The Sex Pixels

The most successful MMO designed specifically for sexually explicit purposes is Red Light Center. This past September, with virtually zero press coverage, Red Light Center surpassed Second Life in terms of active users, with an astounding 600,000 members. In Red Light Center, players can smoke virtual pot, drink virtual booze, and engage in sex acts that are still illegal in some states. Should you choose to, you can shed your clothes and morph into a masked, whip-wielding dominatrix, beat a naked character until she collapses in a heap, then fuck her lights out. (There’s also a European version called Sin City that’s built on the same engine and operated out of Germany.)The game’s creator, Brian Shuster, points out that RLC is not just about quickies. Rather, he says, it’s about human interaction and connection. Game etiquette, just like real-life etiquette, considers it bad form to greet someone with ‘Want to fuck?’

“The new users come in and try that and other members say, ‘We don’t do that here,’ Shuster notes. “They tell them, ‘If you just want to get laid, go to the bordello or hire a professional [the game has working girls], or go learn some manners and learn how to connect with people.” It’s possible to run around the streets naked, but you’d be a pariah. Don’t get me wrong. We have sex in the game, and the sex is wonderful, and for a couple of dollars your avatar can have sex for an hour in an alley; but the much larger picture is that people use this place to socialize, to connect. And when you connect, the normal outgrowth of that is, you want to express yourself sexually.”

Red Light Center is an open world of dance clubs, underwater parks, bordellos, and fetish zones in which you build an avatar and roam around engaging with other avatars. And Shuster is right, if you’re looking for an easy lay and you don’t want to employ a call girl, getting screwed can be as difficult and complicated as it is in the real world. (On the other hand, approach a call girl and mention your taste, and, faster than you can unbutton your trousers, she’ll be stripped and performing acts for which words don’t yet exist. And you won’t get busted.)Red Light Center cost Shuster more than $10 million to develop with money he made from an Internet porn site called Xpix in the mid-1990s. The main reason it cost so much to make is that creating realistic-looking virtual sex is not easy. In modern videogames, human motion is created through very expensive advanced motion-capture systems. The technology has progressed to the point where a single body movement can be captured fairly accurately and fluidly. But when there’s more than one body involved, things get tricky.

In motion capture, real-life actors wear full bodysuits covered with reflectors that act as points of reference for computerized 3-D modeling. When two people are banging around in these suits, they block each other’s reflectors, sending the confused computer into a tailspin, which leads to blanks in the animation and causes limbs to float freely or move directly through other objects. Shuster, who hired a group of professional porn actors to capture the sexual acts he wanted for Red Light Center, found himself bumping up against this problem again and again.

“We’ve spent millions doing motion capture and creating new software to get the sex right in this game” he says. “The faces, the bodies, the genitals’ obviously we spent a lot of time on the genitals. To deliver highly realistic avatar sex requires an enormous investment and has no real known outcome. And the game companies, you know, they’re not that motivated to set up motion-caption rigs to capture porn stars fucking. That takes a lot of dedication.”

The dedication shows’ RLC’s avatars move with a fluidity that’s remarkable by modern game standards. Shuster’s priorities are clear: While the slaying of a three-headed monster may be rendered with awesome realism in World of Warcraft, the swaying hips of a female avatar in Red Light Center’ even the subtle movements of her shoulders or the way she tosses her hair are sensually realistic, almost better than the real thing. Brad Abram of Virtually Jenna had similar challenges to overcome. “Come on” he says. “Who’s ever gone in there and modeled a pussy?” Despite this level of commitment, yes, Abram and his team looked at plenty of real anatomy to model Jenna’s muff for three years running, Virtually Jenna has been denied access to the mother of all American videogame trade shows, the Electronics Entertainment Expo, known as E3.

While the U.S produces only a handful of sex-based games, roughly 75 percent of all videogames sold in Japan are what the rest of the world calls hentai games’ or, alternately, dating sims; ero-games; ren’ai (romance) games; and bishojo (pretty girls) games. (Note: Since hentai is the Japanese word for pervert, don’t use the term while kink shopping in Japan; it’s considered an insult.) Not surprisingly for a nation famous for its love of fetishes, there are more subgenres within the Japanese porn game industry than in all other countries combined. Whereas no major retailer in America would carry Grand Theft Auto after the hot-coffee hooker-humping scandal, Japanese consumer-electronics retailers like LaOX devote entire floors to hentai (okay, it’s the basement, but still). Neighborhoods like Akihabara, the world’s consumer-electronics mecca, are filled with posters advertising the games, and really successful hentai action often gets cleaned up and turned into mainstream movies, TV shows, and comic books. About 50 hentai titles are made every month; a hit can sell millions of copies.

The typical hentai game involves a male protagonist, rarely seen, who acts as narrator. Sometimes just the tip of his penis is shown, and sometimes he has no package at all (known as ‘invisible penis syndrome’). Usually, he has a harem of young girls whose “loveâ€? he must win. The stories are intricate, filled with backstory, multiple characters, and issues of life and death—tears flow freely, as do other bodily fluids. Visually, its all big eyes and long legs, tittering girls, and lots and lots of school uniforms.

Hentai is narrative-driven, with stories told through anime stills. And there is a story for almost anyone. There are ‘molester simulations’ that take place on crowded subway cars (this is the country, after all, where they run special women-only subway cars during rush hour because unwanted real-life fondling is such a problem). There’s also yaoi, which is boy-on-boy action, and is particularly popular among young women; ‘pinnacle,’ which involves tentacled monsters doing terrible things to their victims; a sex-crime series called Battlerape; and an entire genre dedicated to stalking before committing a sex crime. Ying-yang is when gender gets mixed up’ an experiment goes wrong in science class, the protagonist turns female, his girlfriend breaks up with him, but all the guys in school thinks he’s really hot. Got that? Funtari is a sub-category of ying-yang and translates loosely into dick-girl. It’s about young women who, for some reason, have enormous schlongs.

“Virtually Jenna is like walking into your bedroom and there’s a guy lying on your bed naked with a hard-on,” says Brenda Brathwaite, author of Sex in Video Games. “The hentai games are all about role-playing and delayed gratification.”

Delayed gratification; a meaningful phrase when it comes to sex and the gamers who want it. Even Hal Halpin, who helped broker the deal between the merchants’ association and the ratings board in 1996, is now advocating for retailers to reconsider that resolution, and thus acknowledge the maturing gaming crowd.

Norway’s Funcom is following that development closely. The 15-year-old company that made the critically praised sciencefiction adventure game The Longest Journey has Age of Conan due out in March; it’s an MMO based on the same barbarian’s tale that brought Arnold Schwarzenegger to the masses. “Hyboria is a brutal world,” Funcom’s Jorgen Tharalsden boasted about Conan’s universe at last summer’s E3. “It’s savage and it’s sexy. This is a mature game.”

Conan has some serious screwing in it, and Funcom is toying with the idea of using sex as a way to strengthen characters. But the threat of an Adults Only rating, and a torrent of angry letters from both Christian groups and gamers who say their wives won’t let them engage in hard-core action, leaves Tharalsden unsure how it will all play out. And Tharalsden is equally terrified of the German ratings board, Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle, which is known for being as strict about violent content as the U.S. is about sex.

In a preemptive strike in the fight, Funcom is developing a technology to adjust the MMO, country by country, depending on the rating they get from the seven censorship boards around the world; a wild new idea in the world of MMOs. Five years and many millions of dollars of Conan work later, the controversy has rendered Tharalsden nonplussed in the run up to debuting the game. “I come from a culture where sex isn’t such a taboo,” the Norwegian says. “So really, I don’t get what all the fuss is about. The average age of an MMO player is 27 now; if they don’t know about sex at this point, well, I feel bad for them. They’re missing out.”

Heather Chaplin has written for the New York Times, GQ, and Details, and does commentary on videogame culture for NPR. She is the coauthor of the videogame history Smartbomb.

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