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    In the mindshare of the American mainstream, video games are the realm of boys. Not men, not girls, certainly not women. Just boys. They're what you buy your ten-year-old for his birthday so he'll stop yelling at every video-game commercial that comes on. They're an alternative to the ball pits at Chuck E. Cheese.
        There was a time where this was inarguable: during the mid-'80s, Nintendo reigned supreme and the core demographic age of gamers ranged fairly low. Today, according to the Entertainment Software Association, the average gamer is thirty years old, and 43% of gamers are women. Many women gamers are also designers, and they're leading the way into new realms of sexual exploration. "Heavenly Bodies, Rapture Online, Spend the Night and at least two other games in development have or have had women on the team in positions of leadership," says game designer Brenda Brathwaite. If anyone knows about sex in games, it's her.
        Brathwaite, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of three, is a twenty-three-year veteran of the video-game industry, an architect of such award-winning titles as Wizardry (an eight-part fantasy role-playing game) and Jagged Alliance (a groundbreaking strategy game). She is also the chair of the International Game Development Association's (IGDA) Sex In Games Special Interest Group, a forum of game publishers, designers, developers and players.

    promotion

        In August, Brathwaite helped organize the 2005 Women's Games Conference in Austin, which included seminars like "Increasing Market Share: The Marketing of Games to Women," "What Women Want" and "Recruitment and Retention of Women in the Game Industry." Hundreds of women (and many men), from pink-haired to business-suited (and sometimes both), were in attendance.
        In Brathwaite's seminar, "Sex in Games," she led a standing-room-only audience through gaming's sexual history and future, from the early days of highly pixelated porn games for the Atari 2600, past the Leisure Suit Larrys and Lara Crofts of the '90s, and into current issues like game ratings, the recent "hot coffee" scandal involving the blockbuster game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and sex in online gaming. The presentation ended with a glimpse of the future: a demonstration of video-game-controlled sex toys. Throughout, the crowd ooh'd, ahh'd, and more often laughed in complete disbelief. After Brathwaite fielded questions about dating in

    Her transition from geek to gaming sexpert was not in the plan.

    online games and the threat of legislation and lawsuits over San Andreas, she sat down to talk with Hooksexup.
        Brathwaite's career began back in 1981 at the legendary Sir-Tech publishing house, makers of the first major Dungeons & Dragons video game series. She rose quickly from support-line worker to full-fledged designer. Her transition from geek to gaming sexpert was not in the plan.
        As lead designer on Playboy: The Mansion, which was published in early 2005, Brathwaite was responsible for the first mass-market console game with advertised sexual content. These games face a tough road, as major national retailers like Wal-Mart generally refuse to carry them (despite placing huge orders for their megaviolent cousins). "Big-box stores control how much sex is displayed in games. Period," says Brathwaite. "You can take all your creative visions and plans for the product and basically throw them in the trash, because if you can't get on the shelves at Wal-Mart or Best Buy or Target, you're done."
        That wasn't the only unique challenge in designing Mansion. "It was occasionally uncomfortable for members of the team to talk with me about the sexual content of the game," she says. "Once I became one of the proverbial guys, though, it was no longer an issue. The only unpleasant thing I've ever experienced had to do with being pregnant and taking maternity leave. It was bizarre. At the time, I was being told what slackers new mothers were and how they put this burden on their co-workers. I was thirty-seven weeks pregnant with twins and working seventy hours a week, trying to finish the game."
        A "tycoon" game in which the goal is to amass wealth and live the life of Hugh Hefner, Mansion was just the right mixture of smutty, coy and challenging, and it was a smash hit. "The Bunnies, the Playmates, the topless photoshoots, the sexual content — all of that was aimed at men. Sex in games is really hard to do if you want to make it compelling and you hope to actually turn the player on," she says. "It was a lot of fun, but during the process there were so many things that we didn't know — and couldn't know — because there were no other projects to compare ourselves to. Sexually themed games, particularly on the consoles, just weren't done in the U.S. market."
        Hoping to learn from other developers, Brathwaite pitched a roundtable called "Sexuality in Games: What's Appropriate" for the Game Developers Conference in 2005. "It was like a homecoming," she says. "So many developers of adult content came, and by the end of it, I had a huge pile of business cards — people who wanted to stay connected."

    There may be no actual "goal" to the game, other than finding someone to love on.

        Brathwaite also discovered that even a game based on a magazine with 81% male readership could appeal to women. "I suppose I can't help but also make stuff that would appeal to me, and in turn, appeal to other women. I did a lot of research on Playboy and Mr. Hefner and tried to make it as accurate a reflection of the times as I could. That and the tycoon features were appreciated by female gamers. I get a lot of e-mail from people who tell me they decided to play their husband or boyfriend's copy of the game and ended up playing it more than he did."
        So what does a woman look for in a game with sexual content? "Three things," says Braithwaite. "Something that's more than visual, lets them talk with and meet others, and provides them a sense of safety where they can be free to explore their sexuality without harassment or embarrassment."
         During the Women's Games Conference, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs, games where thousands of people play in an online world simultaneously) were frequently mentioned as a new realm for what is known as "emergent" sex, or user-created sexual content not envisioned as a part of the game by the developers. These games are further divided into two categories: in MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), you create a character, go on quests and attain treasures (World of Warcraft, Anarchy Online, Everquest). MMOVSGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Virtal Sex Games) are basically the next step of the dating website, made more for socializing and cybersexing than hunting and killing. There may be no actual "goal" to the game, other than finding someone to love on. "Numerous MMOVSGs that are currently in development hope to appeal to women," says Brathwaite. "But these games still face a challenge: people come there expecting to hook

    "A woman might be comfortable talking to a man in Second Life about a fetish she hasn't even revealed to her closest friend."

    up. To some degree, that adds an element of promiscuity that some women might be uncomfortable with. I believe one of the reasons cybering in MMORPGs is so popular among women is that they can meet and chat without the hookup expectation. Meeting a man in an MMORPG vs. a MMOSVG is the cyber equivalent of meeting a man at the local mall versus a bar."
        In a world where men are the majority of users, women may be intimidated at the prospect of fitting into pre-existing social networks. "I think the gender relations online mirror those in the real world, with perhaps a bit less risk and a bit more reward," says Brathwaite. "For instance, a woman might be comfortable talking to a man in Second Life about a fetish she hasn't even revealed to her closest friend. A male night elf in World of Warcraft (Another MMOG with more than three million players) might be comfortable chatting it up with a female in the game, but in real life, such a situation might be awkward for him. Online worlds provide a degree of safety for players that allows them to experiment with their desires, their gender and their sexuality."
        Because MMOG distribution bypasses the usual retail chains — software is primarily published online — there are no limits to game content. Brathwaite's newer designs go far beyond hot-tubbing with Hef. "Because I'm not considering retail restrictions, I will go as far as needed to satisfy the expectations of the players," she says.
        Girl gaming pages such as Game Girl Advance (the page that discovered that a vibrating hardware add-on for the Playstation 2 game Rez could be used as a sex toy) and Heroine Sheik have led much of the discussion on sex in gaming. With newcomers like MMOrgy (a webpage dedicated to Sex in MMOGs, with female writers) and DarkNest (A World of Warcraft-dedicated "erotica" forum) covering the MMOG scene, female users may start outpacing developers in adding sex to their games. "Someone once said to me that Harlequin romance novels are female porn. I think there's something to that," says Brathwaite. "A game that facilitates relationship development, doesn't make the player uncomfortable with super-graphic images right from the get-go and features some kind of overarching storyline will draw more players. And any game that's social, fosters community and has a chat interface will eventually be interesting to some woman in a sexual way."
     









    ©2005 Kyle Machulis and hooksexup.com

    Comments ( 4 )

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