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Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality
ErosBlog posts containing "SexVilla"
November 20th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
A couple of weeks ago I kvetched mildly about the limited “furry” support in the 3D SexVilla software I’ve been playing with, saying:
Right now there appears to be only two outfits (the tiger for male avatars, the bunny for female) and the hoods are closed-face, so using any oral-contact poses causes the software to remove the hoods. And, personally, I find that the expressive faces of the normal hoodless models go along way toward making the simulation seem lifelike; the unmoving furry-faces, for me, detract from the illusion.
Now, mind you, I’m aware that this is a little bit like complaining that the dancing bear isn’t much of a square dancer and couldn’t do-si-do his way out of a wet paper bag.
Doesn’t matter. This is the 21st century, my software toys are supposed to do what I tell them to. Fortunately, that’s generally just a matter of waiting for the next update. And so it proved in this case. Guess what? Now with Bunny ears!
This time around, it’s not “You’re the girl, so you have to be the bunny” either. Guys can wear the ears too, and will if properly cajoled:
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October 24th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
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?
June 20th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
So the other night I was blowing up some internet tanks and surfing gaming blogs during the 45-second wait times it takes to load into new matches after my own tank gets blown up. And there on Terra Nova I stumbled across a sex-related post that really made me stop and marvel:
Where Are All The Sex Games?
Some of the post is about the worthy topic of sex-education games (like this shooter with an STD message) but I was just sort of snoozing through a skim-read until I got to this part, which really woke me up:
There’s rather a dearth of recreational, digital sex games, a fact that surprises me given the proclivity of clever porn mongers who hawk every kind of sex ware imaginable. Have throughout history, using any available technology. It’s well established, for instance, that early photography and film thrived on sexual innovations. And we certainly spent a lot of time discussing the ins and outs of cybersex back in the day, when everything digital was a novelty. Are we jaded? Or recession economics?
Well, it seems like a business opportunity to me. They appear to sell plenty of books and board games in those novelty sex shops. People could certainly use some variety in their sex lives. Yet the ecosystem somehow manages to eschew innovation, just like the video game industry. Microsoft, for instance, is blocking sexual uses of their Kinect device, citing ‘unintended puposes’ (imagine a mash-up of a Kinect device and teledildonics – long distance love, FTW!). I did find A-Chat , but it seems like a graphics enhanced chat room app, and that’s boring, too… I suppose there’s the seedy underbelly that is Second Life’s sex subculture, but it seems, well, seedy. And not terribly educational. But if people are into it, great. Let’s just have some other options.
It is rather remarkable, when you stop and think. Why isn’t there an adult-themed cyber fun park that’s at least as large (and profitable) as World Of Warcraft? Why don’t we in the English-speaking world have a thriving sexual-games output to rival the Japanese?
I have some ideas about this, but first, it’s probably worth dipping into the shallow waters of my knowledge about the sex game options readily accessible to your average North American:
- Of course there’s Second Life. It’s not a sex game per se, but it’s a big and well-established free-wheeling virtual space, has an in-game economy, and allows an enormous degree of user customization of objects and spaces in the world. Accordingly (and this is by reputation, I’ve never logged into Second Life) it features an enormous amount of sexual material, as you would expect. Just Google “Second Life sex” to get a hint of the sexual diversity that flourishes in that environment.
- There’s a paid space called the Red Light Center that’s said to be pretty wild. I’ve never looked deeply into it, because in the screen shots I’ve seen, the female avatars compare unfavorably in appearance to the female wood elves in original Everquest, circa 1998. If I’m going to cybersex somebody’s avatar, I want it to be sexy-looking. (Yes, the Everquest wood elves were hot, for the time and the available tech. But 1998 is an internet eternity ago. I expect better now.
- There’s Sociolotron, another paid adults-only service that’s got a sort of “glorified cyberchat” reputation, along with some actual monster-bashing and game content. Speaking from a position of ignorance, this one seems to be showing its MUDdy roots…
- Trending away from the online social space toward lonely stand-alone clients on your PC, there is the family of products like 3D SexVilla from ThriXXX, which I have described before as “like better paper dolls for grownups”. This genre is typically visually rich but low on “game factor”; I remember a title for the early Mac in the 1980s that was called “Virtual Valerie” and involved manipulating an onscreen vibrator against a greyscale line-art posed naked woman until she made some noises and started shaking. Some progress has been made since then, especially on the artwork and customization side, with better costumes, posing, and settings. But in gameplay terms, I’ve yet to see one of these that was terribly engaging. Obviously the way to improve these is to get them onto the network and plug other gaming humans into the response loop, but so far the sites that can do that haven’t attempted to match the visually-lush qualities of these local-client electronic dollies.
I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff out there I haven’t seen, and I do invite readers to share in the comments if they know of any other noteworthy sex games. But I’m also confident there isn’t anything out there that even approaches a scale that could be called “mass-market”, and it’s a worthy question: why not?
I can think of a few contributing factors. “Uncanny valley” is a big one … we react well to cartoonish avatars and (maybe) to avatars that are hyper-realistic, but avatars that reach for realism and fall short? We process those as “creepy” and that’s usually an erotic dampener. (Certainly that’s a big contributor to my own lack of interest in the existing virtual worlds where sexual content is welcome.)
Another question is, how much are these worlds impacted by the Greater Internet Fuckwad problem? You can’t plausibly make an online adult playground without anonymity, but with anonymity comes an ocean of dicks, trolls, and creeps, all of whom feel unconstrained from demonstrating their worst and most colorful traits. It’s community poison, and the problem is too vast and varied for human moderation to be much of a solution. Some sort of clever community policing mechanic — as yet not invented so far as I know — would seem to be required.
Finally, the Terra Nova blog post focused to a much greater extent than I have here on the potential value of gamification in the field of sex education. I see the theoretical potential there, but it’s virtually impossible in a commercial sense to do anything involving legal minors and sexual information, no matter how tame. Too many people seem to go all explodey-head when you provide young people with access to sexual information; there are respectable non-profits that can survive that backlash, but I’ve yet to hear of a commercial enterprise with the ability (or courage!) to surf those dangerous waters. Worse yet, young people expect their applications to be networked; but if you add online interaction into any game environment that also requires anonymity, you’re back to the “dicks, trolls, and creeps” problem, this time with added opportunity for fearmongering. (“ZOMG, our kids are hanging out in an online space with TEH SEXXES and maybe PREDDATURZ!”)
So, that’s my answer to the missing sex games mystery: one part uncanny valley (which should go away in time as we get better at this stuff) and about four parts “how can you make a product that is pointless without anonymity but vulnerable to destruction (especially destruction of its reputation) by anonymous internet fuckwads?”
Packed deeply into the fuckwad problem, though, is the recognition that big feature-rich cyberspaces are expensive to create. If you’ve got the commercial resources to create one of these, you may find it’s safer to do something else with it (like a fantasy RPG) than to create an adult-content space that (if you fail to control the fuckwads) could destroy your corporate reputation and/or become a PR nightmare. But let me be clear: the game space itself might readily contain a thriving happy community that self-polices the fuckwads to an extent sufficient to keep the space thriving and happy, and yet it could still be destroyed (in the commercial sense) by the presence of fuckwads on the margins of the product, if those fuckwads are doing something that attracts lots of media scaremongering and knickertwisting.
So, even as we think “corps have all the money and are rightly scared to spend it on this” we shouldn’t extrapolate from there to “we’ll never see an adult playground like this”. We live in the open-source century, and big expensive-in-resources data/software artifacts are increasingly springing up like forests. We’re also learning (see “BitTorrent”) to distribute activities that are disapproved of by more dominant cultural forces (moralists with guns). So it’s easy to imagine a highly sexualized future adult online avatar space made without corporate money and running in a distributed or semi-distributed fashion that’s very difficult to suppress. That sort of project grows (if it does) very slowly, so don’t be holding your breath — but all the same, don’t be surprised if five or ten years from now, you’re reading breathless media articles about a sort of darknet Second Life where the users are complaining about virtual sharking by implacable panty-raiding fuckwads.
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December 31st, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
Bacchus’s many recent posts on 3D SexVilla along with my occasional kibitzing have twigged an interesting memory from my own past, one about an antecedent (if a fictional one) to the cool 3D toys now becoming available.
Some family vacation sometime in the early 1980. I’m in adolescence, with all that implies for family vacations. Generally not good stuff: family vacations in my natal family had a fair amount of “Look, kids! It’s the World’s Third Most Famous Tree! Let’s pull over and take pictures.” Not too exciting when you’re fifteen or so, which is a time when I’d frankly have rather been at home holed up with whatever good bad books I could glean from my hometown public library’s fantasy and SF paperback rack. But one thing that was on the road was motel cable television. We’re not talking porn here, not by a long shot. But we are talking cheesy PG rated movies, including one I saw about one minute of before being summoned off to see the World’s Second Most Famous Tree. At the time I did not know what it was. Only much movie watching later would I be able to identify it as a clip from Looker (1981).
A nude model (played by the actress Susan Dey is being scanned.
And then she is rendered as a 3D computer image:
I felt a tremendous erotic charge out of watching this scene and couldn’t get it out of my adolescent mind for days. Not only was I in a state of reverie past caring about the World’s Second Most Famous Tree, but I kept turning over in my mind possible technical details of scanning and rendering a 3D object (preferably an erotically attractive one, of course) from a series of 2D images. I made only some progress.
If nothing else, I came away with a far keener appreciation of the merits of trigonometry than I previously had. Perhaps if they had moving scan, I might have been much more zealous about calculus!
December 19th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
There I was, trying to create myself a nice Christmas elf using 3D SexVilla for a post to be published (maybe, if it comes out right) next week. But I just couldn’t get her to make the facial expressions I was looking for. The character editor has many undocumented options and although the level of control is amazing, getting the precise “look” you want is not always easy. And meanwhile, while I tinkered, my elf-girl kept repeating “PLAY with me!” over and over, in a most demanding fashion. A jolly elf, she is not:
So, I got frustrated and added a ball gag. Blissful silence! Plus, no more snotty expression:
Note: To a sharply limited extent, this ball gag trick also works in real life. (Your mileage may vary.)
I do regret that the official 3D SexVilla gag, like early Ford automobiles, is available only in black. No festive Christmas colors!
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November 22nd, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
I suppose if I really wanted to I could spend my lunch hours surfing for porn, but surely for a sex blogger that would be a busman’s holiday. So instead I end up reading papers like this one written by philosopher Joshua Knobe and two physicist colleagues entitled “Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology” (PDF version here.)
Knobe and his co-authors summarize part of their argument as follows:
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws.
Well all very interesting, one might think. There are any number of challenging philosophical implications here. An inflationary universe raises tricky problems for epistemology (because, among other things, you might be a Boltzmann Brain) and causes real headaches for people like me attracted to aggregative consequentialism in ethics, as Nick Bostrom has pointed out (see his paper “Infinite Ethics,” pdf link here). These are the sort of things that keep weirdos like Faustus up at night, and not in a good way either. What’s the ErosBloggable significance here?
Let’s draw out a little of the Erotical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology, shall we?
In an infinite universe characterized by inflation, the only limit imposed on what can happen is physical law, and that’s not a very strong constraint, at least relative to the way that we think about the world. Events that have any positive probabilities, even tiny ones, even ones that require triple scientific notation to describe, happen — indeed, they happen infinitely many times. And this includes some very weird events, like fully concious brains appearing right out in the vacuum of space as a fluctuation out of the background thermal equilibrium.
If that can happen, then there’s a peculiar implication, which is that it is very hard to write anything that’s really fiction. Because anything that could happen that doesn’t violate (maybe) a few conservation principles could be happening, indeed is happening. Imagine your bizarre story as a movie. In some region of the universe, there is a fluctuation that creates frame one of the movie. In the vast, vast majority of these, things dissolve back into the equilibrated ooze, to use physicist Sean Carroll’s description. But in a tiny number of regions relative to the first, we get another fluctuation that is frame two of the movie, and so forth.
And so it would seem to follow that somewhere out there in the universe women are mixing their DNA with honeybees to become sex assassins. Somewhere a police detective is having his dead girlfriend replaced with a sexy robot, and not noticing. Somewhere a coed is being put in erotic peril by being accidentally-on-purpose shrunk down to two inches tall. Every weird transaction that for us is just something pulled out of 3D SexVilla is something real people are doing somewhere. Not on the earth we know, but somewhere in the inflating universe.
And of course, there are an infinite number of copies of you dear reader, engaged in almost any thing your imagination can throw up (keep in mind those pesky conservation laws, although if your kink centers on breaking the laws of physics, you win Faustus’s Weird of the Year Award), and vastly many other things besides.
Think on that while you go to sleep tonight. Pleasant dreams!
November 7th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Here’s something you don’t see every day, courtesy of the “Furry Fandom” sex pack in 3D SexVilla. Furries going at it!
Sadly for our furrier friends, the furry functionality of the 3D SexVilla software is somewhat limited. Right now there appears to be only two outfits (the tiger for male avatars, the bunny for female) and the hoods are closed-face, so using any oral-contact poses causes the software to remove the hoods. And, personally, I find that the expressive faces of the normal hoodless models go along way toward making the simulation seem lifelike; the unmoving furry-faces, for me, detract from the illusion. But perhaps a furry-fetishist might see it differently.
Furry things I think the software would need to be really furry: more animal types, an assortment of tails, half-face furry masks, furry leggings and boots, furry gloves/paws..
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