Early this morning we got a tip to that photo (and others), which is part of a gallery of the very attractive Ann Angel showing her lust for Master Chief. The tip backtracked to a site called Gamer Fetish (extremely NSFW, NSFchildren, NSFusing family computer at kitchen table, you name it). And I think it's safe to say that geek porn is officially a growth segment for that business, no small feat considering the infinite variety of infinite fetishes/urges/niches served by online erotica.
It's not just straight-up porn, either. The tease is everywhere. Booth babes. IGN babes. Wii Fit Girl. Bikini models playing Guitar Hero. Jo Garcia. Tera Patrick sexing up Saint's Row. And this freaking site, of course. So I'm not coming to you remonstratively, or remorsefully even. Geeks are no strangers to porn, but I'm wondering if posing a nude girl in the act of sharing your interests - on a giant 20-sided die, humping a Halo helmet - represents an emotional tease that is more powerful than the most explicit picture could ever hope for. Especially since we are, as a class, very easy to separate from our disposable income. Because that's what this is about, monetizing the tease. (Granted, this post could be said to do the same.) Gamer Fetish, for example, is a cookie-cutter free-porn blog - 10 free pics, link to the for-pay provider, and hope that the subject trips your trigger enough that you'll beg (read: pay $19.95) for more. Even at tiny conversion rates, that kind of subscription charge allows the paysites to throw off enough dough to make sites like Gamer Fetish worth the bother. The site's tone, of course, is to read like your standard geek-interest blog. But the banner ads and the links to paysites are unmistakable in intent. I'd also argue that this genre encourages its consumers to see nudie pics in a context other than porn, and on some level regard them as more socially acceptable. Not, like, share-them-with-your-8-year-old-cousin acceptable. But a nude woman engaged in a sex act, well, we know where that lives on our hard drive and its not exactly something we're proud to own. This, hey, we're gamers, and there's video game stuff in the frame. It's funny! It's cute! It's the kind of thing I'd feel like I could leave laying around to provoke my girlfriend and not suffer too badly if she was offended. As for the hardcore stuff, like World of Whorecraft or Rage of Bonan don't think a movie like that appeals to your standard porn connoisseur, who's plunking down his dough for things titled [Random Sex Act]#22, whose production values need to go no further than a bed in a Public Storage garage. These things cost money to make and need a business case to get funding. As Nadine Strosser of the ACLU observed, porn isn't 10 perverts spending a billion dollars a year. People are paying for it. Foot fetishists pay for foot fetish porn. It would follow that geeks and gamers paying for geek and gamer porn. My question: Do you? Because I have a theory that around 100 percent of you will say no. And if that's the case, either we're a cut above all the other gamers in terms of morality and supression of instant gratification, or geek porn is heavily overinvested and/or oversaturated and will bankrupt itself soon. Which do you think is more likely? This is Pretty Much the Hottest Thing Ever [Gamerfetish.com, via Polygamia, very NSFW]