Online games replace monsters with sex

updated 8:49 a.m. ET April 10, 2006

NEW YORK - Online games have so far mainly revolved around the killing of fantasy monsters. The occasional fight with a Stormtrooper provides some variety.

Companies are now developing a handful of games — though calling them that is a stretch — designed to give players a very different option: making love, not war.

In "Naughty America: The Game," set to launch early this summer, players will assume the forms of alluring but cartoonish people who meet, flirt and have sex with other player characters.

Characters will have their own apartment, but the world will have also have "public sex zones" and themed rooms, said Tina Courtney, the game's producer.

"We've got the cowboy room, the make-your-own-porn room ... it doesn't just have to be ‘Your place or mine?'" Courtney said.

Flirting and dating have been rife in online games like "Everquest" and "World of Warcraft" — even leading to marriage between players — despite a lack of romantic or sexual features in the games.

On the other hand, sex-oriented games like "Playboy: The Mansion" and "VirtuallyJenna" have been single-player games with no online component, and thus no interaction between players.

This new crop of adults-only games would combine the player-player interaction of the online games and the graphic sexuality of the single-player games.

Game designer Brenda Brathwaite, who has been in the industry for more than 20 years, sees the new games as a natural evolution of online life, noting that even in the very simple text-based adventure games of the 80s, virtual eyelashes were batted.

"If there were two people playing, eventually those people would start flirting," said Brathwaite, who is working on a book about sex in video games.

Multiplayer sexual games are in the works now, Brathwaite said, because Internet connections have become fast enough to make graphically rich online environments and characters possible. For the games that envision players also meeting in real life, mainstream acceptance of dating sites like Match.com also helps.

In "Red Light Center," a game already available in a test version, players take the shape of three-dimensional characters in a red-light district. They can talk to one another through headsets and microphones.

"Rapture Online," a game Black Love Interactive LLC is set to launch next year, will also have three-dimensional characters, with a lot of attention paid to anatomical correctness. It will feature a networking component similar to that of a dating site, but it won't be necessary to use that feature.

"I'm hoping couples who are in a distance relationship will be able to use this privately between them," developer Kelly Rued said.

Of course, these games raise the possibility of sexual predators lurking in the chat rooms. Naughty America has plans to let users pay for a background check that scans their criminal record. Users who do so would have a special tag in their profiles, identifying them to others as someone who's been vetted.

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