You would think that video games and pornography would be peanut butter and chocolate but the few efforts that have been made have been underwhelming. 30 Rock made it a plot point in one of its episodes.
Porn and video games have both grown in importance economically and culturally. They tend to be of greatest interest to young men who also tend to be innovators.They’re both very visuals-based light entertainment.
So, why haven’t we seen porn and video games combined in more succesful ways than peel-a-woman blackjack, make your own (porn) adventures text games and some very strange and disturbing Japanese stuff?
Is it because porn gaming would need photorealistic graphics and perfect animation to avoid the uncanny valley? There’s a fair amount of non-interactive porn which doesn’t involve photorealistic images and perfect animation.
So, why haven’t we seen more it to a significant extent? If we do in the future, what will it depend on?
Well, I’ve certainly run across plenty of sex-themed mods for various games. Ranging from simple nudity mods, have-sex-with-anyone mods, sex-magic mods (including a summon-sex-tentacles mod for Oblivion as I recall), run-a-prostitution-ring mods, and more.
It’s probably the same reason you don’t see R-rated blockbusters. People who fund things that cost a lot of money - like AAA video games or really spectacular movies - don’t want to cut themselves off from the broader customer base that is their best chance of breaking even.
For the same reason most pornos don’t t bother with things like plot or substance. Porn only needs to hold your attention long enough for you to… get your jollies. Video games aren’t successful unless they can consistently maintain your attention for long periods of time over multiple sessions. They’re just not compatible.
Well, porn games are huge in Japan but they don’t really export them much. Most of them are visual novels though that might or might not fit into your definition of a game. If you want western stuff, there’s some hobbyists making their own mostly on Flash or RPG Maker but yeah, no big commercial stuff. Bonetown and Bonecraft, maybe.
Far from the only problem, but one problem is that most video games don’t have nearly detailed enough models of people. Yeah, a person in a video game can look good, but the way it interacts with its environment is very simple. By way of example: Start up any first-person shooter where you wield a long gun. Back up as far as you can into a wall, then turn around on the spot. If you tried that in real life, your gun would smack into the wall, but it’s not an issue in the game. For purposes of what collides with what, most games treat a person and whatever they’re holding as just a vertical cylinder.
But now consider something as simple as a hug. To get a hug, you need two people wrapping their arms around each other, but you also don’t want one person’s hand to pass through the other’s shoulder, or anything like that. At the least, you’d need to represent the torso as an oblong shape and each arm as a pair of cylinders that can change their orientation, and that still wouldn’t be a very detailed model (you’d end up either with some parts not able to quite contact each other, or some parts able to overlap a little). Now scale that up with hands (including fingers), legs, feet, heads, breasts, genitals, and various orifices. It can be done, but it’s a lot harder than what most games do, and I’m not sure if consumer computers can even do it real-time.
Right- different expectations of gameplay. While hentai gamers may be well disposed to choose-your-adventure type visual novels, where the gameplay is based on decision points, a Western audience would expect something more… actively participative. Controlling what body part or object they insert where in the other character, how fast and from what direction, and that sort of thing. And though there’s a lot of still-picture 3D CG porn around, it’s not trivial to turn it into a game for all the reasons **Chronos **indicates. Real moving living beings are a pain to simulate.
I must admit, the idea of a Kinect-controlled version of porn gaming makes for some interesting scenes in the room and I imagine a Wii-controlled one would lead to yet more object-dislodgement tales from the ER…
If you look around online, there’s a fair number of text adventure porn games being made now.
Of particular note (if you’re into the kinds of stuff Evil Captor is) is Slave Maker v3, which cribs art from all over the 'net (but mostly hentai) and is a fairly in-depth simulator game featuring massive amounts of copyright violation- I mean fanfiction. BDSM isn’t really my thing and the game seemed like way too much busywork imho, but it seemed well-made, so if your into that kind of thing…
And admittedly a bit on the pathetic side, but there’s apparently a whole ton of porn animated flash games over on Newgrounds. The only game like that I’ve tried is Super Deepthroat (not on Newgrounds AFAIK), which is exactly what it sounds like (you set up the scene & participants, control the motions, how it… ends, etc), with a fully customizable (but only female) blower and a fairly customizable (and either gender via strap-ons) receiver. It comes with preset models for females from a wide variety of anime &/or videogame series, and a wide range of clothing options.
I think that’s a good part of it. You can either have non-interactive “video novel” style sex where you’re watching rather than participating or very clunky, inelegant active participation that’s probably more embarrassing to be a part of in than erotic.
I’m suddenly reminded of Seven Sins, a terrible “Sims” style game where you try and seduce women and emulate copulation with exciting mini-games such as hovering your cursor over moving erogenous zones.
As others noted, it seems like a weird thing to shoe-horn into a game anyway. If I want to get my rocks off, I wouldn’t want to slog through game play not directly related to the main event. But a direct “interactive aid” doesn’t seem worth it by itself either.
Similar thread from 2004
Occasionally I find myself wishing for R- or X-rated casual games to play, just because I think it’d be perversely amusing to play, say, a hidden-object game in which the objects were naughty, or an adventure game set in a bordello, or something like that. I suspect that part of the problem is that many of the sources that sell casual games don’t have an age-restriction mechanism they can use.
Uncanny Valley
Basically people like and respond positively to things the more they look real, especially representations of other people. Research shows an almost straight line graph. The more realistic, the better people like something. But interestingly there is a huge dip, right before you get to a hyper real representation. At this point things are almost perfect, but there is something “uncannily” wrong, and people are repulsed by this almost right representation.
The people I know who play video games play for hours at a time. Most of them wouldn’t be too keen on nonstop porn action the entire time. Given that some of them are actively giving up opportunities to have actual sex with actual people in order to play their games, porn is really not on their minds.
