I Was Young And I Needed The Money

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 ... "

Comments

Re:When will they learn the web is not a postcard?

[macshit]

Yup. In fact with my browser and fonts, it's completely unreadable (half the text overflows the white box and ends up displayed as black on dark blue...).

I suppose it probably displays properly in Internet Explorer if you happen to have exactly the same settings as the page designer ("but, but, it worked for me!!").

OTOH, the page does have a convenient "text" button to bypass the page designer's idiocies. [A lot of sites don't seem to have even that.]

Was this freeform

[SmallFurryCreature]

I get the idea from his description of some game mechanics that this was NOT just a mud with cybersex. Rather that the sex was a game mechanic. He does after all talk about how he adopted the combat system.

So it would be far more then just chatting "wanna fuck". You would actuallly have to worry about stats. Probably for the male of making sure you stimulate her enough that you don't come to fast. Wonder if male players are disconnected within a few minutes of climax?

It sounds like he was trying for way more then just another adult chatroom. Could have been intresting BUT hard to sell indeed.

Companies got very weird attitudes to sex. Just check phone companies and how they handle porn. THey are happy to rake in the cash from phonesex lines and mobile porn sites but nobody wants to be the assigned to handle them.

But all is not lost. Read the recent article of upcoming MMO's. Naughty America is sex based and I remember another story about an MMO set in London that has sex as well.

I just hope that they indeed have the whole sex/relationship put in as game mechanics. If it is just freeform sex I am gonna suck at it as bad is in real life. Now anyone know how to grind a really big dick?