World of Warcraft SEX!

I promised posts about World of Warcraft, and I won’t let you down. Click the link! It’s sexy or something so you pussy-hounds will enjoy it.

I have never seen behavior like this on my server in World of Warcraft, but it probably happens. If I’ve learned nothing else from working in porn, it’s that people will beat off to anything, including fairies or whatever in some damn computer game.

I find the uproar over the “nude content” in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to be a non-story. After all, the game is clearly not designed for children. But I wrote an article a while ago for AVN Online magazine about a videogame with pretty heavy sexual content–EAGames’ The Sims Online–that does seemed aimed at children, or at least teens. I’d link to the feature, but apparently they didn’t keep it in their archives. Thanks, guys.

The Sims Online was full to the gills with quasi-porn content, lousy with cyber-brothels, Mafioso, strip-clubs, porn movie studios (I swear) and other houses of ill-fame.

I didn’t have a problem with the sexuality in itself–it’s a little geeky, but, hey, whatever floats your boat–but then I started talking to the people behind the sexy avatars of The Sims Online, and found that almost everyone (from my informal observations) was under 18… and the game-maker EA seemed to be encouraging sexuality in their fruity fake world.

Initially, they’d spent truckloads of money developing the title, confident that an online version of their mega-hit The Sims would own the market. “We’ll get the casual gamers to fork over 15 a month!” I’m sure some dope said, but they’d badly miscalculated their own industry.

They imagined that the masses of non-hardcore gamers would flock to a fake world if it was designed to not be challenging in terms of skill, brains, creativity or anything else. The Sims Online was so ridiculously easy you could hardly call it a game at all. It was more like an animated AOL chatroom.

Sound fun?

The “game” aspect of TSO could easily be mastered in an hour or two, leaving players alone to dress their dolls, work fake jobs (including data entry on a virtual computer), build houses, and create another life. But EA again miscalculated by allowing players to design the content of the game. People are generally too stupid and lazy to do anything interesting with their real lives, so why anyone thought average people could create compelling content in a virtual world is beyond me. That’s what professionals are for.

Lacking the ability to create anything genuinely interesting with EA’s graphics, players turned almost immediately to the prurient, creating garish, horrible buildings devoted to cheap thrills, giving themselves stupid, “sexy” nicknames, and creating a decadent, brightly colored cyber-hellscape… like how bad filmmakers gravitate toward porno.

Most of the popular player-designed “lots” were sexual in nature on my server; strip clubs, dungeons and whorehouses where willing “prostitutes,” who could be 15-year-old girls, or middle age shut-in dudes, would type dirty to you in exchange for a few easily obtainable cyber-dollars. The other popular kind of building was called something like, “New Players! Double Your Money!” and consisted of confidence scamming.

Basically, the game was so boring, cyber-sex and thievery was the most interesting thing to do in it.

The people at EA must have been shitting bricks when the intial sales numbers came in. No one played it. They had a multi-multi-multi million dollar turkey on their hands. But, late in the game, they seemed to have figured out what most teenagers did with their virtual world.

They launched a last-gasp advertising campaign: Remember the commercials from a few years ago? A sexy computer-lady plays strip poker with a bunch of much younger boys. Suggestive and reeking of desperation, “Play our game…it’ll be SEXY!” the ads screamed.

EA created new, sexier outfits for the avatars (lingerie, leather). They dropped specially designed beds where characters could get it on, pixelated to be sure, but the moans and sounds were clearly sexual.

Playing it felt peep-show-dirty. It was just a filthy place.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that probably the largest game manufacturer on earth seemed to be encouraging teenagers to engage in non-traditional sexuality in a “T-rated” title so they wouldn’t take a bath on a videogame…and people say porn is made up of degenerates.

I talked to several sim-hookers, sim-madams, and sim-pimps, after they assured me they were over 18; EA/Maxis may not mind sexualizing kids, but I do. They were kind of sad and hopeless.

Then I called Maxis; told them what I was working on, outlined the point of my article, in order to give them a chance to counter my opinion that they were deliberately sexualizing a game marketed toward young teenagers. I called them many times and they never called me back.

Apparently, Maxis was a little too high-and-mighty to return a call from a journalist within the porn industry, especially one who was on to them.

If I were more ambitious, I would have pitched the idea to a more mainstream source, but what are you gonna do? I’m not.

I wrote the article, relying a lot on an interview with “JC Soprano” a real-life, unemployed computer nerd who ran The Sim Mafia in game. He was a nice kid, actually, even if he specialized in pimping, vandalism and strong-arm intimidation in the virtual world. He confirmed my hunch for me: People were acting “bad” in the game because it was so damn boring to play it as intended.

(Look! You too can toil in a virtual factory for fake money! Fun, right?)

Thankfully, The Sims Online has fallen almost completely off the radar in gameland. You can’t buy it in stores,(although you can still download it here, just please, don’t.) There is no new content pending, and the always-small player base is shrinking, with people heading for much more interesting social life simulators like Second Life and World of Warcraft. In short, The Sims Online is a dying world.

See what happens when you don’t return Steve Ochs’ phone calls?