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I Was Young And I Needed The Money

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the oh-richard dept.

The Escapist this week is running a great article by Richard Bartle entitled I Was Young And I Needed The Money. He doles out the sordid details of his experience developing a never-released sexy text MMOG. From the article: "All we required was some fiendish mind-control system to persuade people to play a text game when they really wanted to play EverQuest. So, that would be sex, then. I'd written a pitch for a sex MUD about five years earlier, but the funding fell through. Now was the time to dust it off! The thing is, sex in a text world has three things going for it that sex in a graphics world doesn't ... "

5 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Before the Karma Whores get here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative
    The 3 things are: (for the lazy)

    1.It's freeform. You don't have to motion-capture every position in the Kama Sutra and beyond, because people can animate it themselves using words.

    2.It's legal. You can write about antics that you would be jailed for depicting visually. The word is pornography, not pornotexty.

    3.For a basic sex game to work, you need comparable numbers of both men and women. A female-friendly game, by virtue of its having women in it, is male-friendly; therefore, you need to attract women. And hey, guess what? Study after study has shown that, in general, women prefer words to pictures - especially when it comes to sexual fantasizing.

  2. Re:When will they learn the web is not a postcard? by snuf23 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Agreed. Everytime they run an Escapist article someone posts a response like yours. At least they do have a text link on the page.

    --
    Sometimes my arms bend back.
  3. Re:When will they learn the web is not a postcard? by 4D6963 · · Score: 2, Informative
    I wonder when idiot web designers will stop trying to make the web look like a postcard instead of a text document.

    Personally the only thing that disturbs me about this site is the naked dude on the second page. Had to resize my browser window to get him out of my sight while reading the text.

    --
    You just got troll'd!
  4. Re:Textual by LordEd · · Score: 2, Informative

    Here's what this refers to in case you don't know.

  5. Re:Was this freeform by Jearil · · Score: 2, Informative

    Now anyone know how to grind a really big dick?

    No, but I think I have a very helpful email in my inbox. Let me forward it to you :)