Go back to your demographic charts, dude. Trust me.

I’ve always been a little uncertain about the minds of people involved in commercial marketing enterprises. Sometimes they seem to be operating on an acceptable scientifically oriented basis. They’ll study demographics, gather data, run focus groups and analyze responses to questionnaires.

Other times, however, they tend to be quite off their rockers. I was reading an article on CNN.com just a moment ago about the risqué direction that the CNN staff feels online video games are taking.

In the section of the article from which I am about to quote, the author is discussing a new type of game that will be a multiplayer online game where individuals can meet, flirt, go on dates, and have sex (all in apparently graphic detail).

Says a business expert in the field about this new game, “Why would I want to log on to a game just to have sex with people? It’s kind of a nice ideas, but I see it as difficult as a sustainable business model.”

Perhaps I’m being a bit too cynical, but does this guy have any clue about basic human nature? Particularly the natures of men (the primary consumers of video games)? Particularly the natures of men who are unlikely to get laid elsewhere (or even those who get laid quite a bit)? It isn’t too hard to describe the internet as a massive database for storing pictures of naked people with a little bit of extra information on the side in other less scandalous websites. I’m lost as to how a successful businessman in marketing might think that an online game devoted to pornographic encounters would fail to find a large following of people, far more lecherous than me, who would never admit to owning or playing such a game.