Sex on the Second Day

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!

Comments

[Westacular]

Well, he wasn't quite talking to you -- the game certainly made it seem that way, but the ending (assuming you're talking about Sands of Time) revealed that he had been talking to the princess the entire time.

[dirtyword]

the problem with this is that the game industry is much better at drawing/modelling sexy people than it is at developing characters. in general, an emotional connection to a character is much harder for a designer or a player to acheive, and so it is hard to find.

[T. Holbrook Walker]

Emotional attachment to characters is often hard to achieve in games because:

1. the level of interaction with non-player characters is limited, and the NPC responses to those interactions is even more limited (where is my FPS hug button for Half Life Episode 1?); and

2. cutscenes tend to miss the emotional point entirely (one reason why there aren't a lot of people who bounce between movies and gaming).

Of course, on rare occasions it has been done properly before (Shadow of the Colossus springs to mind), but I have yet to see this done in a sexually-themed game or even a game with romantic elements.

Hmm, the more I think about this, the more I'd like to give it a try if I ever leave engineering for the gaming industry. I mean, we're mostly adults that play games now anyway, right?

[kuwang]

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