Slashdot Mirror
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 ... "
Has been around for ages. Where was he hiding when MU* games were created. I'm pretty sure the first line ever said in a MUD is "hey, cool, it's working!" The second: "Wanna fuck?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"The thing is, sex in a text world has three things going for it that sex in a graphics world doesn't ... "
Man am I waiting on the punchline for this!
Funny, when reading the title I thought it was an RPG about being a prostitute. It would be interesting for a change.
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.
Anyone else get to this line and laugh uncontrollably for five minutes straight?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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.
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.]
We live, as we dream -- alone....
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!
"I put on my robe and wizard hat"
I'm wondering if that article is some elaborate form of trolling, or what. Even _if_ someone bought a game just to "cyber" (sad as it may be), if I put on my thinking cap and try to think about it with a straight face, it seems like a collection of bad ideas and missing the point by a mile.
E.g., his #1 reason for text-based sex is that it's free form... then he mentions implementing it as a modification of the combat system. WTF? There goes "free form" right out the window.
E.g., his #3 reason is that women prefer their sex in text form. Yes, that means novels and stories, not some automatized spam. I'm not sure if even any guy would actually get off on replacing MUD combat with some spam of "You thrust your tool in." and "You pull your tool out." If anything, just thinking about some automated macro there seems to me a major turn off.
Also I don't know what studies he's read there, because all that _I've_ read points at women being put off by "R U A GRL??? WANNA CYBER???" kids in online games. It pops up again and again as the reason why they're playing a male character.
(Oh, yes, there are women playing online games all right. But the funny thing is, the naked elf chick dancing in the Stormwind fountain probably isn't a RL woman. Chances are higher that the dwarf male with the beard down to his knees or the massive tauren male with a huge mallet are the RL women.)
Basically I can hardly believe that this is the same guy who had the insight to describe the types of MUD players, or create the first MUD in the first place. Oh yes, I can believe that he's seen plenty of cybering on his MUD. Can give one the idea of just making a game around that. But then, didn't they have meetings of MUD players and such? Might give one suspicions when the only ones that show up and are female (again, yes, they did exist) are the ones who weren't playing a virtual prostitute.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A note for the tagging beta people: I suggest you need a new tag called "sex-bad-violence-good". This article should be tagged with it, along with yesterday's one about the scandalous "sex scenes" in Oblivion, the shocking hot coffee mod etc. It's such a huge issue. It's the elephant in the living room of games culture. Or maybe there are two elephants. And God knows what they're doing together, but you better not make a game out of it.
... someone is creating a new IRC channel... right???