Introduction
When Brenda Brathwaite helped launch a special interest group dedicated to sexual game content for the International Game Developers Association last summer, she decided to do a "link of the day" on the IGDA's Sex & Games blog that would feature a new sexually oriented game site for every day of the week. At the 2006 Game Developer Conference (GDC) this week in San Jose, Brathwaite said she wasn't sure there were enough sex game sites to cover 364 days a year (she confessed to taking Christmas off).
She was wrong. "I'm so not in danger of running out of links!", Brathwaite declared to the audience during her seminar on sex and games. Her message was simple: the amount of sexual content and sex-focused games is increasing every day, and is approaching critical mass. Whether or not this will lead to mainstream acceptance, however, is an entirely different story.
Brathwaite's often-humorous and enlightening seminar began by exploring the history of sex in video and computer games. And what better place to start than the joystick? Brathwaite remarked about the phallic nature of the controller, especially the model aptly named "Thrustmaster."
She also informed the audience about a number of early video games during the 1980s that blazed the trail for sexual content.
Those titles include:
- Leather Goddesses of Phobos, the memorable Infocom game in which aliens attack earth in 1936, starting in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, and attempt to turn the population into a bunch of sex slaves. (I say let 'em, but that's a subject for another time).
- Custer's Revenge, the inglorious and irredeemable Atari 2600 game that involves General George Custer, armed with a Ron Burgundy-like erection, sexually assaulting hog-tied Native American women. And Congress thought Grand Theft Auto was bad...
- Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, the first entry of the historic Leisure Suit Larry series. In this classic, Larry, a 38-year-old virgin, decides to head to Lost Wages to... well, you get the point.
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