Writer Eli Cugini tracks the shared pasts of adult content and video games, and what this means for X-rated queer representation in gaming.
WRITER ELI CUGINI
What do you think of when you think of ‘sex games’? Maybe strip poker. Maybe some of those gimmicky erotic dice couples get each other as stocking fillers. ‘TOUCH’ ‘FEET.’ But what about video games? Probably not that much comes to mind; maybe a hilariously low-res ‘meet ‘n’ fuck’ Flash game, or a pornographic visual novel. Erotic games have about as much cachet as ‘mature’ AO3 fanfiction – maybe less, even. We’re in the midst of a Gen-Z driven backlash against sex scenes in film and TV, that questions whether they’re synonymous with misogyny and oversexualised culture; games that focus on sexual content can feel like a relic, something seedy, shallow.
Gaming culture and sex has a vexed history when it comes to gender, given the industry’s long history of bad assumptions that ‘real’ gamers are straight men, and that building an adult game audience means sexually appealing to straight men. Female characters in adult games are often expected to have sexualised designs, with entitled male gamers complaining about characters like Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy or The Last of Us II’s Ellie not being sexy enough; meanwhile, the BBC has reported about female games workers also being affected by a blasé culture around women’s sexualisation, such as graphic, distressing sexual content being thrust upon female games actors without warning. The few semi-famous titillating console games, like the Leisure Suit Larry series or Playboy: The Mansion, don’t exactly seem like they’re interested in feminism.
Gaming culture and sex has a vexed history when it comes to gender, given the industry’s long history of bad assumptions that ‘real’ gamers are straight men.
But understanding sex in video games means understanding it as more than just cheap eye candy for straight guys. Sex is central to how many video games work, including games that don’t technically have any explicit content. Nintendo games present themselves as bastions of childlike, lightly heterosexual wholesomeness – Mario gets his kiss on the cheek from Princess Peach! – but I’ve written about the gay and trans innuendos common throughout the Zelda games, for instance, and how they’re used to both build Link’s androgynous character and to make use of covertly gay and covertly homophobic comedy. Levels of awareness of sex, from basic focuses on satisfying touch to creating sexual tension, are intrinsic to games in various ways, and the games that play with this awareness often find new and interesting ways to tell their stories, and to reflect on why we play games in the first place.
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How video games and porn have been twinned for over a hundred years
Why is sex central to gaming? Well, everything that involves ‘play’ has some things in common with sex – many a film has brought out the sexual tension in music, sport and gambling – but video games are perhaps the form most culturally associated with masturbation and with watching porn. Both video games and pornography are generally associated with solo play, shame, and wasted time. The association isn’t just a likeness – video games and porn have been twinned for over a hundred years. From the end of the 1800s to the mid-20th century, fairgrounds and piers and penny arcades included mechanical and electro-mechanical arcade games – early examples of pinball machines and mechanical shoot-the-target games, for instance – and also peep shows and mutoscopes: machines where you could look through a viewfinder and turn a crank to see a succession of pictures or a flip-book reel. These machines could include all sorts of material, but the machines were most associated with lightly erotic reels, such as one of a woman partially undressing.
Both video games and pornography are generally associated with solo play, shame, and wasted time.
So, precursors to video games and to softcore video pornography sprung up in similar places in the US and UK: public recreational sites that enjoyed both popularity and a certain hum of social discomfort, an association with moral griminess that, under pressure, could blow up into a moral panic. This happened in the US in the ‘40s with pinball: a swathe of American cities banned pinball machines, fearing that they’d encourage children to gamble and become dissolute. (New York City kept its pinball ban in place until 1976!) But cultural anxieties around both games and pornography have intensified since both became uncomfortably integrated into private, domestic life. Games aren’t relegated to arcades anymore, porn isn’t relegated to specialist cinemas; both are mostly experienced, now, at home, but this has created anxieties that access to video games and to pornography will lead to addictively bingeing both, staying in one’s bedroom forever, never going outside. Generally, this fear is assigned to boys, supposedly the ‘infinite libido’ gender, and also the gender given more licence to avoid domestic duties.
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Queerphobia and the moral panic about sex in video games
So says the fear: if we can’t control and limit access to forms of pleasure, what kind of effects will that have? The sex and games controversies that arose from the ‘80s through the 2000s were grappling with a lack of control over the private worlds of both children and adults, which included both their private choice of games and their private sexual exploration. Various discussions arose about whether to ban particular extreme, troubling games that might normalise violent misogyny, such as those whose gameplay centred on rape. The biggest controversy, however, was easily 2004’s ‘Hot Coffee’ incident, where blockbuster hit Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was discovered to have an unfinished sex minigame in its code that wasn’t accessible in normal gameplay but could be accessed with mods. Legitimate concerns about unadvertised sexual content were mixed with lack of knowledge of context (such as GTA having a 17+ rating to begin with), which tapped into wider cultural anxieties about teenagers privately accessing sexual and violent material, without oversight from parents or the state.
This fear covers teenagers being injured or scared by material they’re not ready for, but it also can’t be divorced from anti-gay anxieties about kids being ‘groomed’ by learning about different kinds of sex. There’s never been a major panic about gay sex in video games per se – though if you dip into 2009 articles about Dragon Age: Origins, say, you can see culture-war bickering from far-right news sites about “homosexual seduction” – but the GamerGate movement was tied up with right-wing ideas that the games industry was being poisoned by a feminist, pro-diversity agenda, one determined to push pro-LGBTQIA+ messages against what gamers ‘really’ wanted. Even when no kids are involved, sex is a kind of cultural battleground in games: a way, supposedly, to signal who belongs as a player, and whose pleasure is being catered to. That’s why gay sex can create so much resentment for straight players; so can sex that doesn’t work the way players expect it to.
Sex scenes can consummate tension, deepen characterisation and relationships, reveal power dynamics, show us characters at their rawest and most vulnerable, drive plot.
Sex scenes in any media can be erotic for eroticism’s sake – it’s hot to be hot! – but they also use eroticism as a key for storytelling. Sex scenes can consummate tension, deepen characterisation and relationships, reveal power dynamics, show us characters at their rawest and most vulnerable, drive plot. When games play around with the power of sex scenes, they can use the specific properties of games to create specific experiences for the player: eroticism can provide shortcuts to emotional intimacy, platforms for nostalgia and humour, and heightened sensitivity. Players are immersed, but can also easily be put on edge by subversion or by threat.
The best queer sex games or, rather, the best games which queer sex
PC Gamer recently put out its list of the best sex games on PC, and some of their picks are narrative visual novels that use sexual content in similar ways to film and TV, but others are focused more on using sex as a place of exploration in a way that only games can really do. There are tongue-in-cheek sexual reinterpretations of games from people’s childhoods, like NSFWare’s madcap take on WarioWare, and Hypnospace Outlaw-esque evocations of older porn eras as, themselves, nostalgic: You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter recreates the feeling of being a teenager accessing dial-up porn on the family computer, with a deliberately retrofuturist and low-tech porn style to evoke an entirely different internet.
These games are exploiting the ways awareness and unawareness work together in games: WarioWare throws you into new microgames and makes you speedily decipher them, using your knowledge of how other puzzles have worked, so NSFWare throws you into different 16-bit sexual scenes, making you quickly figure out their logic from the inside through your adult understanding of sex. You’re dropped into scenarios you might not be familiar with (whipping and fetish tickling, for instance), and while sometimes your preexisting knowledge makes the movement easy, sometimes you’re confused about how to accomplish your goal, or even what your goal is.
Gay sex games use their forms to explore, and give form to, queer experiences.
Sexual knowledge marks you as an adult, but grappling with inexperience can make you interested and newly engaged with your surroundings, like games may have done to you as a child. NSFWare is, therefore, both a parody of WarioWare and a re-exploration of how WarioWare works. You Must Be 18 or Older, meanwhile, recontextualises everyday, embarrassing memories of being a teenager trying to access porn in the family house as a rich adolescent psychodrama, full of strangeness, discovery and tension (is that my dad in the driveway?). The makers of these games have really thought about what sex is actually like in practice, using it as a place to think about discovery, uncertainty, freedom/restriction, and culture – all topics where sex and games slot neatly together.
Specifically gay sex games also use their forms to explore, and give form to, queer experiences. Mice Tea, a fetish visual novel, uses its central conceits – body transformation and hypnosis – as the premise for its sex scenes, but it also uses it to produce cathartic story arcs for its queer and trans characters. Hypnosis allows characters deep insights into their insecurities and repressed desires, meaning they can have resolutions that are both general (characters learn to present and dress more confidently, accomplish goals, and address their social issues) and specifically queer (one character discovers her transness during a hypnosis session, while another manages to let go of some dysphoria-related grief; meanwhile, two women resolve their conflicts and misunderstandings and become lovers). The sex scenes themselves are focused on deep connection, and on the eroticism of changing bodies, including explicitly trans bodies. An element of the game’s sexuality is creating a bright, comfortable space, where queer and trans sex are held and celebrated, and queer and trans intimacy more generally is celebrated, too.
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At the complete other end of the feelings spectrum is a game like CLICKOLDING, a technically non-explicit queer sex game that is designed to feel the opposite of cathartic and comforting. CLICKOLDING is a clicker game, in the sense of games like Cookie Clicker – you click a button, a number goes up. Clicker games are usually bright and mindless, almost idle (or, for some, entirely idle); the clicking becomes a hardly noticed background hum. But in CLICKOLDING, you are sitting on a man’s bed in a seedy hotel room, pressing a clicker for him. He is wearing an unnerving mask and promises to give you $14,000 if you click the clicker 10,000 times. He speaks to you breathlessly; at sudden moments he asks you to slow, or speed up, or go somewhere else in the room, or face him, or face away from him. You become hyper-attentive to the press of your finger as an erotically charged movement, not so far away from other fine motor movements used in sex, and to the clicker, which obediently, silently responds to your actions. When you look away, you can feel yourself being watched.
Sex in video games is a bit of a poisoned well at times, given the vast entitlement straight guys feel towards the medium.
CLICKOLDING is a game that players could just experience as a shock-value reversal of expectations, but its duration works against that idea; if you click fast, you’re still in that room for about 40 minutes. You’re immersed in your strange erotic ties to the man in the corner, and in the experience of clicking, which he watches you do because he just…can’t…do it satisfyingly anymore. Maybe you think about your fingers, and the kinds of pleasure that come from doing successful manual moves in games; maybe you think about what will happen when you get to 10,000. Maybe you’re desperate to get there. Or maybe, when you get near 10,000, you slow, trying to stave off the ending. Nobody’s clothes are off, so the game asks you a very gay-coded question: you know this is sex. Why?
Sex in video games is a bit of a poisoned well at times, given the vast entitlement straight guys feel towards the medium. But developers and writers are continually finding new ways to use sex to push the boundaries of gaming, and to use gaming to disassemble and reassemble sex, just like games can explore all kinds of movement, enjoyment, and social play. Bo Ruberg’s famous introductory book on games studies, Video Games Have Always Been Queer, is right; games have an amazing capacity to be queer about sex, and a stigmatised but useful affinity with private sex play and sexual shame. But the most exciting moves won’t come with high-resolution graphics and VR; they come in games that quietly change our minds about what it means to touch a controller, to face away from a character, to move.
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