Sex in Games Conference Announced

An anonymous reader writes "1UP has a story on the announcement of the first ever Sex in Games Conference. According to the group putting it on, the conference is to 'focus on the design, development, and technology of sex in video games from a national as well as international perspective.' It's a two-day event taking place this June in San Francisco. Some of the lectures are: 'Sex in Games: Where are We Now?', 'The Future of Sex and Technology,' and 'The Making of the SeXbox: Applied Hardware'."

Comments

Maybe because

[Moraelin]

1. Because if you just need some masturbation material, games offer piss-poor value for the money. For the price of one game, you could get a month's membership at a premium sex site, and the site will have more... ahem... "replay value". And that's already assuming that you're desperate enough to pay for that. There are plenty of sites that can fill your need for porn for no more than your ISP bill. I'd even give you a few links, but I'm sure you can google on your own.

Let me say that I'm not even anti-pornography or anything. But I wouldn't waste my money on a porn game anyway. Unless you're talking the small niche of hentai- or furry-fetishists, there's just nothing in a crude 3D model that doesn't look better on a real woman. And again, you can stare at a photo or movie of the latter for a lot less money, or no money at all.

So, seriously, the mind boggles when I see yet another idiot publisher betting it all on sex appeal, sometimes even at the risk of alienating their core market demographic. WTF is the rationale there? "You know, old chap, I bet noone knows how to find porn on the internet. I bet they're just starving to pay 50$ to see the heroine's pixelated polygonal ass in a thong, because otherwise they wouldn't find any." Stupid.

2. Because you're targetting the wrong demographic. If you want to sell smut to teenagers, you're gonna have to slip it past their parents. Plus, past the government and youth protection organizations and whatever, who _will_ slap it with an Adult Only rating and require some ID.

And past those teenagers themselves who might figure out that smuggling a porn magazine into their room is safer than playing "Mario's Anal Adventures: Peach Takes A Reaming" on the family TV in the living room. Or that quickly going to a web site while mom is out shopping, is safer than having to find a good answer to "oh, you're back from the game shop. Did you buy anything interesting?" or "uh, what's this Bukkake Fantasy 7 entry in the Start menu?"

So it's going for the entirely wrong age segment. The age where they're dumb enough and think with their gonads is the age where they don't also have all that freedom. And later some get a life, and some start at least being able to do the maths I've described at point 1, because it's their money they're blowing for a change.

3. Because appealing to a minority is no longer enough to cover a major game's development. You may still be able to pay for a cheap 2D hentai game out of it, but not for Quake 4.

There's a reason why you keep hearing about trying to appeal to female gamers and casual gamers and even retired senior-citizen gamers nowadays. Because the industry increasingly needs their money to survive.

Back in the days of Pong it didn't really matter. If you sold 1000 copies of a game you've made in a month, you could proclaim it a huge success and had actually made a tidy profit. So an industry which started with a 50-50 gender distribution among gamers, and they knew it, could easily afford to discard half the market, and focus on making whatever the horny immature lonely programmers wanted to code. It turned into an industry by lonely nerds for lonely nerds, but there was no loss in that anyway, since you still easily got the 1000 or even 10,000 buyers you needed in that niche.

But nowadays with game development costs being what they are, that's no longer enough. That's why everyone from Microsoft to Sony to EA suddenly proclaims their undying love and dedication to female gamers and casual gamers. Because having a game like The Sims which sold to a helluva lot of women (and to a helluva lot of casual gamer dads too) is what makes a profit, while being pegged into the hole of games _only_ for horny 16 year olds might as well make you a loss. (Most games nowadays make a loss, and the publisher uses the games who sell well to basically subsidize those who didn't.)

Of course, after a whole generation of "chicks don't play games" mentality and focusing only on horny 16 year old males, noone really knows how to even start about making a game for anyone else. But that's another story for another time.