Rating: NNNNN
Jenna Jameson seems bored. I am sliding a cucumber in and out of her pixel-perfect vagina, and her “oohs” seem a little forced. So I ask Sunny, a bronzed male model with just enough body hair to appear realistic yet groomed, for a hand. I put him on “automatic” mode and settle back to enjoy the view.
VirtuallyJenna is the newest evolution in the adult gaming market: a PC game available online ( www.virtuallyjenna.com ) in which players produce their own pornography scenes starring Jenna.
“We’re changing the face of adult gaming,” says an ebullient Brad Abrams, president of production company XStream3D, while at the E3 conference in L.A. “Jenna’s the biggest in the business right now,” he says, with a fan base of ranging from housewives to hardcore connoisseurs.
The object of the game is to bring Jenna and some of her Vivid friends to orgasm. You have at your disposal everything from carrots to anal beads, as well as various lingerie attire and some unexpected gear like an army helmet. The ladies, plus token male Sunny, are equipped with Mortal Kombat-like arousal metres, which inch upwards toward orgasm when you use a toy or position they like. A nice feature is the ability to be able to shift views, from the gaze of the camera to a first-person view of the action.
Abrams expresses interested in the implications of exploring gender categories through game play. It’s interesting to listen to people’s experiences when they are “exploring all the positions and combinations like girl-girl and boy-boy (in an upcoming gay version) and seeing how they feel when they are in control of such a situation.”
There are rules, though, on what you can stick where: a big red X covered the dildo when I tried using it on the wide-eyed Sunny.
Sunny has a few choice phrases like “uuuh,” and Jenna only has two oft-repeated phrases, “Oooh” and “Mmm, yeah.” So the sound is sketchy.
All of Jenna’s fleshy bits were painstakingly constructed by Abrams and his team from scratch.
“3-D modelling of the human body has its challenges, and trying to do sex with 3-D characters is another huge leap in human character animation,” he says of the process.
“Things that normal ‘action’ games don’t worry about like jiggling breasts, facial expressions and movement of hair are required in sex games.”
Cognitive scientists have shown that we are excellent at discerning the subtleties of facial expressions, so animated faces are under the most scrutiny for realism. When animation is stylized (think Peanuts), we find it endearing, but when characters become too much like humans (the Final Fantasy movie), we find them creepy because we notice tiny inconsistencies that make them look like animated corpses.
The extra-smooth faces with motorized mouths and eyes here are sort of disturbing. As Vice put it in this month’s issue, “Dear girls . We like a few zits. It makes you more human.”
The bodies look much better. The skin looks exquisite, and breasts and bums seem to jiggle perfectly along. The vaginas are almost photo-realistic, but their movements are rather repetitive under the thrust of different toys.
“We know we will never be able to trick a human into believing that a computer-generated character is real,” says Abrams. That’s one of the reasons Abrams rejects the idea that virtual relationships might take the place of the real kind. People play along to realize a dream, says Abrams. “It won’t be a substitute for the real-world.”
VirtuallyJenna is just the beginning.
“We hope to have several hundred girls and guys in the game over the next few years,” says Abrams.
The next step for VirtuallyJenna is to allow users to be part of the action by sending in a jpeg of themselves to be pasted onto the face of the male character, which drastically increases the integrative nature of the play. It seems Sunny’s days on the set are numbered.
Be forewarned that the game is fairly graphics-intensive and can only run on new PCs.
Although it wasn’t quite the turn-on I was expecting, the demo is worth a download. Game-play oscillates between novelty (Oooh! What happens when you stick in the corn?) and wanting to call your own partner and have a go at the real thing.
