NINA FREEMAN DOESN’T quite know why so many of her games have been about sex. “It just kinda happened,” she says. “Sex is something I think about all the time, so I guess that’s why it comes out of almost everything I do.”
Freeman, an independent game designer, has recently found herself at the forefront of a wave of new games that grapple with sex in novel ways. 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.
Games that deal with sex in a realistic way are largely unexplored territory. Mainstream games with sex scenes like Mass Effect or God of War exist to titillate and empower. But indie designers like Freeman are pushing back, hoping to recouple sexuality and humanity by making players feel confused, awkward and vulnerable. (The games are usually available on PCs, sometimes for free, sometimes right in a web browser.) Games like Robert Yang’s Hurt Me Plentyand Christine Love’s Ladykiller in a Bind take similar approaches.
“There’s nothing sexier than letting down your guard and seeing someone else let down their guard too,” says game designer Yang.
How Do You Do It?
When she was a young girl, sex confused Nina Freeman. With little more than a handful of playground rumors (and the quick flashes of nudity inTitanic) to go on, she wasn’t sure how two people could even fit together. So sometimes while her mother was out of the house, she’d try mashing her Barbie and Ken dolls together. Her game How Do You Do It? replicates those furtive experiments.
“It’s a young white girl playing with Barbies,” Freeman says. “So it’s pretty safe as far as sex goes. There’s nothing graphic to it.” Her game is simple; you play it with six keys. With them, you can maneuver the dolls into positions that vaguely imitate the physicality of sex.
How Do You Do It? is an extremely short game; a session takes a few minutes at most. But in its sonnet-like brevity, it elegantly captures a quintessential bewilderment people have with their bodies, and the naturalness of sex using a veneer of comedic awkwardness. It’s the Goat Simulator of intercourse.
The abstraction helped in its popularity, according to Freeman. “Some people thought the game was perverse,” she said, “but most saw it for what it was: funny.”
Freeman’s latest game, Freshman Year, is more somber, and it hasn’t yet attracted the attention that her previous work did (it was shown at festivals like Indiecade and the Independent Games Festival, for example). How Do You Do It? was approachable in its haphazard fumblings, but Freshman Year is cutting, almost precise, in its attempt to distill the frightening experience of sexual assault.
The game follows Freeman during one evening during her first year of college, when she was assaulted outside a bar. As text sprawls across vivid watercolor backgrounds, players can choose what to do. 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.
Towards the end, Freshman Year‘s text changes from large blocks packed with florid descriptions to short, aggressive cuts. It creates a sense of unease, because you can’t sit and process the language at your own pace. You’re guided, somewhat forcefully, by events.
“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. It’s an inversion of what we expect from video-games: Usually, it’s us inflicting violence on the game world. Freeman tries to flip that script, briefly taking us through her own memories. We can analyze them a bit, but before long, that control is taken from us, just as it was taken from her that night.
Submissive, Not Passive:
“Every power exchange must be negotiated,” read the posters that line the walls of an electronica-fueled sex club in Robert Yang’s game Hurt Me Plenty, a simulation of real-life dominant-submissive relationships that teaches players about BDSM culture.
The game begins with a classic negotiation—a handshake. (You can use a Leap Motion controller to make that experience even closer to the real thing.) You shake your hand to agree upon the intensity, clothing level, and safeword for the game’s activities, or stop shaking if you disagree and want to re-negotiate the terms.
As the player, you could violate those terms. If your computer partner uses the safe word, you’re expected to stop everything immediately. If you don’t, the game blocks you out and displays a message: “Your partner is still recovering from the previous player’s abuse and violation of boundaries.” The game then locks you out of play for some amount of real-world time—typically measured in days.
It’s stark and dramatic, but effective at communicating the importance of acknowledging and respecting the trust a partner places in you: you have power and violence, but with the expectation that you’ll only use them within well-defined limits.
The game Ladykiller in a Bind explores some of the same themes, but through the eyes of both a dominant and a submissive. 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.
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. In part, she says, it’s a game design problem. “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.”
By placing her audience in several distinct scenarios, Love hopes that she can underscore her view of sex as a communicative act, a metaphorical handshake.
Playing games like Yang’s and Love’s can feel silly, if not downright uncomfortable. That’s all by design. In an email to WIRED, Yang likened his work to romantic comedies, calling them “emotional fantasies” that can be embarrassing. 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.
“So many games lack basic emotional intelligence that what I’m doing is really radical and shocking by comparison,” said Yang. In mainstream games where sex is an option, it’s usually boiled down to clicking “sex” and watching a scene fade to black.
“These games simply aren’t about sex,” Yang says. “We pretend they are relevant to this discussion about sex games when they aren’t. Can we finally stop giving a shit about 10 seconds of blue boobs in Mass Effect?”
More than anything, Yang says he wants to see games tackle sex as it actually happens in real life.
“Sex takes time,” he says. “Even a quickie in the morning before work takes at least five minutes. Very few mainstream games would have the courage or the patience to let you flirt with someone, much less have sex with them for five whole minutes.”
