The Sex Pixels

In 1982, an Atari 2600 game called Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em featured a masturbating male on a downtown rooftop, with ravenous, pixelated women waiting open-mouthed in the street below. Twenty-five years later, we’re still waiting for the sexual revolution in gaming. Heather Chaplin discovers that if America can be more like Norway, Germany, and Japan, that day may soon be here.
Illustration by Greg Horn

Although its life span was short, Boong-Ga Boong-Ga wasn’t a videogame you soon forgot. It was an arcade game featuring kancho, after all, which is Japanese slang for anal probing. The game’s controller was shaped like a big fist with one finger stuck up in the air, and the goal was to shove that finger up the ass of the people who ‘make your life miserable.’ Sexual proclivities aside, Boong-Ga Boong-Ga seemed to perfectly marry videogame technology and libidinous perversion.

Not long ago, it would’ve been easy to imagine retailer shelves bulging with Boong-Ga Boong-Ga spin-offs. By all rights, sex and games should be a match made in virtual heaven. You’d think that hooking up the two leisure pursuits would be an interactive medium just waiting to be exploited. America is among the biggest consumers of porn worldwide ’spending as much as $13 billion annually on pornographic merchandise’ and the industry continues to explode online. So why don’t we have more sex in our video games? Where is the Halo of ferocious fornication? Will there ever be an EA After Dark?

Twenty years ago, it appeared that America might catch on and we’d all be swinging in virtual sex clubs, neck-deep in possible partners, joysticks in hand. Back then, videogames were still a Wild West frontier of renegade programmers and self-made publishers, some of whom attempted to make sexually active videogames. In the early eighties, Softporn Adventure from Sierra Entertainment featured a cover shot of a Macintosh and three naked women in a hot tub being served champagne. And for the Atari 2600, there was the graphic and bizarre Custer’s Revenge and Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em. Granted, both of those are still considered among the worst games ever made, but at least they were a start; or so it seemed. But today, when it comes to turning out racy new titles, the U.S. lags behind pixel pushers in Germany and Norway and, not surprisingly, even farther behind Japan. This winter, an Oslo-based company is due to release the most explicit mainstream massively multiplayer game ever with its hot-blooded take on the Conan the Barbarian saga, Age of Conan.

In many ways, American developers are still struggling against a two-decade-old crackdown on sex games. After the Entertainment Software Rating Board was established in the early nineties, Wal-Mart and Best Buy, among others, refused to carry adult titles. Console companies developed proprietary chips, making it impossible for games to be created without their approval. In 1996, the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association, which includes all the major retail chains, refused to carry unrated games and products that had been given an Adult Only rating by the ESRB. But in the past few years, a handful of dirty-minded software slingers are once again happily dipping a toe into the potentially vast pool of porno gaming.

Initially, the adult-entertainment industry was excited about interactive pornography. The math, however, quickly soured the idea for all but the most ambitious producers. The average cost of a porn film is about $10,000, with the most expensive topping out at around $250,000. A videogame, on the other hand, costs a minimum of $3 million to $5 million to produce. Add this to the limited and tightly controlled distribution channels for both products and you start to see the problem.

Still, some Internet entrepreneurs are undaunted. Though most hard-core players are less than thrilled by them, the Flash games found on such Websites as SexyFuckGames.com, WetPussyGames.com, and Adult-Games-Zone.com at least attempt to arouse. But these efforts offer almost no game play, and when they do, you’ll wish they didn’t. In this realm, a typical scene has you bending a schoolgirl over, then scrolling the mouse to thrust your penis in and out of her backside as animated juice dribbles down her legs and her face flushes red. An orgasm is represented by a bar filling up from left to right at the top of the screen. Virtual postcoital cigarettes are hardly needed.

The online Flash games that try to do more can be maddeningly frustrating. In SimGirlDNA on FuckGames.com, you have 100 days (a minute in game time) to build up enough experience points to get the girl. You complete small tasks to inflate your bank account, charm, and physical strength until you can buy her enough presents that she’ll agree to date you. So enlightened! Then you have to remember all the little things she told you (her favorite band, where her father works, her phone number) to get farther than a dinner date. By the time the meal is over, you’ll be ready to hit the hay ‘alone. In Don’t Wake Her, you attempt to have sex with your sleeping girlfriend, but it’s almost impossible to remove her covers without her eyes popping open and her asking just what you think you’re doing. The answer, sadly, is not much. And in Naughty Doctor, it can take an hour of mouse work to try to separate your squirming patient’s legs and get more than an uninspired ‘ah’ out of her.

Other would-be sex-game moguls have done better. Three years ago, Brad Abram was working for a run-of-the-mill technology company in Vancouver. One of the tools he sold was a game engine—the software that powers the action. Wanting to break out on his own, Abram started thinking about what else that engine could do. Today, Abram is chief executive of Stream 3D Multimedia, Inc., the creators of Virtually Jenna, Sex Villa, and 3D Gay Villa—three downloadable sex games based on that initial game engine (which was originally meant to be a flight simulator).

Virtually Jenna (yes, that Jenna) allows users to play with the porn queen and a bevy of “friendsâ€? as if she were a movable fuck doll. In story mode, Jenna pisses off an eighteenth-century duchess by crashing her party and has to placate the lady of the manor by dropping to her knees and fellating the nearest partygoer. Other scenarios: Jenna gets horny in the office; Jenna causes trouble on a pirate ship and must be punished. Those with time constraints can simply choose a location and get right to work. There are ‘anal bunnies’ and dildos to insert, free floating fingers for her to suck, and whips and paddles. The game also has an extensive customization section where you can choose breast and nipple size, eye color, eyebrow shape, and hairstyle. It also has a new feature of which Abram is particularly proud: ‘pimp the pussy,’ which lets you customize the size, shape, and color of Jenna’s vaginal lips.The reason gamers don’t go for this title is that there’s not much to do once you customize Jenna and her friends and pick your position. You click on a series of icons to choose missionary position, sixty-nine, or doggie-style; then Jenna and her partner go at it. There’s no actual manipulating of the figures within the confines of the chosen positions. There’s also no winning or losing per se, although you can collect dollars for bringing your characters to orgasm, which you then spend on gear like French maid or S&M outfits for Jenna and her crew.

The truth is, virtual boot knocking, just like in the real world, offers the kind of sex you want; it’s just a matter of finding the community engaging in it. The most exciting sex action happening in American games can be found in massively multiplayer online worlds. Mainstream MMOs, such as World of Warcraft, or even single-player virtual-world-like games, such as The Sims 2, have entire communities built around participant-created pornographic game play. There are Websites dedicated to nude ’skins,’ playermade modifications of games With these skins, you can turn your leather-jerkin-clad elf into a nude elf, or your happily married Sim into a chronically masturbating secret S&M fan. Second Life has a flourishing sex industry, and you don’t even need to find skins if you want to trot around flapping in the pixelated breeze. Since everything is created by players, things like sex clubs and dildo-enhanced chairs proliferate.

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