Origins & Idea

The idea for The Sociolotron ^SM is quite old. Most of us are gamers of one sort or another, and if we are honest, most of us have been in contact with cyber sex one way or the other. If you enter keywords like 'cyber sex' and 'online role-playing games' (or perhaps even enter the names of a few of the big games together with those) you reach a lot of sites with scientific papers trying to shed light on the phenomenon of alternate identity, role-playing, the way people behave in cyber space without the fear having their real identity exposed and so on.

Pretty quickly you find out, that with the birth of the internet (or even before that) the desire to live out these wishes also occurred and that people quickly came up with means and tools allowing them to realize those ideas. Pretty sad though, most of these tools are more than cheesy. Email role-playing, role-playing in instant messengers, or role-playing in specially set up discussion boards are the most common forms.

There are programs out there called "Talkers" which are specialized in role-playing by offering the customers a text based chat box where they can perform their role-play, however there is hardly anything else but a pure chat functionality, although some try to create an atmosphere by describing the "room" the characters are in according to a certain setting (Sci-Fi, Medieval) and using certain terms to describe the system. Other systems are called "Mushes" and they offer players a wider variety of possibilities, including game mechanics. Mushes are only very seldom made for adult topics and mostly cater to those players who want to "Hack and Slay" monsters or other players in quick combat situations. What's even worse, in order to use all the features of a Mush you need to master the programming language of the system, since playing them is nearly like programming an interactive computer which is, why Mushes are mostly used by the typical male 15 - 30 year geek type. Both systems, Talkers and Mushes, and strictly text oriented which is good for "serious" role-players, but deters most of the casual gamers.

With the advent of graphical massive multiplayer games by big computer game companies, the focus shifted more towards nice optics and easy to use and to understand interfaces, where players could run around, eliminate monsters, make gold, buy nice items, decorate their houses, and then what?! All those games lack from a serious degree of depth that goes beyond the simple eliminate-and-become-richer idea. Many players attempted to do role-playing in the game by becoming "rangers" or "noble warriors" or "evil cultists" or whatever, but often ended in disappointment, for two reasons: Griefer could easily ruin their gaming experience, simply by playing against their self - appointed rules, and there were no game mechanics which would support the role-playing elements. Whether you behaved noble or worshipped a demon did not make any difference to the game. More than that: there were no means to deal effectively with grief players who just want to ruin the gaming experience of other players, they can just go on. As a result, complaints to "Game masters" became more and more frequent, but they could do little as long as the griefers simply used the game mechanics and ruined the experience of other players by doing it legally. Later some games set up some "rules of conduct" thus defining what is legal griefing and what not, but that was simply the confession that the game has completely failed to deal with this aspect of human nature.

Some people are even said to have tried to use the big graphic role-playing games to have cyber sex, but those actions can proof fatal, since the big games don't permit this and a game master can ban a player from the game for the use of sexual language or behavior.

On the other band of the spectrum there were so called "adult games" in the first half of the 90s after the CD ROM was widely accepted. Who has not kicked his own butt after shelling out $30 just to discover at home that the "most advanced adult game ever" was nothing else but a collection of cheap porn flicks and a rendered corridor with doors as user interface? And who was not stupid enough to go out and buy the next one, because this time, it MUST be the real deal?! Enough said!

The idea was simple! Somebody HAD to do a good and fun adult game! Somebody simply HAD to do it! Sadly, nobody did it. Perhaps because the publishers of mature material did not have the right people who were willing to do it, because that would ruin their reputation in the "serious" gaming industry. All they could muster were people who could use authoring tools and compile a CD.

So some while ago, this project started as a hobby project, while the hardware wasn't even ready for the ambitious ideas behind the game. Nevertheless, we started to develop some things, always hoping that the technological progress would some day provide us with the necessary tools and today it finally has. The Sociolotron ^SM server software runs on 2.4 GHz double Xeon machines with 2 GB of RAM each, connected to the internet through a broad band line. Equipment which would have required a multimillion dollar company a few years ago is now available for a reasonable price. The enormous amount of graphic that needs to be on the client side (that's YOU) can finally considered to be reasonable in a time where 1.8 or 2 GHz computers with 256 MB of RAM or more are standard everywhere.

18 U.S.C. 2257 Record-Keeping Requirements Compliance Statement

Intro

Socio Facts

World History

The Idea

Screenshots

Features