Marketplaces: Money and Mind
Asguard said:
As an example I predict at least ONE person will write (at least until they read this) "only pervs want more simulated sex", "if you want more porn just look at the internet"
There's this video game, see. And in it, there are all sorts of sublime sex jokes. For instance, you can get yourself a hooker, bang her, then beat her to death with a pink double-ender, and get your money back. Or cut her throat. Or shoot her in the head. It's awful. But it's fascinating; everyone I know who played the game did that at least a few times. You can also pimp whores, and if you successfully sell, protect, and collect from ten of them, the game unlocks a new feature. Now you can get a whore, and she will pay you for sex. And you can still kill her afterward and pick up an extra five bucks at least, if not more.
And there is a radio host who is a world-traveling child molester. It's absolutely fucking hilarious. One of the women you date is a complete nympho perv. You can take her out, wreck cars and run people down, pick up a bite to eat, and have insanely crazy sex. The plot requires you go through a mission in which a psycho woman
rapes your character. The plot requires you to wear a gimp suit and bang the daylights out of a croupier; you even
beat up the gimp. Which is the point in the game when you must finally recognize the possibility of beating people to death with a dildo. And you do. Because it is hilarious. You walk down the street with a twenty-four inch magenta monster in your hand, just pick someone at random, and beat the holy living f@ck out of them with it.
And you know, a newer chapter of the game got rid of the hookers and upgraded the strip club scenes. You get two girls in g-strings on the third lap dance.
Eh ... I don't know, you know?
I'd rather run around in a gimp suit, or a tuxedo, beating people to death with a dildo. It's a lot funnier. There's more to it than just watching clubbing in the canyon.
One of the things that happens in the presence of customary prohibitions is that people find ways to work around them. If people need more cock in their video games, that's fine with me. No, really, that's all it is. More cock.
The semi-regular lay in the later chapter of the game; I'm not sure the cutscenes would be that much improved by seeing the undersized instrument objectified by the flaccid dialogue.
So, sure, I don't see a reason why not. After all, the results of our neurotic obsession with getting around the rules are hit and miss. And as soon as the software companies overturn the laws against distributing pornography to minors, they'll get right on the cock deficit. Because the video game designers aren't leaving their underage market behind. That's the meat market where you compete to bring customers into the long-term franchise, such as a
Halo or
GTA. And we need not kid ourselves that when the teenagers move into the most valuable market sector, age 18-49, that they haven't already played something like
GTA. Putting cock into those games will inevitably run up against the question of distributing pornography to minors. Parents who blithely buy their child a controversial game might not pay much attention to the rantings of the usual suspects. But once word gets out that they've crossed to virtual pornography, many of those parents will clamp down. The immediate sales loss isn't so worrisome; rather, it's the loss of access to a long-term customer.
Inevitably, the question of cocking up video games is a business consideration. 'Tis better to have the bird in the hand than hope to capture it tomorrow.
As it is, they are capturing significant audiences simply finding ways around the rules. It makes them look clever. And it occasionally makes for some good scriptwriting. The software companies won't attempt more blatant pornography without believing they have a market reason to.
And as with money, so with ideas: You can certainly criticize the customary standards affecting the reservation of such sexual behavior to limited view, but societies in general aren't going to undertake such changes without some apparent demand in the marketplace of ideas that offers some profit for accommodating.