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The Sex Blog Of Record
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 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 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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November 3rd, 2009 -- by Bacchus
There’s something deeply, bizarrely, and recursively ironic about this. While I was playing with the 3D SexVilla BrainImageInstantiator (mock trademark hereby claimed), an exceedingly primitive AI (aka weblog spamming script) landed in Faustus’s post about the future of such tools, and successfully (albeit briefly) hacked a nascent argument about the potential capabilities of AIs by taking three sentence fragments from the previous comment and rearranging them into something that looked superficially plausible to my own primitive high-speed “is this comment human?” Turing-testing algorithms.
Ladies and gentlemen and assorted avatars, please fasten your seatbelts, this is gonna be a long and bumpy ride. And there’s no telling where we might end up.
Meanwhile, back at the dance club, it’s after hours and one of the t-girls (that’s the term the 3D SexVilla software uses, not mine) has gotten bored and perhaps a little lonely:
October 30th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Ever since last week’s post on 3D SexVilla I’ve been trying to decide whether the whole thing is just a transient gimmick, or whether it’s a tool sufficient to allow non-artists to create and share visual instantiations of their fantasies. If it’s the latter, and if it catches on, it could prove to be quite a phenomenon — one I think is potentially important. (I’ve long been frustrated by the fact that I can visualize things I’d like to see, but there’s no way to instantiate them in visual form short of hiring an artist or spending a few years in art school. Sufficiently good computer software will be an important step in solving this.)
One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is how open the product is. If the design work that users do can be readily saved and shared, there’s likely to be a fan community that grows up around the product, as there long has been around the quite-a-bit-harder-to-use and (IMO) not-for-the-non-artist 3d-modeling tool Poser.
Thus I was heartened to see the following in the summary of recent changes to the latest release of the 3D SexVilla software:
All New Pose Editor
Our software engineers have spent countless hours fine-tuning this ‘Pose Editor’ release. It’s an exclusive powerful new in-game motion control tool featuring a collapsible user interface with tons of sliders and controls that enables you to create your own poses, however and whatever you want. It’s an updated mannequin model rigged to allow precise and exacting control of body positions, joint positioning and rotation editing as well as new 3D face shaping, mouth and tongue morphing animations and hand gestures.
Poser Editor allows you to also import poses from the Gamerotica community or from Daz3D/Poser based BVH exports. Using standards based BVH allows you to quickly import existing animations and convert them to 3D Kink and create and watch some of the most advanced sex animations possible.
Still no word on whether the local save formats are usefully exportable/shareable, but the standards-based imports is, at least, good news.
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