First off, a question to all: does pornographic machinima exist? Even if no one’s done it yet, I imagine it’s only a matter of time - especially considering how many sex-based MMO’s have recently come out…
The idea itself raises a lot of questions. Would pornographic machinima have the same implications as normal pornography? Machinima is already such a strange, complicated medium. It lets us mold a world inside our screens, only to freeze it again; it re-subtracts the layer of interactivity, pancake-ing the visuals of gameplay, and somehow therefore creating art. But what would it mean to do that with a sex-based game?
For one, it would remove actual people, actual bodies, from the creation of pornography - which has, of course, both its good and bad points. It also would do strange things to the subject/object relationship. Porn is porn because it involves a subject, the viewer, and an object, the viewed film/woman/couple/whatever. There is no second subject, no dialogue, as in healthy, real-life sex (Not that porn is necessarily unhealthy, but that real-life sex that involves objectification, unless wholly conscious on the part of all involved, probably isn’t a good thing.). In video games, however, this dynamic is altered by the existence of interactivity, which by definition creates a dialogue.
Yet machinima, in halting the element of interactivity, brings us back again to pornography. Even if we aren’t watching two “real” people have sex, the element of voyeurism, of sneaking a peak of something forbidden, is the same - except that, with machinima, the dirty attraction isn’t to watching someone else’s sex per se, but to watching someone else’s gameplay.
In this way, not just machinima porn but all video game-based machinima is innately voyeuristic in that it takes pleasure in watching the interactivity of others. It’s also largely pornographic, in that it necessitates a ceased subjectivity, and a reappearance of the object.
October 10th, 2005 at 12:21 pm
The closest I’ve seen is the incredibly disturbing “Metal Pr0n 2″ video. It was created for humour rather than sexual titillation, but it still falls in this category in a sense. Watch it and see for yourself.
http://web.mit.edu/mokang/Public/mov/Metalpr0n.mpeg
October 10th, 2005 at 2:06 pm
Amusing, but as you say, no so titillating. Still, it’s a whole other issue: why we want to see our favorite, self-respecting characters humping things, because, strangely enough, there is something enjoyable about that…
October 10th, 2005 at 6:07 pm
First off…. Got a new site on the NP Network that I’m pimpin’ around. :)
http://www.mmorgy.com/
Now, to answer: Yes. In fucking DROVES. In SL alone, we have Slustler, PlayAv, and a few other magazines. We’re actually doing interviews with in-world porn producers on MMOrgy, as well as thinking about taking a shot at trying our own. I mean, really, as long as you have enough computers and enough skins, you never have to hire a model. ;)
October 10th, 2005 at 7:53 pm
qDot, God bless you, you really do have the best sex ins. Any particular sites to look at for machinima porn? Just curious if there are certain trends in it, especially since it’s sort of the normal porn of the MMO reality, and you figure there must be certain aspects that get translated more often to porn there, just as there are certain things that are more prevalent in live action porn as compared to real life.
Also, I checked MMOrgy - definitely a worthy cause, though not much content up at the moment (as I’m sure you know), but I’ll certainly keep checking back.
One more thing I wanted to ask you (because I feel like if anyone knows, you do), why do so many people have things for night elves? I’m not a WoW person myself, so I’m sure there’s something I’m just not getting here…
October 10th, 2005 at 8:16 pm
As for WoW night elves, I’m sure it has much to do with their /dance being the sexiest of the races. In all the Blizzard hi-res artwork featuring Night Elves, they’re almost always women dressed like strippers. In WoW, they dance like strippers, hence . . .
As for machinima, I don’t feel it to be a game with the interactivity removed, I feel it to be just simply “animation.” The tool you are using is vastly different from any other form of animation and thus it deserves its own classification and is an art in its own right, but it should still be classified with an MPA rating rather than an ESRB rating, if you get my drift. What makes machinima different in my eyes is that it’s a medium and a tool at the same time; the output exists in the same realm as the input. So, for my money, I wonder about the titilation aspect of pr0n animation in general.
October 10th, 2005 at 9:04 pm
Not many machinima porn websites up yet (Hopefully we’ll be changing that soon :) ). I’ll export a few pictures from a copy of Slustler in Second Life and email them to you. :)
October 10th, 2005 at 9:08 pm
Thanks for the night elves update. I was wondering why the only pictures I’ve seen make them look like call girls. Having checked that “dance” of theirs, I can kind of understand. Not that I agree, personally, with the attraction, but I can understand. Now why WoW chose to sex them up like that, I still don’t get.
As for machinima, I think we’re looking at it in different ways. You’re talking about the end product, a type of “animation”, and I’m talking about the process - at least, sort of. I suppose I’m more talking about the philosophical implications, the residue, that the process leaves behind on the product, if you catch my drift.
I don’t quite follow you though when you say, “The output exists in the same realm as the input. So, for my money, I wonder about the titilation aspect of pr0n animation in general.” I get the both “a medium and a tool” part, but I get lost from there. The general issue of animated porn is a big one, but I’m not sure how that connects (?). But I am sure you’re saying something really interesting, so I’d love to know more…
October 10th, 2005 at 9:08 pm
Thanks qdot - I’m bonnie @ heroine-sheik.com (without the spaces)
October 10th, 2005 at 9:28 pm
Ok, sent, and for anyone else that might wanna pick them up…
http://www.mmorgy.com/slustler.zip
And if we’re talking pure machine generated porn, not just video games (Warning: Don’t look if you can’t handle furry)…
http://www.taurinfox.com/animation.html
October 11th, 2005 at 11:45 am
Thanks for the free issue, qDot. I’ve got to say that it wasn’t quite what I expected, but certainly interesting. My question is how big the market is for SL pornography. How many people purchased that particular issue? Or all the issues so far? Could you potentially make real-world profit off of in-game porn? -sj
October 11th, 2005 at 1:40 pm
We’re hopefully getting an interview with the Slustler people (who hopefully won’t kill me for putting up those pics without permission), those are questions we want to ask.
As for making profit, well, we’re certainly going to try! One of the goals of MMOrgy is to set up and document a cross-world porn studio. All of the fun of porn with none of the soul-killing horribleness (or so I lead myself to believe…).
October 11th, 2005 at 3:19 pm
I found it particularly interesting that a lot of the spreads involved users (please excuse me, I know I don’t have the right MMO lingo), whose avatars were posing, talking about what they do in real life. Somehow I hadn’t expected people would want to share/read about that side of things, especially when linked to pornography. I wonder, is what turns people on the fact that there are real people behind this graphic images?
October 11th, 2005 at 9:42 pm
What I’m a sayin’ is that with machinima, your toolset is limited to the game engine you’re using. Granted, you can add in visual effects with compositing and of course the audio is entirely separate, but the visual aspect is largely controlled by the limits of the engine and thus your storytelling is generally limited to at least a casual relationship with the game world from which it came. Your input into the animation derives from a manipulation of the game engine and the resulting output is run from the game engine. While we may only see the end-product video file, the scene/sequence/scripts first had to be processed and generated in the game engine. Your input goes into the game engine, the game engine outputs your machinima. That’s what I mean by the output and input exist in the same realm. These are the aspects which make machinima a unique species of animation in my mind, but it’s still just animation. Thus, to me, machinima porn is in the same space as all other animated porn and so in wondering the what and why of titilating machinima, I think those are the same questions you could apply to all animated porn and whatever answers you can arrive at apply equally to hentai as they would to machinipr0n.
October 12th, 2005 at 6:42 am
matt: interesting points, except the difference in my mind is the aspect of ‘puppeteering,’ which exists in machiniporn and not in the other forms of animation you mentioned.
In games like SL, the characters you see are avatars of real-people. There is a 1-1 relationship between humans and avatars in such a world (WoW as well), and this adds a touch of humanity that is absent from animation like hentai, where there are characters removed from individuals and exploited to no end.
In game-generated porn, you have two characters having sex, but those two characters are representative of two people somewhere. In this way I see it as more closely aligned with live-action pornography than animation. What are your thoughts on this? -sj
October 12th, 2005 at 9:44 am
Hmm, I think we (Matt and I) might just disagree on this one. You’re saying that since the product is essentially animation, the implications are the same as animation. Personally, I say that there’s another level involved, one of interactivity voyeurism - the added thrill in looking into someone else’s (albeit, altered) game environment - which derives more from knowledge of the process than the product. Either way, you mention the specific enjoyment of animated porn, like hentai. Any thoughts on what that particular enjoyment is? It’s a topic I’m really interested in - what, for some people, makes animated sex more attractive than real sex? Granted, when you’re talking about hentai, that was in many ways created by certain restrictive descency laws in Japan. But I think it’s say tp say that now things have gone beyond that, and animated sexiness has become something of a culture of its own…
October 12th, 2005 at 2:42 pm
Re: Night Elves - it’s the ears. Some dudes just dig chicks with pointy ears. [See also: catgirl fetish.] ;-)
First off, I think one should distinguish machinima from, say, a simple video capture of ingame footage. In the case of machinima, the creator(s) are using the game engine and environments as a toolset for creating animation, just as Matt describes. Machinima is obviously much more limited than than a true 3D animating tool in terms of what can be accomplished; but it’s much easier for amateurs and non-artists to work with, which is a large part of why it appeals to people to use, I’m sure. Machinima is also usually staged and scripted, like an actual film; an ingame video clip, though, is more likely to be spontaneous, like a video taken of your vacation. Thus, I think sex which is “pantomimed” for the sake of machinima is quite different from that which occurs within the environs of an actual game - even if the net result is basically the same. Like the difference between a professional porno with AV stars versus a couple which films itself having sex.
Machinima porn is no more or less “interactive” than regular (or otherwise animated) porn: in both cases, the audience is passively watching the characters do their thing, with no way of controlling the outcome. So I’m not sure I quite get your point about “interactivity voyeurism,” Bonnie - or at least, how machinima porn differs from other types of porn. The manner in which machinima porn is created is quite different from regular porn, obviously; the manner in which it is consumed is not. In the end, you still have actors in front of a camera and an audience watching the finished product - even if the “actors” and “camera” in machinima are purely virtual. An interactive porn game, OTOH, is quite different: no matter how limited those interactions are, they still require user input to advance to a conclusion.
[See how I resisted “climax” there? That’s `cause I’m in grown-up mode right now!]
As for the issue of animated porn in general: while hentai anime is a relatively recent invention (which I believe got their start in the 80s with the explosion of direct-to-video anime two decades ago), I’m sure people have been drawing pervy pictures for as long as guys have thought drawings of penises was funny. [Answer: always.] And certainly, the use of sex appeal in comics and cartoons is at least as old as Bettie Boop, probably older. So finding sexual stimulation in artistic depictions of other humans is nothing new. Dig deep enough into any hetero man’s psyche and I’m sure you’ll find *some* superheroine or cartoon chick who turned him on as an adolescent.
That said, I think it is fair to say that hentai is its own, err, *vibrant* subgenre within the confines of general anime. And even a cursory scan of titles on, say, AnimeOnDVD reveals a plethora of subject matter covered by hentai - it ain’t all “Schoolgirls & Space Tentacles” (not that there’s any shortage of *those* titles). I’ve tried to bend my mind around their appeal over “real” porn for some people, and I have some pet theories:
- Idealized presentation of human anatomy: No body hair. No zits. No bruises. No unwanted fat. Even their hair always looks good. Even a porn star’s mop get tousled from time to time.
- Sexual fantasy scenarios not possible in “real” porn: Whatever your predilection, fetish, or fantasy is, chances are you can find someone who caters to it. Elf chicks? Check. Cat girls? Check. Guy with staying power for more than 3 minutes and who doesn’t fall asleep immediately afterwards? Check. [Actually, I lie, I just made that last one up. As if!]
- “Safer” than real porn: the fact that it’s animated provides an extra level of detachment from the subject matter, which may make some people more comfortable than lusting after living porn stars.
- An actual plot: most hentai anime actually *do* attempt to have a narrative, even if it’s just a thinly-veiled framework to hang the sex scenes on; and a few are actually bonafide stories with a few graphic sex scenes sprinkled throughout. [The same is true of sexually explicit comic books: some are outright porn; others are serious, yet with graphic sex.] In the U.S., certainly, “graphic sex scenes” between two (or more) people in movies is limited almost exclusively to porn; there is little if any serious attempt to deal with explicit sex at anything other than the prurient level.
October 12th, 2005 at 2:51 pm
Hmm, all good theories. Personally, I’m most interested in the level of detachment element you mention - whether animation further alienates us, or incites our imagination and therefore further includes us in the pornographic experience… I think you’re right as well about the appeal of plot in hentai - much more so than in American forms of porn. Even beyond the classic examples (”La Blue Girl”, “Legend of the Overfiend”, etc.), you could look to the entire shojo tradition, which often includes softcore scenes or homosexual eroticism.
But back to the Night Elf thing. Okay, I hear you on the ears, and I think it’s a great connection to the cat fetish, which also comes up a ton in anime. My question is, why!? Not that I’m being critical, but from a cultural and psychological standpoint, I just don’t understand. And I feel like there must be some super fascinating answer…
October 12th, 2005 at 2:58 pm
“And I feel like there must be some super fascinating answer"¦”
Super Fascinating Answer: it’s bestiality without technically being bestiality. In other words: ’she’s only half-cat, so it doesn’t count!’
There is a level of interactivity involved in making machinima, and that is the original interactivity. When making machinima films, the players are ‘playing’ the actors. Mangez-ça.
October 12th, 2005 at 3:04 pm
Tiens, Scott, sois gentil. Ce n’est pas sympa de dire a quelqu’un “Mangez-ca”. Pourtant, tu es mignon. Donc…
Sorry. Back to cats. I hear what you’re saying about the bestiality thing, although I don’t think it’s so related to the attractiveness of actual kitties, which sure wouldn’t be my first choice. And if it is a bestiality thing, why oh why is it only cats?
October 13th, 2005 at 8:09 am
*shrug* I gave up a long time ago trying to figure out why certain things float some people’s boats. There are plenty of bizarro sexual fetishes and turn-ons out there - I couldn’t even begin to explain them all (nor would I want to try!). You think cute cartoon chicks with pointy or furry ears are sexy? Hey, more power to you.
That said, I don’t think of the catgirl fetish as a bestiality thing. I think there are just some people with a taste for the exotic or bizarre, which manifests itself in different ways in geeky communities. So women with weird skin color (mention “Orion slave girls” to male Trekkies for fun!), women with animal traits, women with unusual or distorted physiques (e.g., elongated ears), non-human women (e.g., elves, aliens, robots) - the list goes on and on and on…
In some sense, I think it’s good to explore such issues, to figure out what defines our sexuality when you raise hypotheticals about females who are truly Other. And frankly, I’m more comfortable with those turned on by robot maid catgirls than those aroused by a Kentucky Derby champion…if just barely. ;-P
[And yes, I focus on men who lust after bizarro women because, near as I can tell, women either (A) don’t really lust after bizarro men, (B) they’re much more discreet about it, or (C) no one bothers to cater to their market.]
October 13th, 2005 at 10:18 am
I hadn’t actually thought about that, Ferrous. You never hear about women with a thing for cat-boys, do you?
October 13th, 2005 at 1:38 pm
Yeah, good point. Every example I can think of of an animated boy/animal has been comic. Although, sometimes I wonder if you can split it down the normal lines of male and female desire, since our culture does put the female form on high as an aesthetic object, and both sexes, whether they want to admit or not, come to admire it highly. For example, I do think the cat/girl thing is striking, aesthetically. Then again, I can’t say I find it sexually arousing - and trust me, I’m the first to admit when something female makes me hot. I’m still quite a bit pissed that my parents got off with a straight child. At least I have a little brother; I can still hope :-).
October 13th, 2005 at 2:34 pm
Random thoughts:
I’ve heard some people opine (and I’m probably restating this badly) that drawn / animated porn provides a layer of abstraction versus real porn; that the characters in the former become symbolic and as such, they become open to interpretation in ways which real porn stars can’t. Thus, “imaginary” porn is stimulating not so much for what you see, but for what it represents - the thoughts and images in provokes in your mind.
Take written erotica: it’s clearly meant to be arousing, yet they’re just words; the only images are the ones conjured by your imagination. On the opposite extreme, you have “real” porn: images of actual humans engaged in sexual acts, with little left to the imagination. Drawn or animated porn, then, falls somewhere in between: you’re presented with concrete images, but you know they aren’t real, so your subconscious can play with those images in ways they can’t with real people.
Again: just a theory I’ve heard kicked around. But which comes back around to: why would people get so hung up about sex in games? These aren’t real people, just a bunch of polygons being manipulated to simulate something - so why are some people aroused while others are offended?
October 14th, 2005 at 10:32 am
Interesting thoughts, Ferrous. I think what we really need, instead of all our speculating, is to talk to some sex-game players, and ask them questions about their attraction to the games.
October 25th, 2005 at 6:18 am
Simple reason why some people find non-real and non-humans (anything from animals to cartoon characters to video game characters) attractive. They’re screwups. And anyone who tries to legitamise jerking off to cartoon child porn with the excuse “it’s okay because they aren’t real!” needs to be killed, slowly, in public. Make of them an example. Make the world a better place. Legal or not, being into that shit puts you on the bottom rung of humanity.
Nip machinima porn in the bud before Machinima’s good name is polluted.
December 22nd, 2005 at 10:37 am
I’ve been quite interested in some of the comments here and the responses they’ve elicited. Particularly the last one about the kiddie porn angle.
There’s been a lot of shouting recently about how violent video games can actually stimulate kids to violence in the real world. There’s also, for many years, been the old ‘porn-leads-to-rape’ arguement.
At the end of the day, there are those people out there, who find it difficult to separate reality from fiction. Fiction ‘per se’ has been a mainstream source of entertainment for as long as man as lived and there will always be those who can’t tell fiction from fact. These people are usually either juvenilles or adults with juvenille minds (for whatever reason). It stands to reason that, as technology improves, ways will be found to make ficticious events and images more ‘real’. Look at the holodeck technology in ‘Star Trek’. Any individual could act out their wildest and sickest fantasies and not be censured for it as ‘it’s not real’. It won’t be long before real live actors do not feature in films, it will all be ‘avatars’. The purists will, no doubt, raise hell, but it WILL happen, just as this kind of entertainment WILL happen.
Like the early Victorian ‘etchings’, through Health & Efficiency in the 50’s and 60’s, to Playboy, Colour Climax and the current wash of both soft and hardcore porn, it’s a way of people getting their jollies without resorting to actually doing the imagery they portray themselves. It’s no more real than Mills and Boon or Star Trek or Coronation Street, but it fills a niche. Yes, we’ll have to slap age ratings on it, but what the hell.
Remember, the only screw-ups are those people who think that their view of the world is the ONLY one!
Soap box over!
December 23rd, 2005 at 7:25 am
Looks like Wired has caught up with your thoughts in relation to this:
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69878,00.html
December 23rd, 2005 at 7:28 am
Er, I just realised you wrote the piece. My bad :P
December 23rd, 2005 at 11:28 am
Indeed. But, hey, if I hadn’t written it, it would have been a sweet heads-up :-).
December 23rd, 2005 at 11:29 am
Indeed. But, hey, if I hadn’t written it, it would have been a sweet heads-up :-).