Luring Women into Adult Games

Designers of adult-oriented video games are trying to figure out how to attract women. Nice, I'd like to know how to do the same thing myself, but their efforts are for catching "bigger fish". So, what they're doing is attracting women in creating the ultimate lure for larger groups of male customers.

"Right now, the (adult video game) market targets mainly straight white guys," said Brenda Brathwaite, the chair of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) sex special interest group, and the moderator of Wednesday's roundtable. "And straight white guys aren't the only ones having sex."

The reason for making women see this as something to "click on" is trying to please multiple market constituencies. Noah Dudley, the producer of Naughty America, says that women don't view sex the same way men do, thus their approach is slightly different: "When we started, it was pretty much sex land. You could have sex anywhere you wanted. Our marketing people said, 'We can't sell this to women.' So we cut way back on the sexual content. Now you can have sex pretty much in your apartment. This shows that it's a lot more appealing to women," said Dudley.

Sims like Second Life make it pretty easy for subscribers to engage in sexual activities, even though the game's purpose is to make money. Even World of Warcraft may be used in such purpose, using your avatar. And there's one more aspect to the whole "attracting female groups into sex related video games" deal. Women are more secretive than men; they'd fancy their little adventure every night without anyone ever having to know anything about it.