I’ve got nothing further to add.

(Via Wonderland.)

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.

(Via Alice.)

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.)

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.

Since I know y’all come here for the deep analysis (well, except for those WoW nude skin people), here are some observations:

• What an incredibly inept way of portraying this particular act. Especially the, um, fluid dynamics. It’s not even disgusting.
• Ironically, that is one of the best real-time 3D anime characters I have seen in a long time.
• I had to laugh towards the end. What’s with the baseball bat? Again, let us all be thankful for the ineptness.

(Via Boing Boing, who got it from Rock Paper Shotgun.)

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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!)

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.)

The game offers fare such as battling monsters, questing and other fantasies familiar to players of games like EverQuest and Ultima Online. But Sociolotron differs by providing a way to indulge in sexual taboos like rape and bondage with consequences like sexually transmitted diseases and even pregnancy. And it is quite explicit in informing would-be players about what they may experience in-world.

This article contains a little more information:

In the realm of mature play, Sociolotron doesn’t merely push the envelope: It crumples it into a little ball and shoots it into space.

In this online role-playing game sex isn’t just an option, it’s an inescapable fact. Have too much sex and maybe catch a disease – or at least become a less moral person. Don’t have enough and lose out when you die – lacking heirs to whom you can pass on your wealth and possessions. Characters in the game deal with pregnancy, disease, gangs, crime and drugs in a very graphic manner.

“My original intention was to make a simulation of life in a way that fits most peoples’ fantasies,” said Patric Lagny, 43, the developer of the online game.

“I found out over time that many people fantasize about being a prostitute, being a big-shot mafia boss, playing BDSM games. So my intention was to give them a playground to live out these fantasies without danger. However: If you can live out these or any other fantasies without any danger, things become boring very quickly.”

When the world first opened, players immersed themselves in a hedonistic world of sex and crime, but soon became either disgusted or dissatisfied. So Lagny created rules, guards, a justice system, made it possible for players to kill each other permanently and added some other real-world worries to keep things interesting.

Lagny sees his game, which has about 2,000 subscribers, as just that – a game.

What particularly caught my eye was the name of the game’s developer, Patric Lagny. Could it be the same Patric Lagny with whom I worked at Blue Byte in the mid-nineties? The guy who played the emperor in the full-motion video sequences in Battle Isle 3 (hence my earlier reference to a “shadowy figure”)? It was just conceivable enough to warrant some research.

The Sociolotron website is registered to a Patric Lagny in California. The last time I’d met Patric, he was still living in the Ruhrgebiet in Germany. His home page however, quickly told me that his age is around 43, his email address is the same as the one from the website registration, and that he moved to LA in 2001. Also, he is currently

[...] involved in the development of a Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game with some special and totally new community features.

Wow.

I’m sure some people will get worked up about the subject matter, but I possess the famed Dutch permissiveness which makes me not care. However, I applaud every effort that is made to stretch the boundaries of the medium.

So. I write about sex and violence. Then I write about running into an old co-worker from Blue Byte. Then about an old friend from Holland who made a sex-based chess game. And now I found out an old co-worker from Blue Byte has made an MMORPG about sex and violence. What will happen next? Maybe I don’t want to know.

Links:
Ren Reynolds has commented on Sociolotron as well as another online sex game, set in Amsterdam’s Red Lights District, on Terra Nova.

But by now, things have changed.

Amsterdam-based Guerilla Games, although they’ve been around in one form or another for quite some time, are coming out of the blue with two AAA titles: Killzone and Shellshock Nam 67.

(I cannot resist a little rant about Edge here, who did a cover story on Killzone last year, and promptly inserted all the cliches of the British schoolboy in Amsterdam, i.e. marihuana, red lights district, etc. for which they earn my eternal contempt. “Video magazine for grown-ups”, my ass.)

But anyway, a friend of mine from the Netherlands, with whom I used to talk about making games before I ever joined the industry, just sent me an email about a game he’s been working on. It’s called Love Chess.

Based on the Greek and Trojan epos, LoveChess takes you to a place where the gods make love on the chess-board. Play chess with sexy queens and amorous knights on your PC.

The feature list contains such gems as:

Watch the chess pieces make love from every angle you want.

Diverse and unique animations for all movements varying from very tender to very bizarre.

Ambient music that brings a serene sense of peace and tranquility.

And the best double entendre I’ve seen in quite a while:

Proven game play.

Battle Chess + Porn, an unbeatable combination. I’d buy it if it ran on a Mac, and if I liked chess.

It fits in nicely with the Dutch reputation for permissiveness, and it looks like an interesting experiment in presenting sex in real-time 3D. (See also this earlier post on sex in games).