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"Teenage gamer boys, mainly," said Dan Marshall, Zombie Cow Studios founder and developer of the upcoming PC game Privates. He's referring to the game's intended audience, or rather, perhaps those he believes will be most drawn to it.
Normally a game billed as "educational" repels youngsters and other "gamer boys." Privates is different, though. Its subject matter overcomes gamers' natural aversion to educational titles, and it even garnered headlines recently for its failure to pass Microsoft's appropriate content checks for downloadable games.
The side-scrolling shooter tasks players with entering bodily orifices as a squad of tiny marines and dispatching with various "nasties" found therein. Entering a cartoony vagina with a machine gun may seem at odds with the idea of sexual education, but Privates is intended to raise awareness while holding gamers' interest, something that most educational games simply can't do.
"Some people think Privates is supposed to be some sort of replacement for full-on sex ed," wrote Marshall in a recent e-mail, adding that it's not intended as such. In reality, Privates is simply a well designed game, "technically pretty accurate," according to official press describing it.
"Even though it’s technically an education game, it was designed to be fun and playable by anyone," Marshall continued. "Fun games are fun games – even though the material is targeted to the younger gamer, doesn’t mean grown-ups shouldn’t be able to enjoy it."
Privates handles such sensitive subject matter as sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, in ways that entertain as well as inform. Marshall said it's not meant to push boundaries, necessarily; rather, the studio would like "to get people thinking about sexual health, dispelling some myths and introducing them to the realities of certain real-life 'nasties'."
Though the concept of learning about sexual health while controlling a tiny marine wearing a condom as a hat may seem far-fetched, Marshall likes to remind skeptics not to forget how strange the world often seemed during their tender teenage years. "I’ve had some critiques from people who are 30-plus years old and felt it wasn’t educational," he wrote. "Seems they’ve forgotten exactly how little they knew at age 14."
"Games can teach us a whole load of useful or useless information, whether we realize it at the time or not," he wrote. Though the studio has no plans to seek other official distribution platforms after the game's rejection from Microsoft's Xbox Live service, Privates is available now, for free, here.
Go ahead and download it – maybe you'll even learn something.