Sex Play in Cyberspace : O.C. Firm’s CD-ROMs Are Erotic, Interactive

The image of Stephanie, a busty blonde woman, invites you to touch the computer screen. You play the age-old game of scissors-stone-paper with her, tapping a menu on the screen to make your selection. You make your move, she makes hers.

If you win, she seductively unwraps a layer of clothing, writhing to striptease music. If you lose, she smirks and coos, “Try again.” The playful experience is enhanced by the computer’s video footage of the woman, her digital voice that plays in stereo and a computer-animated background resembling a science-fiction movie set.

This R-rated “Scissors N Stones”game is a glimpse of the interactive enticements that computers can deliver.

Pixis Interactive, a Tustin-based software company with 10 employees, says it has discovered that such adult entertainment--stored on compact disks known as CD-ROMs with vast storage capacity for video, text, graphics and audio--can add a whole new dimension to voyeurism.

“It’s not passive viewing like TV or videos,” said Mark Alamares, vice president of marketing for the 18-month-old company. “Here, you can interact with live characters on the screen. They will react to your actions accordingly.”

Pixis titles range from R-rated games to science-fiction dramas for both the Macintosh and IBM-compatible machines. They sell for $69.95 to $89.95, the typical prices for CD-ROMs.

Not surprisingly, sex has become quite comfortable with the computer medium. Penthouse and Playboy magazines have already produced interactive computer programs that allow viewers to act as “virtual photographers” of nude women.

“Sex chat” computer bulletin boards, where people type provocative messages to each other via computer modems, have existed for years. At the recent Comdex computer show in Las Vegas, scores of conventioneers lined up at booths sponsored by Pixis and nearly a dozen other adult CD-ROM purveyors.

“This doesn’t surprise me because it’s what people want, “ said Amin Hirschorn, who took time to browse at the Pixis trade show booth. “Here you can touch the screen, but not the woman.”

“The quality is really surprising,” said Kelly Ramon, another onlooker. “There’s a trend in society. You’re seeing more sex in movies, and this is something creative that will compete with it.”

Erotica, pornography and adult entertainment usually find their way onto any new medium, Alamares said. “Dial-a-porn” telephone services mushroomed in the 1980s with the advent of 900 numbers. VCR manufacturers got a boost as customers found it more convenient to watch adult videos in privacy at home instead of facing embarrassment at being recognized at the local porn cinema.

Excitement about an information superhighway, where interactive computers promise to deliver addictive realism to simulations and games, is being driven in part by the expectation of digital sex.

“CD-ROMs are in the novelty stage now, very small in sales,” said Lisa Palac, editor of Future Sex, a quarterly magazine in San Francisco that chronicles the link between sex, culture and technology. “But the interest among people is phenomenal. Among computer people, it’s one more thing they can do with their computer.”

If society can be enthralled by the engaging interactive aspect of video games, then interactive sex will probably prove equally engaging, said Rob Kling, professor of computer science at UC Irvine.

“Look at the back pages of a lot of computer magazines and you’ll see ads for adult material,” Kling said. “And if you look at the adult video, it doesn’t take great porno quality to fuel a large number of purchases.”

Despite the concerns of computer experts and the hopes of Pixis executives, market analysts do not expect adult games to spread like wildfire, at least not until most consumers have high-powered multimedia personal computers with CD-ROM drives.

An estimated 2.6 million drives were sold in 1993, more than the total sold from 1986 to 1991, according to InfoTech, a market research firm in Woodstock, Vt. And nearly half of all personal computers sold this year are expected to feature CD-ROM drives.

“The adult segment is not any more successful on CD-ROMs than in any other medium,” said Julie Schwerin, InfoTech president. “It’s a very small part of the industry.”

Of an estimated 7,000 CD-ROM titles available, there are only about 100 different adult titles, Palac estimates. A multimedia offering called “The Interactive Adventures of Seymore Butts,” produced by a Santa Monica company, has sold well over 10,000 copies, a number which is considered a bestseller.

Far beyond presenting titillating images on a screen is simulated sex through virtual reality. This is the stuff of science-fiction movies, such as in Sylvester Stallone’s “Demolition Man”: A couple wears goggles that transport them into a three-dimensional, computer-generated world where they can have sexual intercourse without actually touching. Palac said such technology is still in the early development stages.

The growing culture of “cyberporn” has feminists outraged and fearful of the psychological damage it could do to both women and men at a time of increasing concern about sexual abuse and child molestation. A frightening dimension of interactive porn is that it can encourage men to treat women as objects to be manipulated, they argue.

“It’s marketed as a more sophisticated kind of high-tech entertainment,” said Lisa McLanahan, one of the coordinators of the Bay View chapter of the National Organization for Women. “Any man who has the idea of himself as the preppy, sophisticated porn user is fooling himself.

“Like all pornography, it works to oppress women,” she said. “What is different is the ability to create a woman of your dreams and control her on screen so that the man viewing it becomes the pornographer himself.”

Paul Wu, the 27-year-old president of Pixis, argues that CD sex is no worse than erotica in other media, and that it can even have its health benefits.

“With the prevalence of diseases, we’re directing sexual energies,” he said. “It’s the ultimate safe sex. We think ‘Scissors N Stones’ is tamer than Playboy.”

Whether or not sexually themed CD-ROMs become a mass market on the scale of adult videos, which are a staple in many neighborhood video stores, the founders of Pixis believe they’ve found a place to profit in the emerging format of CD-ROM, which stands for compact disk/read-only memory. These CDs for computers can store more than 600 times the amount of data in a typical floppy disk, making it possible for games to feature complex three-dimensional animation.

Last weekend at the Consumer Electronics Show, about a dozen companies were showing adult movies on CD-ROMs. Among the exhibitors was Pixis’ primary competitor, New Machine Publishing in Santa Monica, which has developed more than 20 adult CD-ROMs over the past year. Some of New Machines’ titles, such as the newly released “Dream Machine,” will be sold in Tower Video, Fry’s Electronics and Virgin Megastores.

Lawrence Miller, co-founder and an owner of New Machine, said that Pixis and his company have set themselves apart from other firms by pioneering the use of computer animation in adult CD-ROMs.

“Everyone else dumps video onto CD-ROM because it’s a new way to make money from their own material,” he said. “That’s not interactive.”

Miller acknowledges that the visual quality of CD-ROMs is worse than videos, but he said most people don’t mind because of the added value of interactive play.

“Our interest is in interactivity, not just the adult segment,” said Alamares of Pixis. “We don’t come from the adult video industry, so our offerings will emphasize better technology and themes that go beyond adult titles, like science fiction.”

The promise of a $5.8-billion industry for CD-ROM disks and drives has made some computer experts uneasy about the spread of computer-based pornography.

George Trubow, law professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, warned of the potential harm to children from interactive adult entertainment in a recent conference on computer abuse at UC Irvine.

It’s one thing for kids to peek at nude pictures on computers, but Trubow said he fears that the improved graphic quality of today’s personal computers will attract all sorts of purveyors of pornography, from child pornographers to proponents of bestiality.

“Parents have no idea what their kids are getting into with computers,” said Valerie Rezmierski, a computer administrator at the University of Michigan, who also attended the UCI conference. “I’m very concerned about the damage that young children could suffer.”

Miller at New Machine said his company’s “Dream Machine” title is nearly childproof: It requires password access to prevent children from watching their parents’ program when they are alone.

Retail chains such as CompUSA and Egghead software have refused to carry titles from Pixis and New Machine. But even if mainstream companies avoid the titles, Pixis and New Machine expect to make plenty of money with adult programming. This year, Pixis expects to sell more than 100,000 of its “Scissors N Stones” title and it expects to quadruple sales overall. The company would not release specific sales information.

Alamares says Pixis has no intentions of marketing to youngsters, and its boxes are marked for “mature audiences.” Distribution is limited to adult stores, some computer dealers and mail order. Of course, there is no reason that kids can’t order these games via mail, but Alamares says the industry can thrive by appealing to those who want “tasteful” adult entertainment.

“A lot of retailers in this political climate won’t carry it,” Alamares said. “We are making products that are done tastefully.”

With backgrounds in the computer industry, the company founders sought to set themselves apart from Hollywood’s adult industry, Wu said. The company got started with private funding and the talents of programmers just out of school.

“We were looking for a way to break into the mass market and realized that sex and entertainment has always been the driving force for the high-technology market,” Wu said.

Instead of churning out numerous features like adult video producers, Pixis plans to make two to four titles a year with budgets of $250,000 to $1.5 million each. It uses a full-time writer to create stories, computer animators to add a multimedia experience, and the company emphasizes game playing.

“It’s not just selling the sex aspect,” Alamares said. “We use a lot of 3D animation, live-action video and interactive game play. Sex is an important factor in the games, but not the sole aspect of it. We mix in action and adventure like in arcade games. It’s a virtual movie, so to speak.”

One technique to draw the viewer into the experience is the use of first-person point of view in the “camera angles” for the games, Wu said. When filming one sexual scene, Pixis’ production team created an animation as if there were a video camera tied onto one actor’s chest so that “you can feel like you’re performing.”

Actors and actresses, many drawn from adult videos, act out a variety of scenarios for each CD-ROM, because the point of interactive technology is to present the viewer with various choices. Thus, one CD-ROM can require seven hours of filming compared to a couple of hours with a regular adult film, Wu said.

Pixis takes that footage and turns it into a complete story or humorous game with three-dimensional animation. “Scissors N Stones” includes a blooper reel, which reveals actors’ mistakes, and also features a “panic button,” which Wu says can be used to instantly turn off the game at work if the boss passes by.

Palac, who reviews CD-ROMs for Future Sex, said many customers are disappointed in CD-ROMs because their computers can’t run the video fast enough to be lifelike or play the sound correctly.

“The interactivity can be a real sham, sort of like multiple choice of which movie you want to see,” Palac said. “Computer video can look chunky, and it’s not as convenient to watch these things on a computer. People with VCRs can watch videos in bed and fast-forward to the good parts. The CD-ROMs right now don’t offer anything better. When it comes to erotic material, the bottom line is people want to get aroused.”