thanks!
xxx – Debbie D. in Dallas

Plenty to read out there since it’s a developing issue, and bad news for freedom of speech as always. Best source on this for now is zepy.momotato.com

As for why it’s popular, it’s a matter of demographic. Far more otaku there than here, and developing studios are minuscule, catering to specific fetishes and fads. It’s a harder public to reach in America, but it’s there. There are some online stores that specialize on english eroge right now.

This is rather mindboggling. 20 years ago the mention of porn movies, a guy watching them and masturbating on them was a confession tantamount to being a loser, weak, pathetic, unable to find gratification with women, andsoforth. The same was unthinkable for women, even recently.

Maybe the US is about 10-20 years behind where I live, but attitudes are becoming pretty laid back on these topics.

Bear in mind – until recently I studied game design. And to these kids games are largely consoles. PC gaming is a fringe activity, to be tolerated for WoW. Games with anything else than key combo’s and XNA and deadly strikes are still oddities. Second Life doesn’t bear discussing, even in those artistic circles.

Give it time. The ceiling of stunning graphics, the skill to capture sexual tension, not getting it, the right dose of accumulating perversions versus prurience, that language of tantra needs to ahh “trickle down” into the collective subconscious. This is an area with very terrifying emotions.

But I do have lots of ideas on how these games would and should function. In my book, sexuality, sexual power play, abuse, seduction, lust, mental unraveling, the was of orgasm and denial can have function in games, and not just as iconoclastic prerequisites for other stuff. I have played with these games since my earliest puberty and I was doing stuff I now see in SL in the seventies. I had my first imaginary centaur in the mid 80s. No surprises there.

In time new cultural perspectives will ahh *saturate* our western cultures. Many people will put up a fight but as soon as the balance has shifted this becomes an acknowledged need and as soon as the quality of what games offer has ahh “drenched the marketplace” these games will begin educating people in in true enlightenment in earnest.

In a few decades sexuality in games will be regarded in almost the same manner as you regard fine food. It’s all about balance and care.

Japan.
They are called Eroge, Hentai Games, or H-Games… it’s all out there and much of it is all about sex. And it’s a whole industry over there.

So the next interesting question becomes: Why are those games big in Japan, but not big in the west?

where are all the sex-based computer games?

has a simple answer: the mainstream games industry cannot make them because of censorship. Games are heavily censored by governments (US, Germany, Australia) and by the industry itself, afraid of the backlash from offended moral-majority types.