  Cheers to Titch for urlLink this link, explaining the next step in online gaming. Sociolotron, currently in beta, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The game offers fare such as battling monsters, questing and other fantasies familiar to players of games like EverQuest and Ultima Online. But Sociolotron differs by providing a way to indulge in sexual taboos like rape and bondage with consequences like sexually transmitted diseases and even pregnancy. And it is quite explicit in informing would-be players about what they may experience in-world. To Patric Lagny, Sociolotron's developer, the game is about breaking down the social conventions that limit what players can do in the EverQuests of the world. "I see it as an environment where you should be able to do anything you want," he said. "It goes beyond the real and gives people the opportunity to do things you couldn't in reality. " According to Lagny, rapes -- as with other in-game crimes like theft, murder and the like -- are quickly investigated. If the perpetrator is caught, he or she is sent to trial. There, a prosecutor, judge and jury -- all roles filled by players -- preside as the accused argues his or her case.
Penalties for rape range from a week to two weeks in the game's jail, said Lagny. "It looks like they're saying, why don't we take the mechanisms of society as they exist, which already have checks and balances built in," said Dibbell, "and just map them into the game play. " "I think sexual crimes are interesting," he said, "because unlike killing or (other) physical violence, there is a real psychological element of degradation and humiliation. " And the reactions of those who have been raped in Sociolotron is revealing, especially given that they knew ahead of time that it could happen to them. "While being raped, it's a loss of control," said a female Sociolotron player known as Phoenix. I "have (only) been raped once by an unknown rapist, (and it) scared the daylights out of me at first. " "I spent about an hour talking to a male victim of a male rapist in the game," said a player known as Ginger, "and he was actually quite distressed about it all in a real-life way.
" Even the rapists themselves sometimes have the tables turned on them, said Lord Foucault. "Being raped myself was shocking at first," he said. "When it happened on a public street where anyone could see it, I was shocked. " Surprisingly, however, some players find that, even though they identify with the emotions their characters feel, they don't always think being raped in the game is all that awful, especially after the first time.
And that has every bit to do with the fact that they know they are participating in a world where, as Lagny says, players are encouraged to act as they wish. "We get very emotional about what happens to our characters, as we do put a lot of work into them," said Phoenix. "But we also need to remember (that) when we signed up for the game that we were all warned about what can and will happen in the game. And we have to figure out how our characters will deal with the 'emotional damage. '" For Lord Foucault, that meant deciding that what had happened to him was "cool" and then figuring out ways to make sure it didn't happen again.
In fact, Reynolds said, the fact that rape and other so-called bad acts are possible in a game like Sociolotron can actually be a valuable social experiment. "On the face of it, it looks immoral," he said. "But there are all kinds of reasons, from notions of what games are and what imagination and playing with concepts are, and the fact that, assuming that everyone there is an adult and knows what they're doing, it's not that easy to mount a moral argument against it. " More to the point, said Ginger, Sociolotron's world is one where caveat emptor is the ruling philosophy, and adults who consent to participate in such a world should be left to their own devices.
"If you can't handle virtual bad things happening to you in a virtual world, then you really shouldn't be playing," Ginger said. "This place has been created to get away from the mainstream, to give players a dark environment with which to play in. If they don't want a dark environment where bad things happen, then they should go back to (The Sims Online) or wherever else it was they came from. " Well, ain't that lovely. The only thing I thought you had to worry about in MMORPGs was being h4X0red to annoying Korean kids. Don't know how true this is - it reads a little like a Brass Eye/"Panto The Dog" style report. 
