Giving people tools to stage their own scenes adds something more active and personal to the experience. The cartoonish polygon arrangements of many Thrixxx games aren't as titillating as photo porn. But even so, the aesthetics of many of these experiences draw from male-privileged fantasies. In Bonetown, for instance, Bright recognized the social satire and absurdity but remained disappointed in the portrait of sex behind the redneck and crackwhore jokes.
"The clichés that they broker in, and how stupid, limiting, unimaginative, and offensive they are is a constant drag," Bright said. "It's like you have to start with the fat chick and work your way up. I was just cracking up--they're so conservative. Their audience for this stuff—there could be so much future, but a lot of people feel thwarted by pornography's narrow confines."
There has long been a tension in porn over having to accept a creator's point of view to the detriment of your own preferences. A counterculture has grown in response. People have begun injecting sex into persistent online role-playing games, Second Life, Craigslist, and even redubbed episodes of The Golden Girls. In the same way that bathrooms in planes and bars have to coyly note that only one person at a time is allowed in, we have a way of incorporating sex into a great variety of ordinary surroundings.
Utherverse is hoping to resolve this tension by offering a 3D social network to serve people interested in virtual sex. It began as a recreation of Amsterdam's red light district and quickly grew in popularity. Utherverse soon evolved into a much larger and more open-ended user experience, driven by microtransactions and player-to-player exchanges using the in-game currency.
"For true virtual worlds, the only ones that have had a modicum of success have been those that dealt with adults," Brian Shuster of Utherverse told me. "It's sort of the same thing as the early internet. We saw many, many failures of search engines and content websites because they just didn't have models to support them. The adult entertainment sites became profitable and ultimately created the business models that allowed the other sites to thrive."
It's true that in the early and mid-90's sex websites were at the forefront, offering solutions to secure online credit card transactions—something which subsequently empowered sites like Amazon, eBay, and Pay Pal to flourish. Likewise, while the video game and movie industry were insisting their content be distributed as physical goods, sex websites began opening the channels for both direct download and subscription services. Game and movie publishers are only now just starting to catch up.
With Utherverse, Shuster believes porn is again opening a road into the future by transforming what he calls the 2D web into three dimensions. One of the surprising benefits of creating a 3D space for people to express their sexuality in is a significant increase in women users.
"Our demographic is actually skewed towards the female side," Shuster told me. "The adult entertainment industry is taking a very healthy turn at this point. It's going from being a visual appeal to the prurient interests of men to being an interactive medium that's much more akin to real world encounters. It's not just about five minutes of watching a video and being done."
Shuster claims that while the majority of users who try Utherverse for the first time are men, women make up more than half of the active returning users. To underscore the fact that much of the interaction in Utherverse connects beyond the simple mechanics of sex, Shuster notes there were more than 1,000 in-game weddings in 2010.
"It's about getting online, interacting in a social environment, getting together with someone you've met, having some romance, having the option to wear any kind of outfit," Shuster said. "It's a way to explore sexuality in a very non-threatening environment. It's much more than just video games, it becomes a real world relationship just done by proxy."
Harvest Moon. Wholesome, for now.
Harvest Moon games have long allowed players to have marriages, but would we say players 'use' them rather than 'play' them? The barely controlled internet expanse has made it harder for people to deny their own insurgent sexuality. Almost everyone has seen porn, and almost everyone has done so by choice. Yet we still thoughtlessly intermingle sexual expression in art with controllable substances when we say porn is something used rather than watched or played.
Even the label of porn is prejudicial, deriving from the Greek word for prostitute. Young people are legally entitled to have consensual sex with people of their same age but they cannot look at—or interact with—images of other people having sex. You don't have to look very far to discover fault lines in the distinction between "pornography" and sexual expression.
Non-pornographic films like The Brown Bunny, Antichrist, and Enter the Void all feature graphic, non-simulated sex scenes with full penetration. Likewise, games like Heavy Rain, Grand Theft Auto IV, and God of War 3 all moved closer to making fully interactive sex scenes that seem so taboo in other settings. Thrixxx was able to create a sex interaction using Microsoft's Kinect a month after its release.
Heavy petting.
Simiarly, former Ubisoft designer Heather Kelly made a famous DS prototype about rubbing a rabbit's nose that was supposed to simulate clitoral stimulation. The much sought-after Copenhagen Game Collective turned the Wii remote into a sexual baton with Dark Room Sex Game. There's something corrupt in the presumption that conflates fantasy with real world acts, a nervous connection that is instantly terrifying when connected to sex.
Interaction has changed our culture, and it is changing the ways we understand pornography. By making the stereotypical scenarios of porn interactive an absurd comedy emerges. But in giving people a palate to create their own scenes with, sexual media is becoming less an illicit contraband and more a normal and healthy party of thinking, hoping, and wondering. Every day we are moving further and further away from pornography toward a less frightful understanding of sex. Sex is not something we use, after all, but something we love, remember, and hope to discover once again, daily, hourly, and maybe even right this minute.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/115/1152693p1.html
"The clichés that they broker in, and how stupid, limiting, unimaginative, and offensive they are is a constant drag," Bright said. "It's like you have to start with the fat chick and work your way up. I was just cracking up--they're so conservative. Their audience for this stuff—there could be so much future, but a lot of people feel thwarted by pornography's narrow confines."
There has long been a tension in porn over having to accept a creator's point of view to the detriment of your own preferences. A counterculture has grown in response. People have begun injecting sex into persistent online role-playing games, Second Life, Craigslist, and even redubbed episodes of The Golden Girls. In the same way that bathrooms in planes and bars have to coyly note that only one person at a time is allowed in, we have a way of incorporating sex into a great variety of ordinary surroundings.
Utherverse is hoping to resolve this tension by offering a 3D social network to serve people interested in virtual sex. It began as a recreation of Amsterdam's red light district and quickly grew in popularity. Utherverse soon evolved into a much larger and more open-ended user experience, driven by microtransactions and player-to-player exchanges using the in-game currency.
"For true virtual worlds, the only ones that have had a modicum of success have been those that dealt with adults," Brian Shuster of Utherverse told me. "It's sort of the same thing as the early internet. We saw many, many failures of search engines and content websites because they just didn't have models to support them. The adult entertainment sites became profitable and ultimately created the business models that allowed the other sites to thrive."
It's true that in the early and mid-90's sex websites were at the forefront, offering solutions to secure online credit card transactions—something which subsequently empowered sites like Amazon, eBay, and Pay Pal to flourish. Likewise, while the video game and movie industry were insisting their content be distributed as physical goods, sex websites began opening the channels for both direct download and subscription services. Game and movie publishers are only now just starting to catch up.
With Utherverse, Shuster believes porn is again opening a road into the future by transforming what he calls the 2D web into three dimensions. One of the surprising benefits of creating a 3D space for people to express their sexuality in is a significant increase in women users.
"Our demographic is actually skewed towards the female side," Shuster told me. "The adult entertainment industry is taking a very healthy turn at this point. It's going from being a visual appeal to the prurient interests of men to being an interactive medium that's much more akin to real world encounters. It's not just about five minutes of watching a video and being done."
Shuster claims that while the majority of users who try Utherverse for the first time are men, women make up more than half of the active returning users. To underscore the fact that much of the interaction in Utherverse connects beyond the simple mechanics of sex, Shuster notes there were more than 1,000 in-game weddings in 2010.
"It's about getting online, interacting in a social environment, getting together with someone you've met, having some romance, having the option to wear any kind of outfit," Shuster said. "It's a way to explore sexuality in a very non-threatening environment. It's much more than just video games, it becomes a real world relationship just done by proxy."
Harvest Moon games have long allowed players to have marriages, but would we say players 'use' them rather than 'play' them? The barely controlled internet expanse has made it harder for people to deny their own insurgent sexuality. Almost everyone has seen porn, and almost everyone has done so by choice. Yet we still thoughtlessly intermingle sexual expression in art with controllable substances when we say porn is something used rather than watched or played.
Even the label of porn is prejudicial, deriving from the Greek word for prostitute. Young people are legally entitled to have consensual sex with people of their same age but they cannot look at—or interact with—images of other people having sex. You don't have to look very far to discover fault lines in the distinction between "pornography" and sexual expression.
Non-pornographic films like The Brown Bunny, Antichrist, and Enter the Void all feature graphic, non-simulated sex scenes with full penetration. Likewise, games like Heavy Rain, Grand Theft Auto IV, and God of War 3 all moved closer to making fully interactive sex scenes that seem so taboo in other settings. Thrixxx was able to create a sex interaction using Microsoft's Kinect a month after its release.
Heavy petting.
Simiarly, former Ubisoft designer Heather Kelly made a famous DS prototype about rubbing a rabbit's nose that was supposed to simulate clitoral stimulation. The much sought-after Copenhagen Game Collective turned the Wii remote into a sexual baton with Dark Room Sex Game. There's something corrupt in the presumption that conflates fantasy with real world acts, a nervous connection that is instantly terrifying when connected to sex.
Interaction has changed our culture, and it is changing the ways we understand pornography. By making the stereotypical scenarios of porn interactive an absurd comedy emerges. But in giving people a palate to create their own scenes with, sexual media is becoming less an illicit contraband and more a normal and healthy party of thinking, hoping, and wondering. Every day we are moving further and further away from pornography toward a less frightful understanding of sex. Sex is not something we use, after all, but something we love, remember, and hope to discover once again, daily, hourly, and maybe even right this minute.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/115/1152693p1.html
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