It was a humid evening on the battle station Halo, Lara Croft was perspiring something fierce and Mega Man had just retired for the evening. Ms. Croft took me by the hand and led me to the combat simulator. I shook with trepidation for the Tomb Raider was a woman of peculiar tastes and not without a reputation for her perverse predilections. Err sorry, no video game-themed erotic fan fiction on this site, I always forget that. If you're up for that kind of thing may I recommend using Google?

Back to the point, game designer Eric Zimmerman comes up with a challenge every year for the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. This year's challenge was to come up with a game about having one's v-card punched.

Legend has it that Heather Kelley and Erin Robinson won the contest despite only having 36 hours to construct their plan (while other competitors had weeks) and came up with a series of mini-games based on their first times (picking out easily-shed outfits, grooming, finding mood music, making the first move when old boy's courage wanes, navigating a top dorm bunk, the usual). It's odd, though, that they were able skip the foreplay and were still satisfied with the end result.

Creating a virginity-losing video game seems like it would have some challenges. Namely, keeping it classy but relevant. And making sure that the characters were comely but not cartoonishly well-endowed. You'd imagine some percentage of gamers could probably be duped about what doing it with a real, live person was like but there is enough web porn out there that they'd probably be onto any ruse using the sensory devices from Demolition Man, the headgear from Coneheads or the female condom.

I'm not terribly surprised that women won the contest. Sorry to generalize, but the male video game community seems like it would either be too flip about the whole thing ("and then this other slut with huge jugs comes in") or way too serious ("and then at the height of their ecstasy, their souls momentarily join and they forget where one ends and the other begins").