Games Should Be Like Female Orgasms

Gamers with Jobs has an excellent look at the pacing of games, and their resemblance to sexual response cycles. From the article: "The female sexual response cycle appears as a gradual (sometimes maddeningly so) upward slope from excitement to orgasm, with several 'false peaks' in the plateau region. Anyone who's ever performed cunnilingus while kneeling on a hardwood floor can attest to the validity of this representation. The male cycle differs radically. The transition from excitement to plateau in men is rather rapid, represented by a near-vertical line. The plateau stage is then almost horizontal for varying amounts of time (see: premature ejaculation) followed by another extremely rapid ascent into orgasm. Playing video games often reminds me of the above."

There's no news here... Just ask Bushnell

[Rahga]

There's a Nolan Bushnell interview linked to slashdot somewhere in the last two years where he talks about Atari's past and part of Breakout's design. He mentioned that one of the intentional goals, though the player didn't realize it, was to encourage the player to get the ball "stuck" so that the game would play by itself for a short while. The player gets a break from the paddle while watching the fireworks, feels a sense of accomplishment by getting the game to do that, and can get back into the game after that brief interlude.

The buildup to flow

[doc modulo]

I personally play Counter-Strike Source online mostly to reach a state of flow [wikipedia.org].
The article talks about the buildup within the game from start to finish.

His ideal buildup is also the best way to gain the altered state of conciousness of flow, although I'm not sure his goal was the same as mine. He was probably just talking about having a smooth experience without unwelcome distractions.

In his view, so as a man, playing video games should be like "playing with a women to reach her orgasm". He literally said he'd like to do the same thing over and over again. In other words, a very long plateau.

I suspect that women, on the other hand, want to play games more like Wario Ware. They get bored more quickly with doing one and the same thing over and over. They'd rather play with one concept, go: "ok I get it, what's next" and then move on to the nose-picking mini-game.

So maybe men would like games to be like female sexual arousal graphs, meaning repetition of comparable experiences to get closer to flow.
And women would like games to be more like male sexual arousal graphs, meaning quick intense fixes of one concept and then moving on the the next.

This is just my personal theory though.

Any women in the audience who can comment on flow and excitement graphs?

P.S. As a man, I figured out how to stay at the plateau level for as long as I want :D

Re:You idiots!

[haystor]

I'm done with Zonk.

Re:You idiots!

[eddy the lip]

I'm replying to an AC, but only because what you say is very funny - I'm a loooong way from puritan, and I work from home, so work safe (as I mentioned) is a total non-issue for me. It's certainly not the phrase "female orgasm" that bugs me. It's the utter idiocy of the story. This is the kind of thing you expect to hear in a locker room, not a site with fun geek stuff. Even for the games section, this is a new low in content quality.

Re:You idiots!

[eddy the lip]

If you mean nerdy in the sense of "no social skills", then, yes, I'd have to agree. If you mean nerdy as in "soldering 1MB of RAM into your TRS-80", then, no, it's not. This is just fratboy humour with a thin gaming-geek patina.

Re:I'm all for frank discussion of sex when releva

[fbjon]

I haven't seen anyone bragging here. You're complaining about nothing, so be quiet.

Back on topic: The article mentions the sudden show-stopper that some games have, and I have to agree. It's probably the most frustrating thing that can happen in a game when nothing new happens, and progress is only past a string of delicate button-twitching. Now, some games are based on that, but that's ok. What's bad is when the difficulty curve goes up like a rocket without warning, or reason for that matter.

Actually, I find it refreshing when the next Boss enemy happens to be easier than the previous one, it gives a kind of breather while bolstering confidence. I'm playing Castlevania right now, and one really neat thing is that there are a lot of bosses. Not big ones, but reasonable ones, and I sometimes can choose which one I go to. Some are easy and go on the first try, while some take 5 tries of sweat before barely making it. Of course, leveling up a bit helps before, but I also have a choice:

If I'm continually wasted by an enemy, I can go somewhere else, where there's more fun things to do. This is a Good Thing.

Honestly, people

[vga_init]

I, for one, am not offended.

Are pleasure cycles and the human orgasm not the subject of serious scientific study? Is it offensive to you that we have collected good, solid data on the subject and discovered that it might be applied to another field?