In response to "Pressing the Right Buttons" from The Escapist Forum: I would be more interested in a game that grabbed me at the emotional level than just the visceral experience. In other words, it's not the controls that bother me, it's that these are one-dimensional characters I don't care about. Women in games are treated like toys to take out and have sex with (the ones that aren't running around shooting vampires topless anyway).
Now you take Mass Effect, for example; that game made me care about the characters. When the two women confronted me for flirting with both of them, and made me choose, it was unexpected and surprisingly immersive. I *genuinely* felt like an asshole.
No game has ever done that before. That's a step in the right direction.
- teknoarcanist
Interesting article.
Looking aside from mainstream gaming, the Japanese adult game market has, along with the visual novel, the occasional game where you are attempting to pleasure your partner (female, the player is male, almost all the time) by choosing actions (squeeze, rub, kiss, etc) and various parts of the body. Illusion produces a fair few of these in 3D. They don't really have an uncanny-valley effect, as they're not striving for realism, IMHO.
Particularly interesting is their Artificial Girl series, which does attempt to imbue your partner with a certain level of sexual personality. The most recent entry in the series (AG3) introduced personality traits for your artificial girl, controlling likes or dislikes of positions, motions, and other sexual considerations. It's only small, and the genre as a whole is generally balanced towards sex-kitten responses rather than aiming for a real sexual simulation, but it's probably the closest modern commercial gaming gets to the sort of interactive experience you've described.
Then again, if 3feel (Sex-based MMO) has NPCs as well as real people, they might have something similar. I haven't looked to far into it; their promotional stuff's in languages I don't read, and what I get from the pictures implies it's person-to-person (PvP) rather than PvE.
And here you can see how the language of MMO doesn't fit sexual interaction particularly well. I can't say I've ever considered having sex versus someone. (Well, except in the "race to finish" sense, which is not really what we're talking about here.)
- TBBle
