Just where on earth does Brandon find these? This is a real gem. You play, apparently, as a little octopus collecting panties - but the real beauty of the game is that the backgrounds are all classic Japanese erotic art, a genre known as Shunga (literally, spring art - because love strikes in the springtime!) - but featuring octopussy-love, which is a genre all its own. Check it out.

My first thought was, how the hell can you write this story and not mention the very famous RealDoll, which is an American product?

Because either the writer didn't know about them - which indicates a lack of simple Googling - or, more likely, because the story is better if it's cast as "Look how weird/sad/lonely/perverted Japanese man are - aren't we glad we're not like that?" In which case it may have been the editor who excised the writer's sentences about RealDoll. I guess "Some Men Like Sex Dolls" is not much of a story.

Gross. MORE...

It must be spring, because in California at least, the sun's out, women are weaing diaphonaous skirts and high-heeled sandals, and the New York times is running stories about: the nature of sexual desire, the mystery of sexuality, and sexual selection.

Why do we call dating a "game"? Well, for one there are rules of play, both culturally derived (men should always at leaast offer to pay for dinner) as well as biologically mandated (the flash of the palm or the touching of the hair unconcsiously signals interest.) Understanding the interplay of those rules, however, is complicated, although as the articles referenced above prove, researchers have not stopped trying to read the code of human sexuality and desire.

For some reason (perhaps just feeling the spring blooming all around me like everyone else?) these topics have been on my mind frequently as well the past few days. What is the code of desire? How do we figure it out? How do we proceed, once we have?

Love is a game, a dance, because there is also pleasure in it. That first meeting, that flush of attraction, the flirting - those moments are all tiny rewards that make you want to keep playing. I know some people say they hate dating. I don't understand that. I love meeting new people and exploring them, as I do in games. Perhaps it's the difference between explorative play and goal-oriented play?

But what if we do figure it all out? What if a scientist can tell me, here, this is the specific range of pheromones you respond to; and having analyzed your dating history extensively, the perfect mate for you is between 5'10" and 6'2", has a BA, plays music, and enjoys cooking. That's what, presumably, sites like eHarmony try to do. What would I do with this information? I'm not sure.

Because it thrills me how unpredictable desire is. Just when I think I have it figured out, something will blindside me like a lightening bolt out of the sky. No action need be taken, necessarily; just feel it, know you're alive, and enjoy it. Explore the landscape of your own heart.

This is a long overdue entry, but I've still been thinking about last week's Sex in Videogames Conference. My judgement in the last post was hasty - it was only the first day after all, and on the second day, the gathering seemed to hit its stride. The initial awkwardness faded, and a comfortable confidence set in. It was such a small group of people after all - we can talk intimately about intimate subjects that way, no?

The best talk of the second day was Sheri Graner Ray's lecture on designing adult-oriented videogames with a female audience in mind. Her point was about the different ways men and women receive physiological responses from stimuli: for most men, the visual image does the trick. For most women, an emotional connection does it. So you could effectively market BloodRayne to men by stripping her down in Playboy, but for women, Graner Ray suggested putting a profile of Prince of Persia in Seventeen alongside a picture of him walking his horse along a beach.

I thought this example was particularly pertinent because, well, the Prince is a hottie. And I've always loved him. And I got a thrill out of the fact that he was talking to me, in the game. "Shall I go on?" he would say softly, so concerned and mindful of my needs. How often does that happen in a videogame?

Anyway, I'm working on a video report of the conference that should be up in the next few days. Um, when I have time to finish it!

Somehow, the talks I saw at the Sex in Videogames conference managed to. I'm not sure if it was just the monotonous speakers or the over-simplistic presentation, but what should have been hotly provocative and challenging was a big snoozefest - at least, the first day was. Brenda Brathwaite gave a great opening lecture and then it all sort of...ran out of steam.

Let me emphasize that I'm fully behind in general and sex in videogames. I may not play much Virtual Hotties 2, but I fully support the idea of it. I do want more sex in mainstream games, too. I've been known to ... experiment in online environments, although I haven't ever had a full-on cyber-affair. So I am eager to explore these topics, hear what other people think, what they've discovered; I want to be challanged and stimulated.

Maybe the problem is that talking about sex is much more boring than doing it? Maybe they should just have monitors and PCs set up with various sexy software running and just let us explore?

I'm going back in today - maybe there will be some interesting revelations.

Brenda Brathwaite's talk this morning was a shot of espresso to start off the conference. She's a relaxed, funny speaker who isn't afraid to take a tangent or a stand. She began with an overview of the important moments of the year, both good and bad: Hot Coffee (today, she noted, is the one-year-anniversary of the controversy), legislation, the GLBT WoW Incident; on the positive side, the formation of the IGDA Sex SIG and the growth of MMOEGs (that's Massively Multiplayer Online Erotic Games of course.)

There's a lot more to the talk and I'll be interviewing her later, but after the hour I was left wondering something. The game industry has tried so hard to insist that violent videogames do no make people feel violent; how do we reconcile that message with trying to make sex games that make people feel sexy?

The reason that violent videogames don't make me necessarily feel violent is because shooting enemies becomes merely a game mechanic after a while, not unlike pushing crates or whacking a mole on the head or fitting the right block into a stacked pattern; so how do we prevent sex from being merely an empty mechanic?

This goes back to the much broader question of how we can make people feel with games the way we can with films and books. But as those media have taught us, simply having a sex scene is not enough - it must be a good, compelling sex scene. Most Hollywood sex is pretty unerotic to me; to be truly hot, there has to be something - special, I'm not sure how to define it.

Hmm, I'm going to have to think about truly hot moments in film history for a moment, and for that I think I'm going to need some coffee. More later.

Been meaning to post this for awhile (Mike's posts keep reminding me), but here's a comprehensive list of the things you can do in GTA (all of them) and Sims (all of them) that no lawyers, Senators, or parents took a legal stand against before Hot Coffee. Yes, there were a lot of complaints, and "investigations," but nothing was ever done about them. Put ones I've missed in the comments and I'll try and add them back to this list.

What's okay in GTA (the series) for seventeen year olds:

Assault with a deadly weapon.
Battery
Murder
Assassination
Vehicular homicide/manslaughter
Grand theft auto (duh)
Sex with prostitutes (tastefully hidden!)
Racketeering
Drug trafficking

What's not okay in GTA (the series) for seventeen year olds:

Consentual softcore sex between two adults, one of which is fully clothed.

Pointless? Cheap? Oh yes. Kotaku furthers the discussion.

(Insert article about what this says about PSP/women/gaming/sex/society.)

The cleverly named Slashdong.org has a poster who has come up with a way to mod an Xbox controller with a vibrator, essentially by tapping the power supply for the controller vibrator and shunting it into the battery pack of an actual vibrator. Perhaps not quite as sleek as the authentic Rez Trance Vibrator, but if you don't have a PS2, and you feel comfortable with a soldering iron, hey why not?

Star-crossed Animal Crossing lovers unite! A quirky article over at IGN explains how one clever guy asked his girlfriend to marry him on Valentine's Day using everyone's favorite collecting game.

I've watched a lot of porn in my day, enough so that it's gotten just a little boring. Maybe you have to be male to appreciate the super-genital close-up cam? Or just a fetishist? What I liked about porn was, and I know this makes me a stereotypical girl, the story. The situations the girls would get themselves into - oh my! The anticipation, the (sometimes) danger of seduction - but so few films focus on those aspects. In any case I admit I'd grown a bit disenchanted with the genre.

And then I discovered the Voyeur series. Needless to say continuing to read this will take you into very un-worksafe territory.

This game looks CRAZY. I'm sure there have been a lot of other online worlds similar to Sociolotron in theme, and certainly the Sims Online was sometimes put to, er, uses the designers may not have anticipated, but this is the first dedicated adult game I've seen with this level of graphic (and I do mean graphic) sophistication.

We finally have our bona-fide porn of videogames*. That's so much better than the airbrushed soft-core disguised under a thin veneer of "gameplay". This is just pure fetish fantasy come to life, a raunchy chat room with costumes.

I am so there.

*I should add, in the U.S. Japan, of course, has been producing porny games for quite a while. But the ones I've seen have been pretty lame with almost no real interactivity.