Apparently I’m not the only one who’s been finding Google’s Lively more deathly than alive when it comes to cybersex. One user notes how dead things are; another how even flirting is technically prohibited. Sexy, huh?
Continuing the theme of morbidity, TIG Source points us to an independently developed platformer called Deaths, which lets you use the corpses of the last fifty players who’ve been killed as part of the environment. Sounds original–plus it makes you think about the meaning/use of death in games. Now that’s morbidity I can get behind!
Despite the fact that I and other sex writers have covered the topic long ago, I suppose I should mention this piece of Violet Blue’s on whether cybersex is cheating. Is cybersex even really sex, she wants to know, and where are the lines of fidelity?
Happy weekend, Heroine Sheik readers. If you’re bored, lonely, or just horny this weekend, remember to hit up Beautiful Stranger!
Bonnie Ruberg is a sex, technology, and video games journalist who contributes regularly to publications like The Economist, Forbes, and The Village Voice. By day she's also a comparative literature PhD student at UC Berkeley, where she studies French, English, gender, sexuality, surrealism and perversion. You can reach her at [her first name and last name, all one big word] AT gmail DOT com.
July 26th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Well, please excuse me for the self-pimping I’m about to do, but… that death game concept sounds slightly similar to a game I’ve made, in which you have to kill yourself and use your tombstones as tools to get through each level. It’s called “No Extra Lives.”
Death is an interesting concept in games because it is slowly becoming obsolete. Back in the day, games took only a few hours to play through at maximum, and so it made sense that people would be able to “lose” the game. Now games are more about human experience and death is becoming another part of the experience rather than a losing condition.
July 26th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
This is genius. From a game-design view it’s an extremely clever idea, and from a social perspective what’s interesting is that there’s a collectivist vs. individualist debate lurking in there.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
It’s very true, skturner. Our entire idea of what death means (in games) has shifted now that we have longer games where losing conditions really aren’t acceptable. Even if we can’t see them, we almost always have these bodies piling up in the background of play: past lives we’ve used, the lives of other players, it’s just that we don’t normally think about them or see them.
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