No Sex Please, We're Capsuleers????

"Sweat baby, sweat baby, sex is a Texas drought, me and you do the kind of stuff that only Prince would sing about, so put your hands down my pants and I'll bet you'll feel nuts..."

- The Bloodhound Gang, The Bad Touch.

Do you ever pay any real attention to those pop-up style adverts you sometimes get when logging into Eve Online? Usually for Eon Magazine or some offer in the Eve Online store? "This Eve Related Promotion will only Display Once". Cannot say I pay a lot of attention, the reason I'm on the log in screen is that I want to log into Eve and fly some spaceships... NOW! However, a recent advert for the Noble Exchange aka NeX Store aka Nob Shop caught my eye. Why? It was a picture of a female toon laying on her front with her legs bent back. The picture was shot down her back showing the back of the head but focusing on the skirt and boots she was wearing. Two of my favorite things, Eve Online and a good pair of legs in high-heeled FMB's (F*** me boots). OK I accept it was just pixels, but in the words of Dave Lister from Red Dwarf "Yeah, but WHAT pixels". I may have given the advert a small mental "Giggity" and went on to playing important internet spaceships. The advert in question is below for either your viewing pleasure....

.... or for you to start to moan about CCP being sexist. What? Yes that was the reaction on the Eve-O forums from some of the community. Not sure if it just wasn't some humungous troll but there were some who were complaining CCP was being sexist. Now stangely enough being a 35 year-old red blooded male, I don't agree. Rule number 1 in advertising. Sex sells. Turn on MTV, let me know if you find a pop music video with a really fat and ugly artist, male or female. Can only beautiful people sing well? Of course not, but sex sells. And that thread got me thinking, and if you've read my previous posts whenever I get thinking a blog appears!

I asked Eelis Kiy, SoTF member, lady gamer and author of Where the Frack is My Ship, what she thought about the advert.

"I don't find anything in games offensive in a sexist way tbh - when you've spent 10 years surrounded by men who fawn all over you the second they realise you have boobies and don't look like the back end of a bus - combined with spending all your time in games where the women have ridiculously unrealistic figures and outfits - well you just accept it all as "make-believe" rather than anything to be offended by. Imo! (PS my sister brought me a Lara Croft action figure for my birthday one year lol)"

So what about sex in Eve Online? It is already there, if you look closely, but is more coming?

Go to the official Eve Online Wiki and look up Gallente. The first picture you get is a thin woman with long flowing black hair wearing very little and her modesty is vaguely protected by what can be only described as two over-sized Janet Jackson nipple rings from THAT superbowl (no I'm not American or watch their football but that incident a few years ago was very funny to the rest of the world, not the nipple ring but the reaction and lawsuits).

Earlier this year, Shadows of the Federation built our own station in 2DWM-2 in Vale of the Silent. We might have since sold it on when we found 0.0 NC Sov holding wasn't for us (approximately 2 weeks before the Russians stomped through there and captured it), but that is OUR station and always will be, no matter if we sold it or if PL or RDF are sat in it currently. We built it through blood, sweat, tears, ISK and capital reps, it's ours! Ever looked closely at a 0.0 player built Minmatar outpost? Here is a screenshot I took after our egg became a station and we were furiously repping it. Yes, that is a neon "Girls" sign on the station!

Now look at the items in game that you can fill your cargo hold with. You have exotic dancers, you have prostitutes. These are all linked to missions, some involving pleasure domes or pleasure gardens or pleasure palaces or something along those lines. I think we can all imagine what is supposed to go on in them. Please CCP, when you properly release Incarna rather than a 3D walking station menu, can we dock at those structures, pleeeeeease... :)

However sex in Eve is all fairly low-key. Some might say appropraite for a game with a PEGI 12 cert like Eve Online. Of course "Online interactions" are not covered in that cert and if you looked at SoTF's corp chat you'd probably go for a R18 rating. However, does a game with an average player age of 31 need a PEGI 12 cert? Some movies have been know to have been re-edited when they sent it in for classification and they felt the classification awarded was too low and wanted the 18 certificate for it. So they made it a bit more naughty and sent it back. Why? Because the "18" certificate will sell more copies than a "15" certificate when targetting certain audiences.

Have you read the Eve novels? Eve: The Empyrean Age has Zero-G bonking and of course that Amarrian Chamberlain who is a perverted as they come. Eve: The Burning Life has some low key references and tongue action. All in all, very low key again.

So generally CCP, in my honest opinion, has not expoited sex for sales.... the silly sods!

Have other games? Absolutely. So why not Eve? Is Iceland a prudish nation? Think of some of the games that have sex or use sex to sell copies of the game...

• Who has played Mass Effect and after seeing the "sex scene" replayed the game as the female Commander Sheppard just to get back to that part for some girl-on-girl action? (I didn't, I just YouTube'd it when I heard about it)
• Anyone played the original EverQuest? Remember the box cover (remember when games came in cardboard boxes?) of the Ruins of Kunark. Partically dressed female Elf in chains!
• Age of Conan. Well that certainly has plenty of, erm, plenty. From the character costumes to running quests for the local brothel complete with "proffesional" ladies!
• Any Japanese styled fighting game - Dead or Alive, Bayonetta etc etc
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Need I say anything?
• Lara Croft!!!

From what I can tell I'm pretty average in game. 35 years old (4 years above the actually average age of an Eve Online player), male, married etc. So why doesn't CCP pander to our two-track minds? Two-track? Yes, Eve players (males anyway) have two-track minds. Your average male has a mind like a railway at a coal fired power plant, one-track and dirty. Your average male Eve player also thinks about Eve a lot during the day too!

Sex and Sci Fi go together, they always have. Whilst there are some lovely ladies out there who enjoy sci-fi (come back Eelis!!!) it is a male dominated genre. Think of the movies and series.

• The 1968 sci-fi movie "Barberella". Look it up ;)
• How about Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi in THAT bikini?
• Flash Gordon and then of course Flesh Gordon!
• How many Star Trek fans instanainiously combusted during DS9 when Jadzia Dax  swapped spit with Dr. Lenara Kahn (I did have to Google that, not such a Trekie I knew her name)
• Lexx - A sci-fi series not only named after a corp mate in SoTF who gets so much of the subject matter he doesn't get to play Eve much, but also, according to Wikipedia, a sci-fi series with so much of the subject matter in it's unsuitable for Americans??? "Not originally produced for a US network, the series features more sexual innuendo and nudity than audiences in the United States are generally accustomed to seeing in non-premium programming. The Sci Fi Channel purchased the series....."
• Six in Battlestar Gallactica
• Seven of Nine in Voyager
• Mila Jovovich in The Fifth Element
• Natasha Henstridge in Species
• Leela and Amy Wong in Fururama
• Jamie Bamber in BSG (Eelis Kiy INSISTED this was included)

To be honest I could go on forever. Think about how many sci-fi films and shows feature more sex than Eve Online. I mean even the original Star Trek series has more. Kirk was either shooting the aliens or kissing them.

So what can CCP do? What will they do?

• Will they sex-up the NeX store? To be honest I personally feel those skirts are way too long and those heels way too short!
• Will we get see-through stuff. See the quality of our graphics engine! ;)
• Lingerie! Will underwear be availible on the NeX store. Why not? TBH I garrentee they'll sell more sets of stockings and suspenders than monocles!
• Will we get Glenn Quagmire inspired furniture for the CQ? Personally I want a heart-shaped waterbed with leopard print sheets! Bow-chica-wow-wow.

But most of all I hope we get that bloody door open and get down to the bar in Minmatar and Gallente stations. We want podium and pole dancers!!!!

OK that's just me thinking aloud, and might be a bit too much. But I think there is a middle ground and I'm sure CCP are looking into it. In the CSM minutes it was noted that there was call for feti...., erm, specialist clothing, in Incarna.

I have CQ turned off currently. I turned it on for 10 minutes yesterday to take some screenshots but that was the first time since about 2 days after launch. All the CQ is currently is a good looking, but inefficient, station menu.

However, put the right clothing in the NeX store, open up the stations and give us access to the bars, put some entertainment NPC's in there, and I might very well turn it back on! Of course, blowing up peoples ships will always be my number 1 priority in game. But whilst waiting for the fleet to form or just after it disbands for the night, or may be even whilst waiting out a GCC timer... I'd go for a bit of T&A down the station bar!

Don't force us to use Incarna CCP, give us some bloody good reasons to!

/Signed Drackarn.
Red Blooded Male and Proud of It ;)