In this excerpt from his book The Erotic Engine, Patchen Barss talks about one part of the future of pornography and sex on the internet: video games.

Not all virtual environments take the approach of Second Life, which is to rely on emergent sex as an engine of change and creativity. Some virtual sex comes from games' creators rather than the users. Given how ubiquitous sex is in general-interest games, pornographic games intuitively strike one as a natural business opportunity. In reality, though, adult video games are the domain of a very few companies and individuals who are able to invest in an area where the track record is one of limited success (and some spectacular failures).

Video games earned a reputation as entertainment for kids and teenagers. Some people suggest that this association explains why an adult video game industry hasn't sprung up on the same scale as pornographic movies. This can't be the whole story, though. After all, other so-called kids' mediums had X-rated counterparts. Superhero comic books, for example, existed alongside "Tijuana Bibles"-illicitly sold pornographic comics, often featuring unauthorized depictions of celebrities.

Two other factors limit the number of video games made expressly for pornography. First, making a video game is not like making a movie. One guy with a camera can shoot a scene for a porn flick, but a video game demands time and expertise that is not nearly so cheap or common. Producing even a simple
game-even one as simple-minded as Custer's Revenge-requires a major investment. No one can churn out thirteen thousand video games every year the way "the other Hollywood" does with porn movies.

The second limitation brings us right back to the power of the word "you." The effect of being immersed in a video game is qualitatively different from any medium in which the consumer is just a spectator. You don't feel as though you're pushing a button on a controller-you feel like you're blowing up a tank. Translate that into sexuality, particularly acting out sexual fantasies, and you are playing with a power that few companies have been willing or able to harness. Although the explicitly erotic video game sector remains relatively small, it is still a driving force in the field.

One of the few success stories in the adult video game genre is Virtually Jenna. Developed by Thrixxx Technologies (slogan "Simulates what stimulates"), whose Vancouver-based operation is run by Brad Abrams, this game has the advantage of trading on one of the most famous names in pornography, Jenna Jameson. As the eponymous title suggests, the game involves a computer-generated version of Jameson, along with those of many of her "friends." Essentially, the game allows the user to be a porn-film director, setting up virtual scenarios and then playing them out. There are many options for different positions, toys, numbers of partners and so on.

"The challenge," Abrams said, "is that people's imaginations are so extensive that in our role-playing games, even when you do all the animations, create all the scenarios, create content, outfits, you can't match everybody's fantasy."

I asked him whether creating an erotica game had any unique technological demands. It turns out there are many-most centred on disguising the computer-generated aspect of the avatars. "If you take Quake or whatever other kind of [mainstream] game," Abrams said, "those engines are made for running around, shooting, explosions and all that kind of stuff. So when you get down to creating sex, they just don't work. You basically have a lot of different, subtle nuances that you want to try and create. For instance, in those games a character's face isn't really that important. Our eyes twitch and move and gleam and all this kind of stuff. They have a lot of life, because we're trying to create that intimacy. In traditional games, too, you're going to be using a lot of polygons for backgrounds and so your polygon budget is used differently. Our models are about six thousand polys, and so they are a lot higher definition."

Polygons are the basis for many modern video games. They are simple two-dimensional shapes (usually triangles) that are combined into three-dimensional objects like cubes and pyramids. These shapes are called polygonal wireframes, and they can be rotated, stretched and otherwise manipulated to create movement and animation. The more polygons devoted to an object, the more sophisticated and realistic it can become.

"We spend a lot of time on, I don't know what to call it, some kind of boob physics or whatever you want to call it," Abrams said with a laugh. "I have no idea what would be a great name for it, but basically our boobs bounce. There are so many little details that we go into to create a little bit of life in a character which are typically ignored most times in other games."

Do adult video games have no more to contribute to the medium than "jiggle physics" (as Brenda Brathwaite, the author of Sex in Videogames calls it)? Yes, actually. Though adult video games will not likely ever outstrip the graphics innovations of major mainstream game and animation studios, they are contributing more than just convincing pertness. Abrams believes that adult games can improve mainstream games simply by making it okay for sex to be part of the narrative.

"To me, sex and video games is the last frontier in storytelling, because it's been such taboo, because people think video games are for kids. But now the average age of video gamers is twenty-eight years old. In Mass Effect, they have a situation where there's an alien commander and a female commander and they're kind of getting all nice and cosy and it's a cut scene just as they are ready to kiss. And God of War had a scene where this warrior grabs a girl by her hair and shoves her head down into his crotch. Cut scene. You can see it's all there in the storytelling, but they just can't do shit.

"It's always been sort of a goal of mine to get mainstream traction," he said, though that wouldn't be simply in a bid to legitimize his own products. "More just to legitimize the fact that sex in video games and the storytelling experience is a valid part of the whole overall experience."

The battle over this taboo is not restricted to video games. Comic books, movies, television, all have faced public outcry because of sex and violence. A common refrain among those who work in adult industries, though, is that the protests always seem to be much more about sex than violence. Abrams has no patience for it.

"All these people just get out on their high horses and say, ‘Sex in video games: it's evil incarnate.' And I'm going, ‘Okay, well then how come people can go out and blow people's heads off and you can see the blood spatter on the screen and then it dribbles down the screen. It's ultra-realistic, ultra-violent.' And I'm going, ‘That's okay?' "

And, he adds, it's not as though the content of video games is in any way unique. "You read the Old Testament and you see whose cousin is marrying whose cousin and whose half-sister is having that kid, and the adultery and all that shit. Don't come down on video games for having anything new and original. It's all been done before in the Bible." Abrams's feelings carry on the centuries-old tradition of pornographers who are outraged by the hypocrisy they see in their puritanical critics.

But he doesn't expect pornography's technological influence to change people's attitudes. In fact, he says he is "pretty jaded" about the idea of pornographers as early adopters and pioneers of technology. When it comes to improvements in Internet infrastructure, he says that Thrixxx is more of a beneficiary than a driver. "I mean, right now the beauty of the Internet for us is that ten years ago you could have never done this," he said. "Even if the technology was advanced enough to create good sex sims back then, the distribution pipelines weren't in place. We don't need retailers right now; we don't need mainstream distribution. People can find us and buy it, download it and it's a done deal." He says adult producers are now leading the way in marketing and business models. "I think adult is one of the most pure forms of free enterprise I've ever seen. If you have something people want, if it's good enough, people will pay for it. If you don't have something that people want, they don't pay and you're done. The marketing, doing everything online, and payment processing: that is where adult is the strongest. Setting up the pipelines, adult is really strong and good at that." These may seem mundane aspects of communications, but without them, nothing else can develop. People tend to be nervous about giving out their credit card information online-doubly so when the product is taboo. One of the biggest challenges of e-commerce is making customers comfortable with a new way of paying.

"The adult side of the business has actually done a really good job of generating trust from the general consumer," Abrams said. Other people in the industry remain more optimistic about the adult world's capacity to continuing innovating on a technological front as well as a business front. Among those with a cheerier outlook is Jenna Jameson herself. She has heard the pessimistic chatter, but does not buy into it.

"We always hear that the adult technology lead is slowing down," she told me. "Not in my opinion, though, as every time I turn around, this industry is still at the forefront of the next new thing. I think we will continue to see the adult industry spearhead the development and use of technology." Jameson may have more reason to be optimistic than most. Not only is she one of the most successful, famous and rich X-rated stars of all time but she has also become an iconic entrepreneur whose brand has crossed over into mainstream culture. Her autobiography spent six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and she has appeared on billboards in New York's Times Square promoting her website. Her brand includes a line of sex toys produced by Doc Johnson (a company founded by Reuben Sturman of peep-show notoriety) as well as ringtones ("moantones," actually), purses, guitars, perfume and more. She has done commercials for Adidas and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. She has attained such celebrity that I was not allowed to contact her directly: my questions and her answers filtered through her handlers. Long before Jameson secured her place as a bona fide mainstream celebrity, the former stripper who graduated from softcore to hard-core, and from stills to film, was already pulling the technological levers that would catapult her to stardom. In those days, though, it was more about survival than getting ahead. "Being in the adult industry means always having to fight: fight with government, media, ISPs or other regulators in both public and private sectors," she said. "In order to survive and deliver what our customers wanted, while working with these restrictions, we had to be better, cleaner and smarter in being able to adapt and constantly look for new and intelligent ways to deliver new media."

Two-thirds of the way through her autobiography, Jameson has a single line about the porn world generally being ahead of the pack technologically. I wanted to know whether she was just repeating a truism, or whether this was something she had actually experienced working in the industry.

"I have seen this throughout my career, especially in the advances in streaming video. Big mainstream studios were always watching what us little adult companies were up to and a perfect example is shown in the adult world bringing video to the web before the rest," she said. "In my business, keeping ahead of the game in technology just made sense so we could satisfy our surfers and customers with new and exciting media. We started off with photos and stories, but to give customers a true experience, the next natural step was to provide video content. Once video was commonplace, the demand was to meet enhanced and higher-quality video requests, and so on." The demand for "more," "better" and "new" never abated. As the push moved beyond video toward more interactive media, the technological demands made by Jameson's fans began to feel more like personal demands.

"Fans never had a forum with which to interact with me before the Internet," she said. "And then, with my participation, they were able to email, chat, submit artwork and send mail directly to my computer in a way that was easier than ever before. They couldn't get enough. The more I made myself available, the more they asked. I had to learn to draw the line in order to keep my personal boundaries intact." In some ways, Jameson was becoming the highly commercialized version of Jennifer Ringley. As lucrative as it might have been, though, there was to be no JennaCam to replace the long since defunct JenniCam. "As I made myself more available on web chats, I had many member requests to install a 24/7 webcam into my bedroom," Jameson said. "That's an area where I had to draw the line."

With Thrixxx's Virtually Jenna, Jameson commercialized another piece of Internet technology that had until that point been a deeply personal aspect of many people's online experience: the avatar. I have described some of the ways people have developed intimate relationships with their own avatars and have built up infrastructures of sex, love and marriage with others through MUDs and modern virtual worlds. Jameson's avatar, though, commodified this intimacy in the form of a pornographic fantasy world in which you could buy, interact with and control the online version of a real person. (Of course, "real" is a tricky concept in this case, as the "real" Jenna Jameson, as with any porn star, is also mostly fantasy.) Given the personal relationship so many people have with their online presence, and Jameson's limits as to how much privacy she will give up, it seemed as though creating a virtual Jenna might be a bit too much for her. She said, though, that other projects have felt more intrusive. "When Doc Johnson approached me to create a full body mould of myself, it was exciting to be at the forefront of this type of interaction, but it took a little bit of getting used to knowing that someone was probably using a mould of my entire body for their pleasure," she said. "When it came around to creating my avatar for VirtuallyJenna.com, not only was it easier but it was exciting to be at the top of this new technology and a lot more fun to be able to make facial expressions and movements that would be linked to my image."

She said having a virtual version of herself feels "kinda like being cloned." In this, she has realized the dream of many a science fiction fan-creating a clone of one's self to do all the work, while the original human being sits back and reaps the rewards. Jenna Jameson confirmed to USMagazine.com in August 2007 that she was "done with porn forever." In one sense that's true-she does not have sex on camera any more. But her virtual counterpart continues to be the main player in thousands of user-generated sex scenes, and the resulting revenue helps feed the $30-million-per-year Club Jenna juggernaut. Usually when people think about having artificial entities to do humanity's work for us, it's in the context of robots, and it usually has to do with manufacturing or the military. But for entertainers-adult and mainstream-virtuality may be where the greatest threats and opportunities lie. Should it become the norm down the road that Hollywood celebrities maintain a virtual version of themselves to build their fan base or entertain the masses, there is a real chance that nobody will remember or acknowledge that this was another technological innovation first proved viable by the pornography industry.

This excerpt comes from The Erotic Engine: How Pornography Has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg to Google, by Patchen Barss (Doubleday). You can pick up a copy of the book via Amazon (it's out already in Canada, and comes out in the US tomorrow).

We'll have plenty of time to scrimp, save and perhaps land a second job to afford the next generation of video game consoles. Avalanche Studios, creators of Just Cause and the forthcoming Renegade Ops, believe 2014 is when we'll get them.

So says David Grijns, the man heading Avalanche's new New York City-based studios. He tells Edge that the developers "have some intelligence to go on that, by early 2014, we're pretty sure there'll be at least one next-generation console on the market." Based on Grijns' wording, that next generation excludes the Wii U, which is expected to be slightly more powerful than the Xbox 360 and PS3.

That release window jibes with information Kotaku has heard, which targeted Sony and Microsoft's next-gen efforts for 2014.

Avalanche's new U.S. studio is working on "large-scale, online-enabled original IP"—so, not that rumored Mad Max game?—for PC and other still unannounced platforms.

Avalanche "pretty sure" of new hardware in 2014 [Edge]

The handful of people making zombie survival horror game Project Zomboid have pulled their game from the Internet, not because they hate that their game is getting pirated. They expected that. They could even live with that, as they had been, quite merrily.

They have pulled their £5 game because, despite their tolerance for piracy, they're now definitely losing money to piracy.

A new pirated version of the game includes an "update" button that, any time it's clicked, forces a new download of the whole thing from the cloud servers that the Zomboid team uses to distribute the game. Each download from that service has to be paid for, by the developers.

On their blog, the game's indie creators explain why this is a potentially costly problem:

Whether piracy actually amounts to lost sales we're not going to get into. The possibility that it raises awareness and promotes the game cannot be ignored, but the difference is offline versions on torrents, which we've been largely unconcerned about, do not cost us real money [emphasis in the original], only potential money, and even then we can't really guess at what the net effect is. Likewise people who download the game through our website only download it when there is a new version, so once every week or so. These new pirate copies have an ‘update now' button which will download the game every time it's clicked, potentially every time the game is run by everyone using it.

They've pulled the game, but are offering a public demo via torrent. Do check it out and consider this an important anecdote for the ongoing arguments about who piracy serves, who it hurts and who it helps.

Sorry we've had to take the game down for the day [Project Zomboid developer blog]

Bowling with Tekken characters is coming to the PlayStation 3 this fall with the release of Tekken Hybrid, the Blu-ray disc bundle that includes one computer animated movie, Tekken: Blood Vengeance, and one PlayStation 2 remake, Tekken Tag Tournament HD.

That PS3 exclusive will both help us wash the foul taste of the live action Tekken movie from our mouths and get us more excited for Tekken Tag Tournament 2, still just an arcade release at this point. To ramp up enthusiasm for even more Tekken over the next year and to hype up Tekken Bowl, Namco Bandai has released dozens of fresh screens from Tekken Hybrid.

There are shots of Tekken Bowl, stills from Blood Vengeance, a selection of detailed character renders and even a few shots of Tekken Tag in the gallery above. Who's excited?!

SERIOUS GAMING | The Games for Change Festival kicked off this week in New York City. (Photo by Brian Crecente)

Resident Evil's Dip Into Action Is More Experiment Than Evolution

I haven't had a good scare since 2005, at least not at the hands of Resident Evil. While it may not be another six years until the lurching infected, man or dog, scare the pants off me, Capcom does seem hesitant to make any short-term promises about the series once famous for making people... More »

Can Two Dudes Really Survive Against a Horde of Zombies?

The latest in Rooster Teeth's Immersion series of web videos is here, this time seeing if two dudes in a video game could really survive against a horde of 400 zombies. More »

Wii Motion Plus Captures Jimmy Fallon's Wild Flailing on Late Night

Jimmy Fallon's body was ready, but Reggie Fils-Aime overwhelmed him anyway with what Nintendo had to offer at E3. Nintendo's E3 showcase spanned four consoles while Late Night with Jimmy Fallon featured only three. More »

Liveblogging Al Gore's Games for Change Keynote

Former vice president Al Gore addresses the Games for Change summit today, kicking off three days of discussion about making games for social impact. Gore is co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management and co-founder and chairman of Current TV. More »

Proving Ground Co-Host Dies in Crash [Update]

Ryan Dunn, Jackass daredevil and co-host of G4's Proving Ground, died in a Pennsylvania car crash this morning. He was 34. Dunn's latest show, which co-stars IGN's Jessica Chobot and had the two testing memorable moments in video games, comics, TV and movies, premiered less than a week ago. Dunn... More »

Welcome to the Game Club: Shadows of the Damned a.k.a. the Five-Week Boner Joke

Howdy everyone! Welcome to the next installment of the Kotaku Game Club! Starting this week, through the month of July, we're going to play Shadows of the Damned, the third-person shooter from Resident Evil mastermind Shinji Mikami, and the crazy man behind No More Heroes, Suda 51. More »

Nintendo Believes the 3DS' Two Big Problems Have Been Fixed

The buzz on the Nintendo 3DS hasn't been good, I recently mentioned to Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime. I hear people complaining about a lack of must-play games and a lack of reasons to boot up the machine. More »

Accused Train Robber and Whiskey Thief Sets Sights on Game Consoles

An accused whiskey drinkin', train robbin', Xbox stealin' ne'er-do-well was picked up earlier this month after police say he stole more than $100,000 worth of Xbox 360s. Mario Ward and his accomplice William Flowers were arrested a couple of weeks back for stealing hundreds of Xbox 360's on... More »

If you know the name Jim Redner, there's a good chance you know him for the single Duke Nukem Forever tweet that caused a brief public relations shitstorm last week. If you don't, Jim Redner will tell you all about the "brain fart" that caused Duke Nukem Forever's publisher to drop him like a bad habit.

Redner, dropped by publisher 2K Games last week after calling out reviewers of Duke Nukem Forever for their "venom"—he later apologized—explains his side of the story at Wired's Epicenter.

The source of Redner's frustration that ultimately lead to that heated-then-deleted tweet, he writes, was one review in particular.

"It was a scathing diatribe masked as a review," Redner says. "Hate is a strong word, but I believe after reading his review it is fair to say that the reviewer hated the game."

"I overreacted when I read the review and I vented on Twitter," he continues. "It was an act of passion on my part that lacked objectivity. In my opinion, someone had gone over the top to attack the game and those who spent their lives trying to make it. Ultimately, I committed a cardinal sin in marketing."

(Gearbox Software founder Randy Pitchford recently offered more measured defenses of Duke Nukem Forever, which he likened to other guilty pleasures.)

Redner goes on to explain the process by which he fields what he says are hundreds (or more) requests for preview and review copies of games, a process that is largely governed by Metacritic weight and an outlet's coverage of the game before consumer interest peaks, right around launch day.

The man behind The Redner Group goes on to explain more about the thought process behind which media outlet often gets which games for reviews, noting that he never used the word "blacklisting" in his original lashing out on Twitter.

"Publishers are under no obligation to send out copies of their game for review," Redner writes. "They reserve the right to pick and choose who they want to send their game too, just like writers have the right to publish a review in any manner they choose. It's call[ed] selection. It's a choice. [...] I personally have sent first person shooter games to one editor knowing that he likes FPS games, but then not sent him a copy of a game based on our national pastime because I know he finds baseball boring. That's not blacklisting. It's a selection process."

There's a lot more where that came from, so if you're interested in some behind-the-scenes details on reviews and the people who control them, head to Wired.

Guest Column: My Side of the Duke Nukem Twitter ‘Brain Fart' [Wired]

I'm a bit of a physics hobbyist. That doesn't mean that I understand or can even converse in the language of motion, but I love reading about it.

So you can imagine my delight when ElectricPig wrote up something about a physics professor using Angry Birds to teach students about physics. Turns out he's not the only one, there's a slew of physics fans who have started using the game in classrooms.

I think Angry Birds' rising popularity in classrooms is driven by its overall popularity in pop culture, its direct use of physics and the fact that the game is now playable in a web browser. The fact that it's playable in a browser means it is much easier to capture your own footage of angry birds laying down a bit of revenge of obnoxious pigs.

Plenty of people have been writing about physics and these cartoon game birds, but my favorite has to be this little video-enhanced physics pop quiz.

I've dropped the questions in with each video. I don't know ANY of these answers but if you want to enlighten us in comments go right ahead. Sound smart enough and I promise I'll buy it.

Angry Birds in the Physics Classroom [Action-Reaction, via ElectricPig]

1. Make a reasonable estimate for the size of an angry bird, and determine the value of g in Angry Bird World. Why would the game designer want to have g be different than 9.8 m/s²?

2. Does the blue angry bird conserve momentum during its split into three?

3. Does the white bird conserve momentum when it drops its bomb? Why would the game designer want the white bird to drop its bomb the way that it does?

4. Describe in detail how the yellow bird changes velocity. You will need to analyze more than one flight path to answer this question.

5. Shoot an angry bird so that it bounces off one of the blocks. Determine the coefficient of restitution and the mass of the angry bird.

Angry Birds in the Physics Classroom [Action-Reaction, via ElectricPig]

In honor of "The Legend of Zelda" existing in this world for 25 years, Josh Dunbar created an amazing fan art poster to hang on your wall! (High-Res)

Now available to purchase at his art blog (18"x19" $25 | 11"x26" $45).

Zelda 25th Anniversary Tribute by Josh Dunbar (deviantART)

Need your daily fill of geek eye candy? If so, head over to Justin Page's Rampaged Reality and get your fix. Republished with permission.

Zipper Interactive has released a new DLC pack for SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy Seals. The "Pro Assault Pack" includes three new maps and two new guns—and is absolutely free, for registered SOCOM Pro members. [SOCOM Blog]

I'm supposed to be telling you about a new video game called Defiance, but... I have to tell you something else: I saw one guy controlling the game on an Xbox 360. Another was playing in on a PlayStation 3

But they were playing the same game, on their two distinct consoles, with each other.

I thought the cool thing about Trion's upcoming shooter-MMO Defiance was that the players of the console and PC game will somehow affect what happens on a related SyFy channel TV show.

That's why I went to meet with the Defiance people.

But I've got to keep pointing this out: this was one game, one shard of a game world, and yet I saw it played on two TVs hooked up to an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 that were linked together for multiplayer.

I had expected science fiction from from Defiance, but I didn't expect this. It wasn't a magic trick. It was multiplayer console gaming without borders. And it won't be coming to a home near you.

Defiance is a third-person shooter set on a future earth that has been invaded by aliens. The game will play as a massively-multiplayer online third-person shooter, letting gamers team up for co-op missions or battle each other. In the brief gameplay sequence I saw in a theater demonstration earlier this month at the E3 gaming showcase in Los Angeles, the Xbox 360 player and the PlayStation 3 gamer teamed up to secure valuable crystals from a fallen alien terraforming satellite called an Arkfall. In the process, of course, they wound up in a massive firefight against aliens who wanted to protect the Arkfall from human pillaging. I saw what seemed to be solid third-person shooting amplified with the effects of coordinated team play.

That's cool, right? The world could use another attempt at the shooter-MMO, and PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC gamers would all be the richer for it?

By the time Trion global brand director Alex Rodberg started talking about how the game was tied into an upcoming Syfy TV show involving this same fiction, I must confess that I was already too distracted by this sight of cats and dogs playing together. Xbox 360 with PS3? How? And would that mean.... Xbox 360 vs. PS3?

No way.

Officially, Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s can't be wired together. Not with finished games. Rodberg told me that the demonstration I saw involved development hardware. Any device running a Defiance client (read: program) could be connected to the same server, he said. That's what I was seeing: developers showing off a unified-Germany of a video game, a game where divided console populations could mingle. This was something I'd never seen developers show off in the half-decade I've seen PS3 and Xbox 360 games demoed for me and my fellow reporters. And you, reader, will most likely never see this for yourself, not just because the Trion people wouldn't let me take a photo (these are basic single-console Defiance screenshots in this story, I'm sorry to say).

As cool as this sneak peek was, Trion can't let the finished Xbox 360 game connect to the PS3. "Microsoft won't let Sony players play against them," Rodberg said, before suggesting we change the topic to something less sensitive. Presumably the barrier is a corporate and/or technical incompatibility between the Xbox 360's Xbox Live and Sony's PS3/PSP PlayStation Network. Those services are separate enough that people who play, say, Call of Duty on one, can't play that game against owners of the other, rival console.

I checked with Microsoft to be sure Rodberg wasn't maybe just mis-hearing them. Maybe Microsoft wanted to break the barrier too? Here's a Microsoft spokesperson saying "no," while promoting how awesome the Xbox 360's online service is: "Xbox Live delivers the best entertainment experience unmatched by anyone else, with 35 million actively engaged members. We have a high level of expectation for our game developers to ensure that all Live experiences remain top notch. Because we can't guarantee this level of quality, or control the player experience on other consoles or gaming networks, we currently do not open our network to games that allow this cross-over capability."

It wouldn't matter much, I guess, if Sony was into this thing while Microsoft wasn't. It would matters as much as if DC Comics wanted Superman to punch Spider-Man again while Marvel Comics was holding out. I checked with Sony's public relations team, but they didn't come up with an official statement yet about how their company feels about the possibility of cross-console gaming.

Sony Online Entertainment's DC Universe Online does segregate its PC and PlayStation 3 players. The game's creators explain the division in their game's FAQ: "We want DC Universe Online to be an experience that's fun, rewarding and balanced for both console and PC gamers, so we've decided to keep the platforms separate."

Cross-platform multiplayer does exist. The Xbox 360 game Shadowrun let console gamers battle PC gamers. The upcoming racing game WipEout 2048 will let PS3 gamers compete against players of the PlayStation Vita. World of Warcraft gamers can group together regardless if they're on a PC or Mac.

Players of Final Fantasy XI say that they've been able to connect the PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360 versions of that game together. The game's creators at Square-Enix even boast about their game's platform-agnostic sharing of worlds on their site, though, not having played FFXI I must confess that I'm having a hard time nailing down just how cleanly and completely that MMO's Xbox 360-PS2 cross-console play is supported. UPDATE: Several FFXI players have confirmed that cross-platform and cross-region play is fully supported, no strings attached.

Defiance won't allow for PS3 gamers to play with 360 gamers, but maybe we can forget that if their actual cross-platform connection between video games and a TV show works. The game will connect to Syfy's TV show that involves the same world. The drama of the invasion in Defiance isn't exactly humans vs. alien invaders. There are aliens who are trying to live happily alongside humans and others who hate them. That more complex friction will produce what will hopefully be a complex drama. Within that televised drama, Trion's Rodberg said, top Defiance players can expect to hear lead characters mention their gaming character. The show might demonstrate in some way that you, a top Defiance player is at the top of the game's leaderboard, Rodberg said. You might be "featured." And, in turn, as the TV series unfolds, the game will in some ways change. Rodberg kept things vague and wouldn't commit to players seeing their characters actually being played by actors. For all we can guess, the integration might be no more involved than a Defiance leaderboard ticker going across the TV screen while the show plays. But Rodberg made it sound like the connections would be cooler than that.

I went to to see the game Defiance with the same expectation I have when I attend most demonstrations for an upcoming video game: to write about an expected future. I saw one, but it was accompanied with the side distraction of a prohibited future. TV-that-connects-to-a-video game vs. rival-consoles-that-connect-to-each-other. Which of those futures really has the best shot? They both sure are wild.