For a company like xStream3D Multimedia, which makes Virtually Jenna — the official online Jenna Jameson game — the event was a logical meeting place for a growing industry recently shunned by E3, the tradeshow for mainstream video games.
“This is a great conference for us,” Brad Abram, president of xStream, told XBIZ. “This is a way for two ends of a new industry to meet and put their best foot forward. For game companies, this is a new arena with lots of potential; for adult companies, this is a new product that complements existing content, and it’s a way to upsell customers on something new.”
The conference featured a range of panelists, from Wired sex columnist Regina Lynn, who gave a personal account of sex online, to attorney Gregory Piccionelli, who gave a primer on adult entertainment law for game developers.
Dave Taylor, a noted game developer and industry consultant, addressed the crowd from an end-user perspective with a touch of humor, saying that “porn in games requires a third hand.”
While Taylor offered no solution to the third hand problem, he did point out that adult games present a novel solution to restrictions on traditional adult content. Adult games allow for endless combinations of niches — the permutation problem — and make dangerous, illegal and impossible content available, Taylor said.
While Taylor chose to focus on women with breasts that exceeded the laws of physics, Joan Irvine, executive director of ASACP, moderated a panel on Morals & Ethics & Sex & Games, expressing concern about the possibility of depictions of children in adult games.
“The challenge with adult games will be to develop best practices for the industry,” Irvine told XBIZ. “It will be a lot like developing best practices for dating sites. But there’s a unique challenge for games because we want go beyond the legal guidelines in terms of restricting depictions of otherwise illegal content.”
Adult games also will face a hurdle in terms of establishing a best practice that demonstrates that adult games will not be marketed to children, according to Irvine.
Attorney Lawrence Walters, an Irvine panelist, outlined the censorship restrictions adult game companies will face as their products grow in popularity.
“Welcome to our world,” Walters told the crowd.
While many attendees chuckled at Walters’ remark, his discourse on the legal, political and moral adversaries lining up to challenge the adult gaming industry highlighted the purpose of his visit.
“[For the adult entertainment industry] this is about coalition building,” Walters told XBIZ. “That’s why I’m here, to educate and network with an industry that is new to the challenges of censorship, to teach them about what we’ve been going through for decades.”
The conference was produced by Cynthia Freese of Evergreen Events.
