"So many games lack basic emotional intelligence that what I'm doing is really radical and shocking by comparison," said Yang.
Admitting that you like them is an act of vulnerability, and that places us in a position where we have to admit something personal to ourselves. In an email to WIRED, Yang likened his work to romantic comedies, calling them "emotional fantasies" that can be embarrassing. Playing games like Yang’s and Love’s can feel silly, if not downright uncomfortable. “It's a lot easier to depict taking the lead in any given scenario, but again, sex is communication, and being submissive isn't the same as being passive."īy placing her audience in several distinct scenarios, Love hopes that she can underscore her view of sex as a communicative act, a metaphorical handshake. In part, she says, it’s a game design problem.
Love says she plays a lot of games that deal with kinky sex, but finds that the vast majority of them put the player in a dominant role. It’s a work in progress from Christine Love, a game designer whose work is modeled on and sometimes parodies the Japanese “visual novel” genre of occasionally pornographic romance games. The game Ladykiller in a Bind explores some of the same themes, but through the eyes of both a dominant and a submissive. We can analyze them a bit, but before long, that control is taken from us, just as it was taken from her that night. Freeman tries to flip that script, briefly taking us through her own memories. It's an inversion of what we expect from videogames: Usually, it's us inflicting violence on the game world. "People aren't used to losing agency in such a violent way, and I made it violent because that's what it is," Freeman says. You're guided, somewhat forcefully, by events. It creates a sense of unease, because you can't sit and process the language at your own pace. Towards the end, Freshman Year's text changes from large blocks packed with florid descriptions to short, aggressive cuts. The choices, Freeman says, are meant to tap into a feeling faced by many survivors of abuse: that maybe if they'd done this or that differently, they could have avoided the whole thing. As text sprawls across vivid watercolor backgrounds, players can choose what to do. The game follows Freeman during one evening during her first year of college, when she was assaulted outside a bar.
(The games are usually available on PCs, sometimes for free, sometimes right in a web browser.) Games like Robert Yang's Hurt Me Plenty and Christine Love's Ladykiller in a Bind take similar approaches. But indie designers like Freeman are pushing back, hoping to recouple sexuality and humanity by making players feel confused, awkward and vulnerable. Mainstream games with sex scenes like Mass Effect or God of War exist to titillate and empower. Games that deal with sex in a realistic way are largely unexplored territory. Her "vignette games" aren't interactive porn they're quirky game designs that explore snapshots of her life, often tapping into formative experiences she had with sexuality and femininity.
"Sex is something I think about all the time, so I guess that's why it comes out of almost everything I do."įreeman, an independent game designer, has recently found herself at the forefront of a wave of new games that grapple with sex in novel ways. Nina Freeman doesn't quite know why so many of her games have been about sex.
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