Our local, yet internationally renowned, sex-positive BDSM powerhouse Kink today launched a project that they’ve been (ahem) slaving away on for a while now: 3D Kink. An online, community-run massive multiplayer online role-playing game, 3D Kink is a world where members can do and be pretty much anything they want. Think “Second Life sex” yet 24-7 (read: all the time), it’s a fully customizable “gaming” environment, yet it’s specifically for sex and adults. Additionally, the staff at Kink are — as we all know — all about the ‘safe, sane, consensual’ aspects of BDSM, fetishes and kinky sex; plus have a very diverse and inclusive LGBTQ staff, so it’s not your average endeavor. Meaning, they understand the difference between fantasy and reality in presenting such an environment, and thus present it with intelligence and proper context. In 3D Kink you can do things that are impossible in real life, and that’s the point. And it’s never, ever to be confused with reality.
Maybe I don’t need to contextualize it for you quite so much; it’s a hardcore MMORPG made by some seriously tech and kink savvy people. It’s run and backed by Kink’s empire so you know that if you join this world and you like it, the world won’t disappear into the ether if someone pisses off a prudish VC holding the purse strings on a social media startup. No VC necessary. Just sophisticated geeks. And it’s made after a real place: Kink — and you better bet the models and subs and Dommes and Tops will hang out there. So much potential.
You can see two preview galleries here on the main 3D Kink tour page. More sample images (that I handpicked) are after the jump.
Have been playing with this all day now. I wish it were a multiplayer game; it feels like it was designed to support one, so maybe that’s still in the works.
One thing that’s still sorely lacking is tools to share customizations, storyboards, and so forth between users. The files look to be stored pretty openly, so maybe this is just a matter of waiting for interface improvement.
I’ve also been wondering whether Kink.com plans to release “people packs” modeled after some of their popular models. (That would raise some interesting intellectual property issues, but they’ve got the lawyers and money to make it happen if so inclined.)
In addition it has about the worst user interface of any game I have ever tried. It is also buggy and as far as I can tell not even two player and certainly not massively multi-player. It is not up to the excellent quality I have come to expect from Kink.com.
Tess
Second Life can be played free but 3D Kink is $30 per month. In an age where more and more MMO’s are free to “play” and make their income from micro-transactions I think the good folks at Kink.com may need to rethink their business model.
Tess
I wonder which physical attributes will start to be the most common that people choose for themselves. Will some be editable over time, like you can’t change your neck length, but you can change your pubic hair cut as much as you want, and your breast size once or twice at most?
It IS 3d sex villa branded by Kink ( if you go to the 3D Villa site you see the same clothing & rooms. ) I dont understand the “second life” part as it is not an online game.
looks pretty much like SL to me, furries and all. /me waves to Peter
I don’t see anything on the site that indicates this is massively multiplayer…
It really looks like 3D sex villa (and other games from the same company.)
It was quite a amazing game, with realistic physics and all…
It’s a shame I don’t have a PC with both windows and that configuration.
Because Mac users are too busy to yiff?
The only problem here is the lack of Mac support. Why is there never Mac support?
As someone who has been in Second Life for a while, I don’t see anything here that can’t be done in SL, including yiffing (furry sex). One thing is that the UI is more specialized. For instance, in your picture #4 it’s easier to take off individual pieces of clothing here than in SL, not that stripping isn’t done in SL.
I seriously doubt that Kink.com has the capability to build this from scratch. This is probably build on top of a private OpenSim grid, although there are other platforms available. I commend them for their job in designing their client (the front end program that customers use to access the virtual world).
Although I have no interest in the content, I’m very interested in how they handle puppeteering, that is how does the user control her or his avatar? From what you’ve shown already, I expect they have some smart ideas.
There is a compromise in where one sets the minimum system requirements. The higher the bar, the better the customer experience, but the fewer potential customers with the hardware needed to run the program used to access your virtual world. The minimums for 3D Kink are actually rather low. Windows XP or Vista (no OS X or Linux), a Pentium 4 or similar at 1GHz with 512K or RAM, and 64MB 3D video with OpenGL 1.1 or DirectX 8.
I thought – according to mainstream media – Second Life is all about sex and filth already? ;-)
incredible… what does intimacy look like in a culture of e-communication?