Many of you may be wondering where this obsession with Winnie the Pooh’s favorite food comes from, although some of you may already imagine that it all comes from falling into a seduction trap. It’s a simple and fairly straightforward analogy, and is used for situations in which a lady (of undeniable beauty but questionable intentions) uses her seductive weapons to achieve something that has little or nothing to do with romance or its implied promises.

Sensual intentions…

We all have something that seduces us, beyond our potential ideal partner. In my case, I am passionate about eroticism in general, and eroticism in video games in particular. Too much so that I have been dreaming of writing about the subject for years, while I have been getting a large collection of titles that represent an inaccessible fetish in terms of time required. And on top of that, their number is becoming unmanageable, invading the precious and limited space of a small flat in Tokyo.

But returning to the idea of writing a book, I only needed a chapter of 15 pages to realize that the subject is overwhelmingly vast and almost unmanageable if you want to approach it from an encyclopedic point of view. And so the project was frozen… until I imagined a different approach: if the worst thing about embarking on a literary adventure of such characteristics was that the fruit would be seen only at the end of the process, making it a real test of willpower and discipline, why not approach it as a step-by-step process and share it as a blog, social networks or even a YouTube channel?

That’s how “SexyPixels” was born in my head, a crude and direct name, but borrowing a reference from a certain book of images about sexy advertising of Japanese computers. I asked a friend who owns a hosting company (the amazing Stoorlabs) for advice and everything I needed to start working with WordPress, and another friend who is a graphic designer (among many other things) for a generating a corporate image. Suddenly I had an epiphany about the title.

From sexy pixels to honey traps.

My mind went back a few months ago, when I was visiting my sister-in-law in Osaka. We were waiting for a train at the mythical Esaka station, reference of the most famous King Of Fighters games. I noticed a sign on a nearby building that caught my attention:

江坂駅前のビル。このページの「起点」です。
You wait for a train to arrive while these flowers catch your eye.

I really like to joke about these things so I asked my sister-in-law:

“It looks like I could study Japanese there… they look like serious girls in the 3-B class, and 3,000 yen an hour (with… drink?) seems reasonable…”

“Nooo…” – she commented somewhat blushing, “they are not real students! they are adult women disguised as students: you should be careful, it’s a ‘honey trap’, you won’t learn anything, they want your money…”

I was very amused by the smart use of the term “honey trap” and the fact is that, practically everything can be categorized as a honey trap. From the most basic human relationships to any marketable object that marketing can sneak into your shopping list.

So I stopped engines and requested a new direction to my colleagues on the other side of the world. One got me my desired domain with a WordPress package installed, and the other designed a cool logo. I have only words of gratitude for both of them, and invitations to come as soon as I return to my homeland.

Project logo, with Hani-chan on a honey pot.
Hani-chan, providing even more inspiration to the project. Excellent contribution from MrSr

So everything was set; I created a YouTube channel where I could experiment with a second-hand video capturer, opened a Twitter account and started fighting the clock to build the idea.

And what is the idea?

I may have decided to change the format, but the intention remains the same. Ideally I would like to generate the necessary content to publish something related to eroticism in videogames, its history, evolution, industry… for now I’m content with shaping the project and trying to have fun in the process. Hunting titles for my collection, cataloging them, playing them, and preserving them is among my goals. But beyond that, I want to be able to study and transmit the history behind them: the technological means, the strategies of studios and companies, their members, the evolution of styles and mechanics, and of course, the socio-cultural frameworks and their relationships with the product, from the consumer to the absolute detractor.

And during the work of documenting it all, classifying it (how much “Honey” and eroticism is present on each title… topic that I will develop in the next entry) understanding that it is not necessary for a game to be explicitly erotic in order to participate in this attraction to which the title is endowed.

And to the question “What is a ‘honey trap’ in all this concept?”, the answer would be:

Speaking about games, a “Honey Trap” would be a title that does not give you what it promises. That is, it tempts you and convinces you to buy it, generating expectations that are not fulfilled at the end.

ERO-MASTER

Not all games that have some “sweetness” are “Traps”. Nor do all “traps” have to be bad games, even if we all think of disasters, blatant lies and lame games that only manage to sell themselves by showing flesh.

Having said all this, hands on the honeycomb!