Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Paying Girls to Play Games with You

http://kotaku.com/5499552/would-you-pay-women-to-play-xbox-games-with-you/gallery/

As the internet continues to evolve and as the service industry expands to satisfy untapped niches in the market, a bizarre union has formed between video games and dating services.
Out of the muck and the mire, gamecrush.com has spawned and feeds off the stereotype that all gamers are socially inept males who would go so far as to, dare we think it, pay girls to play games with them.
Gamecrush.com does exactly this proudly encouraging its clients through its slogan, "Be a player." After signing up with the site, for $8.25 one can arrange a "PlayDate" where you can either play a Flash game (e.g. Checkers, Bejeweled) for six minutes with an "attractive girl" over a webcam or play an Xbox Live multiplayer game for ten. "Players" can opt for either a "flirty" or "dirty" date where afterward clients can rate their date in terms of "hotness, gaming skill, and flirtiness."
The Xbox Live games currently available are largely popular, male-marketed games; Halo 3, Grand Theft Auto IV, Modern Warfare 2, and Gears of War 2 are currently supported, though, MMOs seem to be a natural progression as the article's author Luke Plunkett suggests. No one can predict for certain how popular this kind of service may grow (the site may be the first of its kind), but it is certain that it challenges the ways in which we normally think about the nature of online, social relationships. Technology often moves faster than we are capable of understanding its implications; in our Anthropology class we are studying the nature of relationships in games and social networking sites while the internet is one step ahead introducing the online equivalent of escort agencies.

3 comments:

  1. There is already an article about this website further down.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Aaaahhhh hahaha. I love how you put "attractive girl" in quotes. Remember in class when that one kid was all, "what exactly does an attractive person look like"? And then the person being asked the question had nothing to say?

    Oh man that was sweet.

    ReplyDelete