“Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight eyes — for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate — while we moan and die.
‘What’s the katter with misses?’ I muttered (word-control gone) into her hair.”

Ok, so stuff like this has been all over the Webs of Inter of late, and has created a large, if misinformed stir. Some interesting things to glean from this little netscapade, other than the fact that the Internet is becoming increasingly prone to embarrassing misfires (if it draws hits, who cares if it’s accurate!), is that our culture is still painfully backwards when it comes to sex. Even, or perhaps especially, those online.

Retarded (re•tard•ed) adj. - “Occurring or developing later than desired or expected; delayed.”

People. Please, go read Lolita. Is it creepy that Humbert Humbert is having sex with a 12 year old girl? Yes. Is he an empathetic character and is the love he has for Lolita beautiful and haunting? Yes, yes it is. I’d like to think that I live in a country and culture where I can say that without being accused of pederasty. Sadly, this is not the case.

Anyhow, what interests me about this uproar is not so much the response, but the question that, as a game designer, seems to underlie this talk of perviness and games: how would one make a game about sexuality that is not pornographic? A game design challenge, if you will.

Create a smart, sexy game about intimacy.

For whatever reason, and the reasons are many and well-lamented (yay, Robin!), our little industry is completely puerile when it comes to sex. We have big bodice vixens, babes with guns, and cutie-pie anime girls; fantasies for teenage boys. To claim otherwise is intellectual dishonesty. Anyhow, what’s pertinent to our design challenge is the fact that the sex we have in the games we have now isn’t sexy.

For me, sexuality is much more about intimacy and sensuality. Pornography in the traditional sense - ramming it home, as it were - is pretty horrifying. Though (as my girlfriend points out) being ‘ravaged’ has a certain fantasy appeal, one wouldn’t want to make a game where the focus was, ah, thrusty.

So, putting aside the possibility of the game being about actual intercourse, and limiting ourselves to a single player experience (the role of virtual chat rooms with avatars who engage in animated sex being well covered), we’re left making a game about intimacy. What, then, are the mechanics of personal intimacy?

Proximity is a necessity, to be sure. It’s interesting, though, that it is possible to be intimate without actual physical contact. The simple act of moving into another’s personal space immediately heightens physical intimacy. As long the person is not a stranger or unwelcome, simply being close can be intimate.

“For instance, there is a game in which a couple may try to see how close they can get to each other without actually touching. Another game involves running hands along the contours of a person’s body without touching him or her. These techniques often heighten sexual arousal. When a person enters someone else’s personal space for the purpose of being intimate, it is physical intimacy, regardless of the lack of actual physical contact.”

Recently, I went to see “The Departed”, which I enjoyed. There is a sex scene in the film which struck me as very sensual, very sexy, and which included only some kissing and mild undressing. In fact, the scene caused a friend of mine to, involuntarily, yell the phrase “HOLY GUACOMOLE!” out loud in the middle of the theater, to general hilarity. The moment at which the scene pivots from uncertainty to extreme sexiness is a moment of physical intimacy without any touching. Vera Farmiga’s character is sitting on her kitchen counter and Leonardo DiCaprio is face to face with her. Great moment. This is not to say that touching should be omitted from consideration, I’m merely pointing out that the proximity of two people seems to be a prerequisite to intimacy.

So that’s a possible direction, I guess, some kind of interpersonal simulator, where you play as a guy or girl trying to become intimate with another person by making advances in the right order or with the right finesse, with interesting control mechanics related to eye contact, body position and language, proximity, and picking up on subtle cues. Sounds pretty boring, though, and similar to the territory Façade and others are aiming for. Also – and this may constitute a significant heresy – I think trying to translate film or literature into interactive form is, as an approach, entirely too complicated. The scene’s success depends almost entirely on context: the attachment to those characters built across an hour of excellent film and the details of this particular encounter (it’s raining and Leo was *apparently* without a jacket, Vera’s moving out of her apartment so the lighting is diffuse and so on…) Even when approached with powerful intelligence and determination - that kind of procedural context generation being dutifully attacked by the Interactive Storytelling Battalion who are bivouacked in what seems to be a relatively strong position – I think our goal of making a sensual game could be much, much simpler.

In fact, my solution to the problem of designing a game about intimacy hinges on simple touch. Before I go there, though, I think it’s also important to note that smell (candles or incense), sight (candles or low lighting), and sound (Barry White or whatever) are also traditionally integral to ‘setting the mood’ for intimacy and sensual enjoyment. We’re not going to get smell, but we can certainly hit sight and sound. I think a great treatment would be something like Peter Miller’s “Eros Ex Math” series:

As noted, “The images in this room are created entirely from mathematical algorithms.” That’s ripe for real time if anything ever was. It also does a fantastic job leveraging the brain’s imaginative capacities, offloading a goodly helping of sexy interpretation to the player’s mind. So, we’ve got our look . For sound, simple breathing.

Now to answer the heroic question posed of Harvey Smith by David Jaffee – that’s all well and good…but how do we make a game of it?

The Touch

One mechanic of sensual pleasure which I’ve always found fascinating is touch. Specifically, extremely light fingertip-to-skin touching. I find, without getting too ribald, that touching a woman’s skin as lightly as possible while varying the speed and pattern of the contact of each fingertip (so that there is no discernable pattern) is extremely effective in providing sensual pleasure. As it turns out, there’s an interesting scientific explanation having to do with the way the somatosensory system interprets input over time – if it’s in a straight line the neurons are able to predict and anticipate the stimulus and are prepared for it. If there’s no pattern, it’s much more exciting and stimulating. This is why it’s difficult – if not impossible - to tickle yourself.

The game is very simple, requiring the player to touch the undulating Miller forms as lightly as possible without breaking contact, uninterrupted, and without a discernable pattern. Shallow breathing in the background quickens in pace to indicate system state, getting faster as you succeed, with an advancing round structure for pacing (complete one round, move on to the next.) As an area is touched, it lights up, a gradient glow expanding from the point of contact. Touching the same area over and over again yields diminishing returns, with variations in surface and movement speed providing additional difficulty.

There are two control implementations that come to mind, one of which requires some non-standard input device configurations. The non-standard configuration would be wearing the P5 Glove (degree of finger curl to indicate the strength of the touch) while moving the mouse with the same hand (to indicate position.)

I’d simulate the skin as a series of spring hulls, each with slightly more stiffness than the last, to create a sort of layer cake effect, and then test to see whether and where each layer was depressed, touching the layer below as a gauge of pressure.

A keyboard and mouse version of this would separate the touching pressure from the pattern of movement. The touch pressure would be a separate, smaller picture-in-picture window where the player would use the mouse to keep the appropriate (light) pressure on the skin, which would scroll right to left to increase difficulty. Meanwhile, the player would have to press keyboard buttons with the other hand to indicate the area to be stimulated. An interesting idea I have here is that of a keyboard ‘mashing’ scheme, where instead of four buttons indicating directions to steer in, the whole left side of the keyboard is active, from the ~ key in the upper left to the B key in the lower right. Any key within this range is a valid press, but to succeed you must press keys out of vertical or horizontal order and, again, hitting the same area while it’s still illuminated produces diminishing returns.

Anyone else have an interesting take on what a ’smart, sexy game about intimacy’ would be?