Many of you may have heard that the very first Sex in Videogames conference was held in San Francisco last month, bringing together a couple hundred game designers, erotic futurists, and pornographers, into the same room.

The special economies of porn design vs. game conception were one hot topic, according to the Wired story I've linked above, but my friend Neil added to the story: "I find it interesting that they are (accurately) able to point at the porn industry for lacking a sense of adventure in sex. Prudes."

My friend Tony, who attended the conference, told me it was interesting and full of information... "though it became a bit grating after a while. I heard one spiel too many about the hard-wired differences between men and woman. Many— like women are not "visual"— are complete bullshit, imho.

"Most of the games being developed by porn people are of the 'poke the doll' variety," he said. "I'm not convinced there's much of a future there.  The real excitement is in massive multiplayer games and environments like Second Life and RedLightCenter, that are open-ended. Again, my opinion."

I'd never heard that expression "Poke the Doll," before, and it made me laugh. We've all done our fair share of poking and prodding in our toy-life history, I imagine.

I remember having someone bring the earliest title of this kind into the On Our Backs office in the 80s. It was a black-and-white game for the Macintosh called MacPlaymate. She was a hand-drawn, b/w cartoon, a heavily pixelated naked woman who lay on a bed. You moved your mouse around her pussy, to arouse her to orgasm. She responded by writhing and moaning.

I was startled that she turned me on at all, but she did. What was it? I finally decided it was her incredibly sexy voice. You would just keep mousing away at her forever to hear those moans. I called up Mike Saenz, her creator, and he said that yes, he really did luck into "Rachel," his impromptu voice talent.

But I forgot about her after a few days. What a cad.

With my taste in story and dialog, if I did follow a game, it would because there was suspense, conflict, occasional ecstatic relief, and a real investment in character. A little poking now and then would be fine too, but in the excitement of those contexts!

I grew up with the first generation of boys who played Dungeons and Dragons. I always wondered how come that world wasn't sexier. My own version of Dungeons and Barbies certainly had the erotic suspense element.

What do you think? Did you or do you ever play a computer-origin game that feeds your inner horny dragon? Did any of you go to the conf and come to other conclusions?

Comments

[Jackson West]

Indeed I did go to the confab, and Tony was right on about the tone of the conference (held in an Elks Lodge, where I'm sure many a stag night has taken place over the decades). The porn folks were aghast at what it costs to produce a latest-generation video game, and the video game developers were freaked out by the social stigma and legal liabilities that come with producing anything sexual.

Of course, the other problem is that the entire scene is relatively male-dominated, so the maturity of the debate about sexuality left a lot to be desired (my friend Annalee actually overheard "We don't like to use the 'P' word" from representatives of one interactive title). Regina Lynne gave a great talk on the reality of contemporary online relationships via text chat, Violet Blue did her best to dispell the notion that women were only interested in "emotional intimacy" and "relationship building," and never just wanted to plug in and get off, and a number of gentleman whom I won't bother to name here did their best to sleaze it all up by hitting on fellow panelists. Dave Taylor on the other hand, a gamer hero and creator of the original Doom, gave a hilarious demo about the fetish possibilities that can only be achieved through digital art -- with his own massively-inflated breast fetish as an example.

I think the best point made on the subject so far was by Kyle Machulis of Slashdong (and now a Second Life developer employed at Linden Labs her in SF) back at a panel in Austin for SxSWi. The real problem right now is the interface, and "until they develop a machine that you'd want to fuck," the sexual possibilities online are almost exclusively mental. As for visual stimulation, while certainly better than the old C64 Strip Poker, the human (and non-human) models aren't nearly as polished as those in sports, fighting and war games right now. Why am I not surprised?

I highly recommend Noche Kandora's blog ApogeeVR, which goes into great detail about online sex, primarly in Second Life but now branching out into other platforms such as Red Light Center. I'm actually working on a piece for Other Magazine that will be a quick and dirty guide to quickly getting dirty in SL, so look out for it in a couple of weeks.

[Susie Bright]

Jackson, thank you so much for your observations. Can I press you for more? For one, what is the "P" word: Penis? Pussy? Pablum?

Who is Regina Lynn, and what do you mean by "online relationships via text chat"? You mean when you are basically pen pals with someone and maybe someday you meet? Which reality was she talking about?

Please let me know if there's a link to your Other article... I'd love to read it.

[rosewood]

Some of the happiest hours of my high school years were when we played dungeons and dragons. We didn't do anything sexual because the dungeon master (seems odd to type that title) was eleven and one of the players was his father.

But, yes, it would be fun to play a more adult--and gay--version of D&D now.

But now I guess it would be expected to play on a computer. I liked keeping track of things on graph paper and playing it in our heads. Talk about a shared virtual reality.

[ambiva]

Some of the happiest moments of my junior high/high school years were also spent playing Dungeons & Dragons...but all we talked about was sex! Well, once we got rid of the boys, that is. Our all-female group, with me as the Dungeon Master, quickly abandoned silly monster-fighting and spent our time creating a sexual fantasy world that our characters blithely fucked their way through. I did the same thing with my Barbies at a younger age, with mostly girl-on-girl action since Ken was boring. I wonder what this says about my "hard-wiredness."

And yes, I agree that I actually liked it better when it was something that I created out of my head, rather than something that was generated on a computer screen for me...I'm still the same way today in that I prefer written erotica that I can imagine myself over visual erotica.

[Itinwi]

I don't have much to add to this debate so far as the computer games thing is concerned, except that from what I've read and understand, the real heyday of video games is just around the corner, when game companies start to make the source codes for their best games available (meaning that for very little money and with not an incredible amount of no-how, someone could create a completely new game using the basic engine of, say, Grand Theft Auto, but instead of running around and stealing cars, you're tying people down, spanking them, or running away from hordes of zombies (sorry, my biggest non-sexual fantasy is a free-will game like that in the middle of a city with a zombie problem)).

I would like to comment on this statement made above though: "The other problem is that the entire scene is relatively male-dominated, so the maturity of the debate about sexuality left a lot to be desired"

Why is it that the maturity of the debate is in question because of the gender of the debaters? Why isn't it because it's video game dorks or mainstream porn purveyors. I'm not saying that perhaps a lot of men have less than refined views on sex... but maybe it's also that the female POV on things has been agreed upon as 'the high road' and the male POV is viewed as immature. I think there's obviously some room to be made up by men, especially straight men, towards doing the kind of work exploring gender and sexuality that a lot of women have been doing forever now. It just breaks my little heart when we can blame a poor discussion on sex on the fact that everyone in the room had a "P," or didn't have a "P," depending on what the P word is.

[Becca]

Susie,

You have to get to know Regina Lynne. She writes regularly on the intersection of sex and technology for Wired and she's written a couple of books. She's super-smart, nice, funny, mature, thoughtful, etc. Lucky for you, her column comes out on Fridays, so there's a new one up: http://wired.com/news/columns/0,71380-0.html

[Shanna]

My first "poke the doll" game was Leisure Suit Larry...this was way back, when I was in college. It was one of those hush-hush things that the guys didn't want to tell us about :) I thought it was a little dull, and too easy for my taste.

As a gamer girl myself, I'm not as interested in something that's "just sex" but would totally play something that integrated sex into a character. In RP or multi-player games, characters eat, drink, train, sleep, etc. Why not sex?

In sort of related stuff, I heard these two women talking on a radio show about how a new study found that the majority of online gamers were women over 40 (or something around there). The women on the radio were scoffing at the study, saying "What? What women play online games? I don't believe a word of it." And I was just sitting there, shaking my head, thinking, that if the world only knew...

[Safira]

Has anyone else out there seen The Book of Erotic Fantasy? http://www.gamegrene.com/node/374

A very well-done, and attractively illustrated, rules supplement for introducing sex (and sex magic) into your D&D campaign. I'm thinking about picking up some of the bardic spells for my character if the DM will let me.

42 years old and still a proud gamer...

Geek sexuality is rather odd, from an outsider's perspective, and I say this as a geek myself.

Do a Google search for "erotic anime fanfiction" some time if you want to see something that's generally regarded as relatively tame and mainstream among geeks. For more fringe stuff, try "cosplay." Or "furries," but I think they might be beyond the pale even for you.

[Sandrino]

You had MacPlaymate in color? The one I had in the mid 80's was only black & white. It was quite one dimensional but it was fun for 10 minutes. I too found myself being strangely turned on by it.

Maybe I am too square but I never did anything sexual in D&D. It could have been a lot of fun, D&D often got quite slow and dull. Then again, I wouldn't have wanted to get sexual with the guys I played D&D with. maybe if we had been playing with some coeds, hmm.

Then again, why waste time with D&D? There are plenty of explicit sex games that do away with all the percentile dice and hit points crap of D&D. I found greatsexgames.com through a podcast. I haven't played any of their games personally but they seem to have quite a variety.

It seems to me that someone should come up with an internet controlled sex toy. You could give your partner control of your toy and vice-versa. I am sure we have the technology necessary. I wonder why no one has marketed one yet. Perhaps I should be talking to a patent attorney.

[Peter Tupper]

I understand that dating simulation games are big in Japan, and played by males and females. It's rather like the arrival of manga in North America: the American comics establishment's wisdom dictated that girls don't read comics, and then girls and women started buying manga collections by the millions, and DC and Marvel are left playing catchup.

Likewise, the idea that women are quietly having cybersex in MMORPGs actually makes sense. I see it as an outgrowth of slash fiction.

BTW, have you seen the game controller handset for the forthcoming Nintendo Wii? I blogged on the erotic potential of this device a while back: http://beautyindarkness.blog.ca/2006/06/22/playing_games~901550

[Peter Tupper]

There are dating simulation games in Japan that are played by both men and women.

This is a little like the spread of manga in North America. For decades, the wisdom of the American comics establishment dictated that "Girls don't read comics." Then girls and women started buying manga collections from Chapters and B&N by the millions, and DC and Marvel are left in the specialty retail shops wondering what the hell happened.

BTW, have you seen the game controller handset for the forthcoming Nintendo Wii? I blogged about the erotic potential for this device a while back: http://beautyindarkness.blog.ca/2006/06/22/playing_games~901550

[C.S> Lewiston]

IMHO, a good place to start for furry critter sex is Omaha the Cat Dancer
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omaha_the_Cat_Dancer ), despite the fact that one of its creators (Kate Worley) has passed on and the strip seems to change publishers every week.

I've never been much of a video/computer game player. If I want to kill time, that's what the internet is for! I do remember the earliest days of video gaming (Pong, anyone? How about Space War?). As for sexual content, does anyone here remember the controversy over a rather tasteless game for the Atari 2600 called "Custer's Revenge"?

http://www.classicgaming.com/rotw/custer.shtml

One of my first gigs after college was as a repair geek in a video arcade which also had a handful of pinball machines. One of them was Bally's "Xenon" (also the name of a NY disco from that era).

( http://www.ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=2821&picno=3173 )
( http://www.sevwave.com/early_ciani/ciani_xenon2.html )
( http://www.xmission.com/~daina/images/do/xenon.html )

Where other pinball machines would ring bells or buzzers when a ball was in play, Xenon would emit vaguely orgasmic female "ahhh"'s. Although it doesn't show up in any of the views on the above web sites, our machine had a graphic on it of a pinball machine, viewed from the back of its readout panel (the part which is usually against a wall), which contained a female human face in an apparent state of bliss. At the business end of the machine (where the controls are) stands a bald-headed man who has his loins pressed right up against it. As George Carlin once remarked, you don't have to be Fellini to figure that one out!

[Mark Woodhouse]

There's a bit of a new generation of small-press pen-and-paper games that deal with sex and relationships with less tittering and more heat, too. Emily Care's Breaking The Ice
http://www.blackgreengames.com/bti.shtml is about dating and romance, and Bacchanal
http://www.halfmeme.com/bacchanal.html
involves creating stories of lust and depravity in a Roman town in the grips of divine madness.

So it's not all +5 swords and succubi.

[Steve]

For me, I agree with Neil: The porn industry is a bunch of prudes. Porn seems so formulaic. I mean, whatever your kink, you probably are going to see pretty much the same film as the film made for the next kink. It's been distilled to the very basics of what you need, visually, to whack off to, and nothing more.

Not that I MIND that always. But it could be much more interesting. As things are, porn is almost Pavlovian - show me a certain image and I'll get off.

[LadyClaw]

To quote Peter Tupper:
"Likewise, the idea that women are quietly having cybersex in MMORPGs actually makes sense. I see it as an outgrowth of slash fiction. "

I'm sure the "slash fiction" theory is true *some* of the time. It is certainly not universal, and I'm a good example of that.

Why? Because I don't watch TV, I don't see a lot of movies. I'd rather make up my *own* characters. Maybe that's why, back in 1993, when I found out about MUDs (a text-only predecessor of today's MMORPGs), I went to town-- in all ways. I loved playing the game for itself, I enthusiastically created interesting environments through programming not only for game-play but also for interaction between players, and I had 15 different 'virtual husbands' (not all at the same time....). ...

Why does a college female who has plenty of dates get involved in these things, anyway? Well, to begin with, it's because of the freedom it offers to experiment with many different ideas, sexual or not. It's "safe."

...And let me reiterate.... I preferred making up my *own* characters.

Years later, having experiemented with that, I'm still a gamer. I've moved on to the more sophisticated 3D versions of the games I used to play. I no longer feel the need to constantly use the game as a safe-haven for personal experimentation, because I've learned a lot about myself, have become more confident, and learned enough about myself to bring it into the "real" realm of my every day life.

[Jon Bailiff]

I am surprised no one has mention "SIMS". They appear to have had a gold mine in an ever increasing level of sexuality and titilation in thieir platform.

[misterniceguy1960]

I often annoyed the gamers I GMed for on account of the sexual content of my play. I was always having them run into mushroom people wanting to share spores, succubi and incubi, or hideous little things that radiated aphrodisiacs (an encounter with the latter was described as "doing a disgusting thing with a disgusting thing" -- a line we stole from Harlan Ellison).