Duel Love: Scrub That Boy! March 9, 2008
Duel Love is a DS game from Namco Bandai. It is a dating game aimed at girls, and apparently involves wiping sweat of half-naked teenage boys.
I’ve got nothing further to add.
(Via Wonderland.)
EA Calls Fox Out on “Insulting” Mass Effect Inaccuracies February 1, 2008
Remember that ‘infamous’ sex scene in Mass Effect? Well, Fox News, fabled U.S. news organization, reported on it. And apparently they slightly got the facts wrong.
EA is doing the sensible thing and is pointing out Fox’s reporting inaccuracies in public, and in no uncertain terms. I don’t know how effective it will be, but still, it’s a great letter.
Sex advice from video-game designers September 23, 2007
Nerve.com has sex advice from video-game designers, and it’s not a set-up for cheap joke. OK, it is part of a series which includes sex advice from surfers and dog walkers. Still, it features Heather Kelley and Randy Smith, so it can’t be all bad.
(Via Alice.)
Mass Effect to include sex scene September 19, 2007
(I don’t consider the content of this post to contain spoilers, but if you like your gaming experiences pristine, better look away now.)
According to Eurogamer Mass Effect is to include a sex scene. From the BBFC rating:
The single sex scene is brief and undetailed, although there is breast nudity in one version of the scene. The sex scene is triggered by the player making a series of choices about becoming more than friends with a colleague. If playing as a male character the scene can take place between him and a human woman or a humanoid female alien. If playing as a female character the scene can take place between her and a male human or a female humanoid alien.
So, if you are gay and male, tough luck. Weird.
Something like this has already been done by Origin Systems in Ultima VII: The Black Gate, which was released in 1992. That game allowed you to have more fun as a gay male. Of course, back then it was all a little less graphic:
The actual sex scene is some text on a black background.
It is ironic that the interactive medium has to fight to gain back the creative freedom it lost becoming (relatively) mainstream.
BioWare has included a relationship path in a large portion of its games to date. But, in keeping with nearly everything else in Mass Effect, the choice here is more detailed and has a lot more depth.
Jeez, I sure hope so. KOTOR was not very effective in this regard, not to me at least. I remember there being a certain area on the first planet where a trigger box in a certain place would always trigger a certain party member to make an idle remark in the hope you’d talk to him. The conversation itself seemed to be a kind of mini-game of ‘repeatedly talk to gain his trust until he tells you about himself’. For me, it went more like:
“Oh damn, the bridge, what do I do? If I cross it, the ugly and annoying man in my group will want to talk to me. Can I avoid the bridge? Can I get him killed somehow?”
However, despite my deep loathing for KOTOR, I must say I am intrigued by Mass Effect, sex scene or no sex scene.
(Thanks Chris.)
Love Death 2 September 5, 2007
Alright, here is my dirty little secret: a significant chunk of my non-subscriber traffic is people looking for nude World of Warcraft skins and other dodgy subjects I have occasionally blogged about over the years. So, in a cynical attempt to increase my traffic, I bring you news of Love Death 2, a first-person bukkake simulator from Japan (where else?). If you don’t know what bukkake is: don’t bother.
Anyway. There’s a video. Although you probably wouldn’t want to watch it at work, it’s far from scrubbing-out-your-brain-with-acid stuff either. But then again, maybe I have a withered, scarred husk for a soul.
Julian Eggebrecht on censorship in games August 21, 2007
Julian Eggebrecht held a really interesting keynote address at GCDC this year, about a subject dear to my heart: the idiotic standards used to censor games.
Just before I became a producer in 2004, I heard a particularly ludicrous story about an extremely convoluted way to access “sexual content” (a nipple) in Max Payne 2, and how the developers were forced to take it out. It’s not quite “hack the game to reactivate dead code” a la Dead Coffee, but it came pretty close. The irony is of course that violence is regularly removed from games for non-US markets, often using somewhat Byzantine rules (no blood, no violence related to sex, etc.).
I vowed that in my next project, as a European developer, I would try to add enough sexual content so that it would need to be censored for the US market, much like Basic Instinct or Julian’s example, Eyes Wide Shut. From a development point of view it’s not a big deal: if you’re making multiple SKUs with different content changes for each, why not add one more? (At some point I may be able to tell what became of that vow.)
Anyway, Julian makes three excellent points:
- The standards used by various rating organisations are nonsensical. Of course, that’s true for other media as well, but I think it’s worse in games right now.
- This is caused by the more general issue that games are not generally recognized as an art form, a topic that is being discussed more and more in the last few years, to the point where it has spilled over into mainstream culture.
- Finally, Julian urges developers to push the boundaries of sex and violence, but to do it in an artistic way. This reminds me of something Brian Moriarty said in one of his excellent talks at GDC in the late 90s: if you’re going to portray violence, do it for a good reason.
(Thanks Kirsten!)
Warren Ellis on sex in Second Life March 1, 2007
I have not really taken any kind of in-depth look at Second Life, but I have been reading the various stories that have appeared over the years. I was nevertheless quite surprised by the amount of coverage Reuters is giving it.
I found their Second Life site spooky because I had to keep taking closer looks to find out if this was real-world news or SL news. Exchange rates and economic stats? SL. Mass pillow fight video? RL. Article about John Edwards, presidential nominee? SL. “Granny finds grenade in groceries”? RL. The double-takes made my neck hurt.
Anyway, Warren Ellis is writing a column about SL for Reuters (”Business Community Economy Interviews Lifestyle Warren Ellis” - I figured it’d be about him. But no).
His latest entry, Second Life: Please stop doing that to the cat, talks about cybersex in SL. He finds icky stuff, and if he says that, I believe him - I stopped subscribing to his blog ages ago because of the stuff he links to.
It ends with:
I’m just saying: anyone who says that sexual activity is a tiny part of the SL experience is either stupid or knowingly lying. Further: anyone who thinks it’s not going to lead to trouble down the line is just an idiot.
Well, yeah. SL is bound to im- or explode at some point. It is the place where some of the most interesting cultural issues of our time are being worked out, in an uncontrolled way (Linden Labs may disagree). The unpredictability is awesome. Taxation? A wide range of legal liabilities? The nature of governance in cyberspace? You name it. Over-hyped or not, it is a little pioneering node, freely and frantically experimenting with stuff while culture in general is slowly catching up with it and figuring out what to make of it - what is OK and not OK, what is legal and not legal. Not that different from communes in the 60s.
Of course, I have no personal experience with either 60s communes or with Second Life. Yay for blogs and low standards! \o/
(Via BoingBoing.)
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WoW nude patch November 29, 2005
Well, that took surprisingly long. Read about it over at Wonderland, then indulge your secret gnome fantasies.
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Sociolotron, a BDSM MMORPG, more or less July 4, 2004
I seem to be picking up material from an ever-decreasing number topics these days. This time, a BDSM MMORPG, and it’s link to a shadowy figure from my past.
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Dutch games June 30, 2004
Historically, the Netherlands is not known for game development. The reason why I packed my bags for foreign climes (Germany) in 1991 was that there were no serious game development companies in Holland at the time.
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