Gamers And Playboy: A Match Made In Heaven
Man, you’ve really got to hand it to Playboy: they are more than happy to both acknowledge and appease the nerds in their audience. Not only did they make their own (admittedly, somewhat dull) video game where players could manage their own photo shoots, but the November issue of the magazine featured the third annual Women of Gaming feature… which, when you get down to it is a series of different female characters rendered by their developers in the buff.
Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury News recently sat down with Scott Alexander, senior editor at Playboy. Alexander is, in large part, the source of Playboy’s recent rush to embrace nerds everywhere, and was more than happy to discuss exactly why video games are becoming an essential part of the magazine’s content:
Alexander says he has been trying to inject video game culture into the magazine, and he notes that Hugh Hefner has always been a gamer and he has a high-profile game room with pinball machines and what not in the game room at the mansion. The Playboy Mansion video game debuted some time ago and sold particularly well in Europe. Alexander says that the demographics for video games are a good match with the average Playboy reader. The average gamer, he notes, is 32 years old.
“Hef is a gadget guy and tech is a huge part of men’s lives. The constituency of gaming and Playboy are almost exact,” he said. “People in my generation grew up with Space Invaders and Pong. These are all beautiful women in these games. They’re marketed to adults. It’s not like we’re dealing with Princess Peach. God of War is an M-rated game. It’s funny how you can have all this violence and game gets a teen rating. There’s always a lot more violence than there is sex. We want to support the happy part of adult gaming.”
Alexander makes a point that a lot of adults just don’t seem ready to accept yet: video games are no longer (if they ever were) for kids. I’m afraid I have to agree with him: despite the fact that politicians have spent the past year rallying voters under the banner of violent/sexually explicit video games needing to be banned, none of these games are actually created or marketed towards minors. Not only that, but we as a culture have way too many hang-ups when it comes to sex but not nearly enough when it comes to acts of violence. Me? I blame our Puritan ancestors for that little personality quirk.
Ultiamtely, I think Playboy is doing the right thing by helping progress gaming as a serious medium. I also think it’s entertaining as all hell that they’re choosing to promote mature video games the way they are. However, I’m just waiting for some right-wing nutjob to use the Women of Gaming features as evidence that the gaming industry is corrupting the youth of America.
A+E Interative: An Interview With Playboy On Its Video Game Spread
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to Video Games on 16 November 2006
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Other stuff like this: dean takahashi, playboy magazine, playboy: the mansion, san jose mercury news, scott alexander, women of gaming
I’ll be a little more interested when we see “A Bear’s Life: Friends Of Grizzly Town”. Rated W, for “Woof”.