Regina Lynn, Wired’s Sex Drive columnist, makes an interesting point in today’s article, Sex Trumps Game. The article is Regina’s advice to developers of massively multiplayer online erotic games, or MMOEGs. These games are trying to take online sex (and its surrounding activities, “flirtation, courtship, rules, jealousy, attachment, love and breaking up, not necessarily in that order”) into the modern age of video-gaming.

Regina’s interesting point is that, “A video game already intrudes on sexual fantasy by presenting visually what we once had to write out in text. No matter how detailed the writing, each person was able to imagine what the scene really looked like to them. [But] in a game, both partners see the same thing, a third party’s vision of how sex looks in some position or another, or how a bed or room is furnished.” Her advice is to make the world itself “be secondary to the relationships, so partners truly experience their interaction.”

In most game design, the world is the thing. Whether you consider the world to be the way the graphics represent it or the way the world’s laws work, game designers are in a continual race to one up each other. This transfers to web design too, where developers focus their efforts on the “look and feel” of a site.

But if we take Regina’s advice that a world should be secondary to the relationships that develop within it, then we might be able to say that she is advocating a Web 2.0 paradigm for game developers. While Web 1.0 was about developing a relationship between the site and the user, between the company and the user, Web 2.0 revolves around developing relationships between the users themselves without the site demanding any attention of its own.

Regina talks about the danger of adding a third-party perspective into the sexual fantasy. Imagine wanting to bend your virtual partner over the coffee-table in the middle of the virtual room, only to find that the game developers haven’t programmed the coffee table to be used as a sexual aid. All of sudden, the fantasy disperses and you have to spend a few minutes figuring out someone else’s rules for your fantasy. While this will surely drive away players, the real tragedy is that a couple of individuals had the possibility of wonderful moment stolen from them because some programmer somewhere had never imagined anyone wanting to bend someone over a table.

The danger is the same for Web 2.0 developers. They need to be conscious of the space they set up, and they should not let a failure of their own imagination prevent users from realizing their own potential. Of course, no one can imagine everything, and so gathering user feedback and making constant revisions are the reality of Web 2.0, but if developers start from the desire to stay out of the way, if they give their widgets and features plenty of room for user manipulation and customization, then perhaps they’ll be able to develop a site that will make the people come.

What developers should learn is to give users a space and let them fill it with their own desires.