If you haven't yet tried an online game like World of Warcraft — or are simply perplexed by the acronym of its genre (MMORPGs, or massively multi-player online role-playing games), the premise is simple: you play in a lushly animated 3-D environment populated with other human players. Your avatar can look exactly like you, or exactly the way you wish you looked. You mingle with everybody else, adventuring and fighting — or just exchanging backrubs by the fire at an inn.
With all the physicality, you'd think that World of Warcraft, with more than four million users, would provide an outlet for all the hormones that spills into its servers. But the game doesn't support sexual activity, and neither do the other mainstream massively multiplayer online games, such as EverQuest II, City of Heroes and Anarchy Online (although players have petitioned for it in AO).
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For its part, World of Warcraft is a hotbed of "everything" but. Players can get engaged to each other and even purchase rings and wedding dresses. (Many players take pride in posting screenshots of their jawless, gore-smeared zombie dressed in virgin white.) On my first day in the game, I saw two female avatars jump on tables and dance in their underwear. And then there's the case of Jailbait, a female night elf who auctioned an erotic dance on eBay at a starting price of $10. She — actually he, because Jailbait's played by a guy named Scott — didn't get any takers. "The options to have your online toons appear to actually have physical sex are very limited," said a dejected Scott via email.
There's a reason for that: Because of the high cost of game development and the recent backlash against sex in gaming — see Grand Theft Auto's recent "hot coffee" scandal, and the Hillary Clinton-driven legislation that has followed it — it's hard to find any sexually explicit games that don't come from a tiny developer overseas. But a few developers are forging the way into adults-only gaming, and they're doing it online. I toured three of the most infamous.
There's more to Sociolotron than strangers offering you blowjobs.
Sociolotron (http://www.sociolotron.com, $4 monthly subscription), from Sociolotronics LLC, is the most notorious and explicit game on the market. Through crude graphics and an interface that's slightly less sexy than a C++ debugger, it casts you as a struggling survivor in post-apocalyptic London, where you can practice a trade, fight marauders, become a law enforcement agent . . . and screw. The controls aren't intuitive, and the graphics basically just show you bobbing back and forth on top of each other. But you can have animated cybersex with other players or computer-controlled hookers while crude but hungrily written descriptions narrate every step of the act, from foreplay — "the nipples are fully erect and stand out proud and thick" — to the massive release, where the man "groans as the white lava continues to erupt from his angry meat volcano." Semen flies everywhere; thanks to the interface, it looks like someone spilled cottage cheese.
Even though newcomers visit the game for the sex, Sociolotron has attracted a cult following by building an elaborate and largely player-run society. In the game, sex play is just one activity, but everything you do in bed impacts your character. For example, masochists can take more damage in a fight; practice sadism, and you become a better interrogator. I went for exhibitionism. I clicked the "Strip Genitals" button to drop trou, and then paraded through the bars and down the dark streets with my gigantic, mallet-like member dangling between my legs. Whenever I bumped into another player, my "reputation score" fell — which made me more attractive to the thug-level strata of the game — and my urge to be an exhibitionist grew.
But there's more to Sociolotron than strangers offering you blowjobs or naked guys just hanging out in the middle of the street. To get anywhere in the game, you have to work, traveling to the edge of town and harvesting raw materials while half-naked people with names like "Pimp Daddy" come at you with swords, and taking the material back to make products for cash and experience. At the same time, you learn more about the society of other players, and find your place in the world — much like any other online community. But it takes time and commitment, and if you're just here to hook up, you may find the interface leaves both too much and not enough to the imagination.
XOXCity is a raunchy Super Mario Brothers.
For a simpler alternative, you could try XOXCity (http://www.xoxcity.com, $13.95 monthly basic subscription). This community of about 5,000 users is two-dimensional and cartoonish, a raunchy Super Mario Brothers. You can design and clothe your avatar any way you like — though basically, you'll always look like a kewpie doll — and once you get the hang of the confusing controls, you can wander around a small but colorful world of moonlit beaches and downtown hotels, and meet and hook up with other players. The game offers tutorials on how to simulate sex, which involves jamming your avatars together and making them twitch and jitter. But good luck finding a partner: I trolled the game for an evening and only saw two other players, who looked disturbingly like Christmas elves. With a high monthly subscription rate and extra charges for accessories and sex toys, XOXCity doesn't give you much bang for your buck.
But I easily found the best value for anyone looking for an online game, adult or otherwise: Linden Research's Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com, free basic membership). In fact, Second Life isn't really a game: you don't score points, and you literally have no goals. Your only mission is to explore a kind of lucid dream where, through 3-D modeling and animation support, you can create any world you want and just hang out in it. The game has drawn 90,000 users who are responsible for every building, shopping mall, and dance club in the game world, and between the post-post-modern architecture, the convoluted amusement park rides, and all of the chic avatars, Second Life is hands down the damnedest thing I've seen since the World Wide Web itself.
In Second Life, the sexual situations and subcultures could fill pages. You can act out any fantasy you can imagine.
For example: I signed up for the premium account, which includes a free plot of land on which I could build a house. In my neighborhood, "Impeach Bush" signs hover in the sky outside my window, while a giant Roman candle sometimes throws pixelated sparks that can float through my walls. Down the street, a punk clothing store's chimney spits smoke into the sky, while around the corner someone constructed an Old-West-themed downtown, complete with a bucking bronco and a trick outhouse: when I sat down, it thrust my head in the toilet and spun my body in circles.
Of course, that's a PG-rated neighborhood. Second Life has an anything-goes policy in its mature areas. (A teen version also exists, and probably sees better action). The sexual situations and subcultures could fill pages, but the basic mechanics work like this: you start by finding or building a "poseball," which just looks like a small sphere lying on the ground or nestled onto the furniture. Sitting on one triggers an animation that can make you dance, comically contort yourself or perform slow, erotic motions. If another player sits on a matching poseball close by, you've got yourself a sex scene. If you're handy with a 3-D design application like Poser, you can make yourself look like the Little Mermaid, a killer robot or a gay Abe Lincoln, and act out any fantasy you can imagine.
The regulars brag that you can see anyone try anything if you spend enough time here: there is a community of furries and several longterm slave/master relationships. The "Find" command brings up lists of strip clubs, dungeons, and other erotic venues: you just browse the directory and teleport to your destination. An hour with a real-life escort will cost you around 500-1,000 units of the Linden, the in-game currency, which converts to $1 to $2. In fact, there's almost too much to do in a weekend. Should you buy an hour with an escort who advertises with a giant photo of Princess Leia in slave garb, spend the weekend at a BDSM community or go shopping for lingerie and strap-ons? (Neither the female or male avatars have genitals.)
It's a long way from The Sims 2, which allowed characters to make euphemistic "woo hoo" under the covers. Yet video games can't compete with porn for pure titillation, at least not in the near term. Perhaps that's why a slate of forthcoming games are simultaneously more explicit and dating-focused. Rapture Online, Spend the Night and Naughty America: The Game plan to offer 3D fantasy dates and a space where you can chat with potential real-life partners. Yet the project that has attracted the most buzz is Nest Egg Studio's Heavenly Bodies, whose promo material makes it sound like every role-playing game rolled into one spectacular fantasy universe. Tagging itself as a MMOUGG — "massively multiplayer online ultra genre game" — Bodies will offer "tastefully graphic" sex, according to its designer, Vera Odessa Newman, and it will take place in "a universe where magic and science co-exist, where gods oversee galactic empires and any adventure is possible."
If it all sounds a bit absurdly conceptual, remember: ten years ago, online dating was science fiction too. n°
