Meet Elina

Elina.

Countries in Eastern Europe are small and, if they’re lucky, have one city whose name an outsider might recognize but not be able to place on a map. Every weekend young people, minus the boys who’ve turned youthful excess into serious alcoholism before the end of their teens and wander the streets catatonic, go out to party. You can visit ten clubs and leave having seen every beautiful woman in the country, it’s beautiful, easy and numbing. Two of the biggest clubs in the region are within a minute’s walk of my apartment and sometimes, on my way home from somewhere else, I’ll stop by just to take in the view.

The women are tall and graceful with high-cheeks and almond eyes. The men are so average that you wonder who the women breed with in order to produce such spectacular offspring. No one is fat (in the entire country - despite a national cuisine based around fried pork, potatoes and cream), and the only thing keeping most Latvian girls off the catwalk is a dental infrastructure who operate on a ‘if in doubt, file’ principle. The men take the women for granted which is stupid, given a higher concentration of beautiful women than anywhere on the planet bar Brazil. Doctors earn about $400 a month meaning a Latvian trophy-wife is a surprisingly easy to obtain accessory for resident foreigners.

Last Saturday, while leaning on the bar with my drink (whiskey - vodka reminds Russian women of their fathers in the worst way) my Romanian friend Dan grabbed me.

“I have to show you this girl. Amazing!”

He lead me behind the dancefloor, through another club where local strippers were helping guys invest in their economics degrees, into a room above the casino.

“She is a model,” said Dan, introducing me to the woman whose photo accompanies this post. “Sam, meet Elina, Elina this is Sam.”

As so rarely happens in reality, my jaw dropped.

“She’s a model Dan?”

“100%! Model, pure model!” he said.

I was looking at the future. Elina, a woman with lips that make Angelina Jolie’s look like a pair messy flaps, is computer generated. Entirely modeled, with no ‘hand finishing’ involved in her appearance, she’s pure polygons and math. Given enough processing power (like the PC you’ll be buying in 2 years time) she could be animated (should we say live and breathe?) in real time. Welcome to the future of porn.

Sex and computers have always been connected. One of the first widely known attempts at machine intelligence was a piece of software called Eliza, a primitive text only therapist who, despite being less convincingly human as an ATM, managed to keep users occupied for hours. It’s not surprising that even this ostensibly sexless programming exercise was a woman with an exotic name.

Despite the prevalence of sex online, the use of computers as devices for creating sexual experiences, not merely as a means for delivering them recorded as photos or movies, has only just begun. For years a taboo regarding sex and computers, has slowed the creation of digital sexual experiences, supported by two invalid assumptions:

• Computer users are sexless nerds
• Computer games are for kids, so sexually charged games are morally wrong

With the majority of internet users being female, the average age of a computer game player now 30, and abundant cheap computer power, digital sex is finally about to arrive. It won’t kill the porn movie, or other forms of sex on the web but what it will provide is a range of sexual experiences we don’t have today. The question is what will they be?

We live in a world where our sex lives are enhanced by technology. Many of us have had sex with people we met online, and many more have experienced orgasm while interacting with a chatroom, instant message, voice over IP client, or webcam. Enhancements of these applications is easy, obvious and inevitable.

A lot of people who buy the new iMac’s are going to discover that idiot-proof video-conferencing makes phone-sex seem very second best by comparison. Webcams will get better and HD video will arrive, (making us nostalgic for the flattering haze of compression artifacts that treat our imperfections kindly today.)

The problem with webcams is that reality limits their appeal. Sex-camming is fun if your partner’s cute and well-lit, but what if they’re not. What if you want to have sex as a woman but are a man? Want to have sex in zero-gravity or free of the confines of your wheelchair? A better webcam’s not the answer.

While you can pay to interact with a model of your choice via webcam, the market for sex-cam websites will be dwarfed by any technology that allows people to meet, and interact sexually, with people they have a more genuine relationship with.

The first new sexual realm to develop will be an offshoot of online role-playing games, like Everquest and World of Warcraft. When their graphics are of sufficient quality to make Elina possible, online sex will become more than a niche interest and, for the first time, people will join game universes with the sole objective of interacting sexually within them.

Games won’t have to be built to contain sex in order to make sex possible. In traditional games each player has an objective and missions to complete, ‘open’ games provide an environment within which players can do whatever they want to. With players controlling the other characters you meet, interactions can be as sophisticated as those you enjoy offline. If sex isn’t an ‘official’ part of the experience people will, as they always do, find ways to get what they want. It might be weird but it’ll get people off and that’s always popular.

It’s a small step beyond where we are today that only requires improved graphics. It’ll prove that given the right context, online sex will exist as more than a curiosity, and can become a natural extension of the relationships people have online, as it is offline.

The next step will occur with the launch of more focused sex-game products. Building a game used to mean developing an ‘engine’ to handle the graphics and underlying technology, and the time and expense of doing that set the bar to entry very high indeed. To use a moviemaking metaphor, it was akin to having to design, build and test your cameras before being able to shoot your movie.   

Today, for about $750,000, you can buy a license to use a cutting edge ‘game-engine’ developed by someone else. $750,000 is three times more than the budget of a ‘big-budget’ adult movie, but the economics of sex games are far more favorable than the economics of sex movies.

If Vivid Video spend $250,000 on a movie they can sell it for $20 a shot to a certain number of people and then move on to their next movie with a fresh investment of capital. A video game sells for $40-$60, you can charge a monthly subscription for use on the online elements and there’s money to be made from plug-ins and accessories.

With the investment in the ‘game engine’ being a one-off expense, the cost of producing a title decreases as the number of titles published increases. Once the ‘game’ works you can publish the same title repeatedly, changing only the ‘cast’ and scenario, for a production cost of close to zero. This is something the existing game industry can’t do - no one will buy a shoot-em up again simply because the image of the guy holding the gun is different.

Low cost and online distribution will mean that the ’specialization’ of the video market we see today ends up looking restricted compared to the range of options and specialties which appear in the gaming market. As options increase, so will sales (Jenna speaking Chinese in a Chinese game will sell more in China than a subtitled American DVD)

If Vivid video had a video gaming development unit they could be releasing a virtual (ageless, perfect) Jenna each year, using the same technology to drive games featuring each of their contract stars and perhaps even cut deals to offer those models as plug-ins for other games. Your girlfriend in Grand Theft Auto becomes Silvia Saint, with all the skills she brings to bear.

At that point the expense, hassle and health-risks involved in making ‘real’ porn are less appealing. Jenna can continue to sell her likeness for as long as she desires, never need walk onto a porn set again, and her likeness can do things she’d never consent to in reality, perfectly safely. Beyond Jenna, virtual stars like Elina will be able to speak any language, in any market and do anything without compunction or complaint. As purely owned creations they’ll be more profitable to work with than likenesses and make porn without people possible for the first time ever.

The final step will come in 10-15 years when, instead of connecting you to a partner online, your computer becomes your partner itself.

Given the hopeless stupidity of most video game ‘baddies’ this seems hopelessly sci-fi but that won’t last long. At current rates of progress by 2020 the average $1000 PC will have equivalent processing power to the human brain. That’s not to say computers will be smart then, but they will have the processing power required to be, given the right programming. Using all that power to accurately simulate the limited range of possibilities presented by sex isn’t just realistic, it’s inevitable. We’ll be able to program digital partners who know enough about human desire and sexual availability to provide a satisfying sexual interaction - albeit one that’s not very human. Creepy? Perhaps. Profitable? You bet.

The idea that as entertainment moves forward, humans will leave their sexuality behind as an evolutionary relic is ridiculous. The potential for profit is irresistible to sellers and the experiences on offer desired by buyers. Computers as the greatest sex-toys in history? Not if, or when, but soon