3D SexVilla2: Like Better Paper Dolls For Grownups
As faithful ErosBlog readers will have deduced from the unbroken string of desultory image posts, it hasn’t been an internet-facing week for your trusty sex correspondent. Combine a mild sinus infection with at least four different flavors of family craziness, and you get a Bacchus who neglects the fans. Meanwhile, on the internets, the progress of science and the arts moves rapidly ahead, all unheeded.
I refer, of course, to the new 3D SexVilla software offering. Alert readers (which is most of you!) will remember my post from a few weeks ago called Paper Dolls And Customized Dildos, in which I discussed a new software offering from Hustler that combined EverQuest-style graphics with sexually-explicit user-selectable sexual content. Well, I’ve become aware that the Hustler product, and a similar new release from the Kink.com people, are branded versions of the SexVilla2 offering from Thrixxx.
Early in the week, I started seeing screenshots and web ads all over the place for the various products. Bondage Blog started posting screenshots on Thursday, and by yesterday, Spanking Blog was on board. Somewhere in there I started getting emails offering me free looks at the product, but I manfully soldiered on with my mundane duties. Which doesn’t mean I wasn’t itchy to play with the virtual sex dollies.
Last night was Friday night, which is fleet night in my internet spaceship game. (Some of you will understand when I say “It rocked; we caught a Loki and ate it with catsup.”) So, no 3D SexVilla for me last night.
Thus, my impressions in this post are very very preliminary. Visually, the software is stunning. The girls are pretty and sexy yet safely on the “obviously virtual” side of the uncanny valley, customization options are astonishing, the camera viewpoints are flexible and easy to control, and there’s an early-and-obvious addictive quality to the thing. Having been conventionally-socialized as a male child by parents with 1950s attitudes, I never played with dolls, nor yet even “action figures” much; but I can see the lure here to the “she’s cute like this, but I wonder how the same pose would look with a vest and no bra, and what if we lost the hat and her pants?” dress-up part of the game.
That said, I haven’t progressed very far into the actual game. It’s obviously designed to be “sticky” in the commercial sense; as you play with your virtual paper dolls and achieve various orgasm-related goals, you earn virtual coins with which to unlock “sex packs” consisting of more models, more clothes, more sex toys, more positions, more of everything. So far, all I’ve done is summon the existing models, pose them, move them, dress and undress them, watch them writhe under the virtual ministrations of various plugs and dildos, and marvel at how entertaining such simple pleasures are. Anybody who has ever spent four hours in the character selection and customization screens of a game will understand what I’m talking about.
That said, I can confirm what I said about the Hustler version of the product at the beginning of the month: 3D SexVilla feels to me like the avatar-generation tool-set for an absolutely killer massively multiplayer online role playing game, but it’s not actually a multiplayer game — at least, not yet. It may be online (the software wants an internet connection, at least on startup) but it’s not any kind of multiplayer. You can play at satisfying the computer-driven avatars, you can script your virtual sex players and storyboard them and make movies of them, but there’s no way to drive your avatar while it interacts with (er, make that “fucks, sucks, screws or spanks”) another avatar being driven by somebody else. Or not, at least, at this time; I can’t see the tech team that put this much effort into building the avatar tools (gentlemen and ladies, there are entire screens for customizing makeup and facial hair!) not having long term plans that will let people cybersex each other with ’em. It just wouldn’t be sensible.
Anybody out there who is playing with it is invited to share their own impressions in the comments. Do you think this is a mere curiosity, or do you suspect that it’s the thin leading edge of a new “new thing” that’s eventually going to feature prominently in everyone’s online sex life?
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I’m having nightmares thinking of this mashed up with Second Life and Plenty of Fish.
Nightmares? That’s pretty much the future of online sex I think, and it looks fairly entertaining to me…
It’s a bit odd to see a whole bunch of sexbloggers go ‘oooh, shiny!’ over this since it seems to be a kink/hustler branded versions of thrixxx’s main product, who have been around for yonks — regularly updating and expanding what you can do with their single-player software during those yonks it has to be acknowledged — I’m guessing the big change is they’ve recently employed a more aggressive bunch of marketeers and introduced a licensing program :)
Outside of Second Life, the one thing like this I’ve heard of that’s actual multiplayer is Red Light Center, which has been around a couple of years I think. Never tried that one tho’.
Skap, it’s probably a marketing thing indeed, given that I’m all over the adult web every day and I never saw one single hint of the thrixx product until Hustler licensed it about a month ago.
Red Light Center contacted me when they were new, looking for some promotion; but their front-end (at least at that time) was a really hostile set of Flash browser widgets, and you couldn’t see anything without going through a registration process. Since I’m not in the habit of typing registration info into an untrusted and untrustable flash application, I wrote them off as irrelevant — and have never heard another peep about them since.
I’ve seen a few of these in my neverending quest for decent adult flash games. They have gotten better over time, and is a thriving market for that sort of kink. Definately brings cybersex to a whole new level.
And bach, try it with mustard next time ;)
I wou;d argue that while Kink 3D offers the infinitely customiseable optionn of personalising your kink it is a long way from enulating the genuine emotions which act as the masin turn on of many of ud fetishists… or maybe I’m just bitter that I rub Linux sndlack sufficient bandwith to use this to my desired extent…
I’m going to go off point for a moment but with a purpose.
I got stuck at your ‘uncanny valley’ link and went there before finishing the article. It caught my eye because ‘Uncanny’ was the tagline that Lee and Kirby affixed to their creation-‘the X-men’. At the time most companies that made super heroes crafted characters that basically looked like human beings but made perfect. Superman could fly but he didn’t have unsightly wings. The ‘bad guys’ in comics tended to look grotesque and sub human–especially during WW2. It’s a little embarrassing now how racist the depictions of Germans and especially the Japanese were, but it was a different age and we were at war. As a kid what was immediately noticeable about the ‘X-men’ is that they were, relatively speaking, ugly and off putting. Iceman looked like a walking snowman and presumably was uncomfortable to be around. The team leader looked like Gort from ‘the Day the Earth Stood Still’ and shot similar beams from his eyes. No kid was going to run toward that in real life. The head of their school was a bald headed old guy who could read peoples minds. At around the same time the Outer Limits had a particularly scary episode where Warren Oates gains bug eyes and telepathic powers after exposure to rain fall on an alien planet. And of course the Beast was essentially a teenaged ape boy. The X-men were set up as heroes but their gimmick was that they weren’t actually human (they were mutants) and human beings who came in contact with them had to overcome an innate revulsion.
I go into detail about this because popular as the X-men movies are they are really shiny and audiences aren’t repulsed by them visually the way Tod Browning’s ‘Freaks’ were repulsive back in their day. Reading this mornings post I am struck that Stan Lee or Jack Kirby either came up with the use of the word Uncanny just as an accident of alliteration or had researched this ‘uncanny valley’ effect and used the concept well in their creation. I know that Kirby was an avid reader and Lee continues to write books based on his file cabinets of weird facts that he collected all through his career to use as fodder for his fantastic tales. I strongly suspect that even if he’s no longer aware of the original trigger Stan probably read an article about the Uncanny and it stuck in his subconscious. Childhood heroes don’t often stand up under adult scrutiny. The early creations of Lee, Kirby and Steve Ditko continue to amaze and satisfy.
And oh yes, it’s clear that these sex avatars are going to be a big part of everyone’s future–soon.
What I love about the images you have here are the tan lines. Really, what a great detail.
eve
This is just to let folks know that the Kink Land user community and forums is up and running. A major goal is to figure out what can be customized and how to do it.
Happy about this game