Feature: Sex in Games Conference Keynote

In the first of today's Gamasutra features, we begin our retrospective coverage of the first ever Sex in Video Games conference with a look back at the openin keynote and lecture by event organizer and game design veteran Brenda Brathwaite. In the following extract, writer Ren Reynolds summarizes Brathwaite's disspelling of the myth that players don't crave sex in games, the first of three such dispelled rumors in her speech: "The fact of emergent sexual practices in just about every online game and the modding scene’s creation of adult textures for just about every game that can be patched shows that there is a latent demand for adult content in games. Examples of the user community creating it’s own content where the market is not supplying it include the World of Warcraft erotic machinima site 'World of Porncraft,' which is devoted to sexual uses of MMOs and Sex MMOrgy; the fact that even Habbo hotel, a game with no in world economy, has an emergent sex industry where people "babbo for furniture"; and lastly, what Brathwaite described "the grand daddy of emergent sex," Second Life, a virtual space that has a sexual culture that is "exceptional and totally community generated," a space where you can purchase virtual sex, where there are reviews of escort services and even an adult publication for the furry community called ‘Play Pony.'" You can read the full Gamasutra feature for more, with continuing coverage throughout the week (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).