Protecting minors

Spend the Night will be sold as an AO (Adults Only) title, opening up problems of distribution. Traditional game retailers and family-based stores won't be lining up to stock the game, but Coshland is confident it will find broad distribution.

But this mixture of a new game concept, masses of publicity and sex is also likely to attract a very different kind of audience -  teens and kids. Coshland says, "We will do everything in our power to stop children accessing the game, to the extent that any adult product can. You cannot play this game by just picking it up. You have to connect to our servers and validate a credit card and any number of methods of checking age verification. We can only do what is available out there."

Sex and the game industry

Games and sexual content have mixed before and the result has almost always been either outright offensive or plain ludicrous. Next Generation recently commissioned a feature on overt sexual / pornographic (not romantic) content in games, and the results were too poor, or too tasteless, to bother publishing.

moscallout"We're very up front about what our game offers"/moscalloutThe most recent example of sex in a game was Grand Theft Auto's Hot Coffee mod; a hidden episode that scandalized the nation and rendered a very violent game that was suitable for 17-year-olds and older, suddenly only suitable for 18-year-olds and older. It exposed both the fundamentally schoolboyish attitude the game industry has towards sex, and the ceaselessly amazing relationship the public (or at least the public's representatives) has with the notions of games and sex and, inexplicably, violence.

For Coshland, GTA is irrelevant because Hot Coffee was hidden content and "we're very up front about what our game offers".

He believes that multiplayer gaming, decent graphics and casual gaming have all come together to bring gaming and erotica together; and to open up a very large market.

Still, we can talk about new markets and technology and demographics all day long. Doesn't this game, ultimately, make him a pornographer? "I guess that would be how you define it really. In a traditional sense pornography is a passive visual entertainment, but in this case the players themselves will be generating the gameplay and they can do what they want; we just provide the tools. The level of explicitness is determined what players choose to do."