Monday, August 2, 2010

Blood elf porn

By popular demand :), here it is, my thoughts on blood elf porn MMORPGs. The USA is the world's biggest consumer and producer of porn, including blood elf porn. That might be due to the curious legal situation, because pornography is mostly legal in the USA, while prostitution is illegal in all states except for a few rural counties of Nevada. Thus paying a girl to have sex is only legal if a camera is running. The US sex industry is estimated to be $10 to $13 billion big, a lot bigger than the US MMORPG industry. So why aren't there more porn MMORPGs?

Most people think that the lack of sexual content in MMORPGs and video games outside Japan is to not hurt sales to mainstream customers. Big distributors like Walmart refuse to sell games rated "adults only". But is that argument really all that valid in the current world of digital distribution? Some people think video games are for children, while pornography is not, and therefore feel that porn and video games don't go together. I would say that most parents haven't realized the truth of the internet yet: If your boy can play World of Warcraft, he can also find explicit pornographic material on the internet. In fact, parents should be more worried if their teenage sons *can't* find porn on the internet, because then they are either completely retarded, or sexually not normal. The existence of blood elf porn games wouldn't change anything in the accessibility of pornography to children.

If you Google for "blood elf porn", you will find either drawings or films with real actors wearing fake elf ears. Other people on the internet already noticed that there is a distinctive lack of pornographic 3D software, although a Google search will find some "virtual sex" single-player "games". The few existing porn MMORPGs aren't very good, and there is only one commercially somewhat successful MMORPG with pornographic content. There is also Age of Conan, with its "mature" rating, but that basically only means naked boobs, the size of which you can modify with a slider in the character generator between "large" and "gigantic". Some people "roleplay" cyber-sex in other MMORPGs, but as avatars usually can't undress to less than their underwear, and there are no animated emotes supported by the games, that "cybering" is mostly in text form.

There are two possible explanations for the lack of virtual blood elf porn games: One is the uncanny valley hypothesis, which says that an animation which is almost, but not quite, human-like is more likely to cause revulsion in a human observer, basically looking like a zombie. But I think the other theory is more likely to be the culprit: It is a lot cheaper to pay a porn actress with fake elf ears than to create good enough 3D models with life-like animations. Well-animated MMORPGs cost many millions of dollars, and the ubiquity of free pornography on the internet makes it doubtful that a company could make a profit on a blood elf porn MMORPG. For a porn MMORPG to really be a huge success, it would need to tap into the power of multiplayer fun, for which there would need to be a sizeable female population. In reality the acronym for "porn MMORPG" would stand for Many Men Online Role-Playing as Girls.

So, now if some other bloggers could write posts on the subject (and with the title) of "blood elf porn", we might get an interesting blog meme running for this low-traffic lazy summer period. :)

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