LAS VEGAS—For the second year in a row, Flirt4Free and Mr. Man sponsored the GayVN Brunch and Keynote Speech. And once again—as with last year’s speech by Jake Jaxson of CockyBoys—it was a high point of the Internext Expo.
The event took place January 15 in the GayVN Lounge, located in the Paradise Tower at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Las Vegas.
Jeff Wilson of Flirt4Free addressed the crowd first, taking the opportunity to provide some insight into his company’s newest ventures, Gay.com and GayHub.com. The latter is a new tube site that will partner with gay adult studios to build “something very special” that will offer 100 percent gay content.
Next Wilson introduced the speaker, Gabe Zichermann, an author, TED speaker and entrepreneur who is widely regarded as an authority on gamification strategies, user engagement and behavioral design.
Wilson explained that about a year and half ago the Flirt4Free staff got owner Greg Clayman interested in Zichermann’s book and he suggested that they contact the author and learn more. It turned out that Zichermann was a fan of gay porn, and one thing led to another—specifically to Flirt4Free’s new Flirt Rewards, a customer loyalty program that adds layers to the experience on the site “more sticky.”
Having piqued the crowd’s interest, Wilson turned over the mic to Zichermann, who started off by saying, “I’m Gabe and I love gay porn,” eliciting a round of cheers.
An expert in gamification—the application of elements of gaming to other areas, in particular to encourage engagement with a product or service—Zichermann talked a lot about how modern technology has become a powerful opponent of boredom. “I don’t think you could have anticipated how much we could have killed boredom. To perfectly honest with you, nobody has to be bored for even a second,” Zichermann said. With social media, electronic games and smart phone, he said, “You don’t even wait for the fucking elevator and be alone with your thoughts.”
The phenomenon of boredom comes from the mental process of “habituation,” Zichermann said. Since the human brain becomes accustomed to any stimulus, in order to avoid constant distraction, “everything becomes boring over time.”
The same holds true for sex itself, he asserted, mentioning a study by Danish researchers that surveyed 15,000 straight couples and found the average couple at about two years into a relationship “switches from romantic affection to companionship affection.”
Many industries must beware of habituation, he explained. The fast food industry, for instance, is “very methodical and specific in finding ways to deal with boredom, creating new food to get people excited.”
Zichermann said he sees the adult industry and the gaming industry approaching the problem of boredom in different ways. “The primary tool that adult companies have created to deal with habituation is increased horizontal choice,” he explained—for instance, the wide array of similar content available on a tube site.
Video game designers pursue a path of “vertical habituation,” keeping individual users focused on one game rather than multiple similar games. In part they employ the concept of “intrinsic reinforcement.” Describing how this works in terms of an addictive game like Angry Birds, Zichermann said, “You challenge yourself to something and you achieve it, and you get a little dopamine. Then the brain says it wants more.”
Because of the powerful effects of dopamine, online games can be addictive—as can the use of social media or other online pursuits. Even though the technologies that can produce addictive behaviors are not inherently good or bad, some people do tend to overuse them—and porn is no exception. Zichermann mentioned some initiatives in other countries that focus on treating addictive behavior among gamers.
But in the United States, he said, all the focus is on the dangers of online porn. Zichermann warned the audience that by attacking porn on “health grounds and safety grounds,” anti-porn activists do not need to go through the Supreme Court for obscenity prosecutions. Instead, they can seek to regulate porn on health grounds.
He would like to see the industry “adopt some techniques used by the gambling industry to deal with the small but nonetheless real population” that overuses adult content.
“The vast majority of people who have those problems are not broken. … There’s no reason why we can’t help those people and at the same time protect this industry, and the important work that you do, against regulatory threats and cultural pushback. … It’s not a first amendment threat; it’s a health threat. And the health threat is real.”
And in addition to avoiding the specter of regulation, the idea of helping consumers who are overusing adult content is ultimately better for the future of the industry. Because, as Zichermann said, “A healthy customer is a good long-term customer.”
