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March 17, 2006
Lost Garden: Sex, Design and Advertising
As a designer, I find Danc's Lost Garden blog to be consistently good reading, and his latest post seems particularly relevant to sex games.
He gives us new vocabulary to discuss sexual content in games. In particular, there are two important types of content: "visceral" (think of lots of hot naked bodies thrown into a game for the sole purpose of stimulating the sex-crazed part of the player's brain) and "social" (actual human interaction, or a reasonable simulation thereof).
Visceral sex games are those games that graft gratuitous sexual content onto mediocre, uninspired gameplay on the theory that "sex sells". But such games are vilified by gamers (for their lousy gameplay) and non-gamers (for their shocking content), and are rarely if ever successful in the marketplace.
So, if you're creating a sex game and you're relying on extreme sex content as your game's primary selling point, you might want to seriously rethink your design.
To summarize, games that rely primarily on visceral rewards end up causing several issues:
* They provide poor value to customers. Long term this lack of value often alienates customers.
* They are a poor business practice that seriously increases the competitive risks for your company and the industry.
* As a side effect, they encourage increasingly demented ads that strive to promote a shallow value proposition. This helps alienate both marginal customers and the world at large.
Posted by IanSchreiber at March 17, 2006 11:51 AM | Discuss this post on our forums