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?
