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macros by Leon Arnott

reviews/notes: The Average Gamer, Indie Statik, John Brindle, Rock, Paper Shotgun

As Porpentine puts it:

Forget first, second, third base.

Eroticism is bigger than that.

Here’s 300 queer as fuck bases.

I like lists a lot and I love the way this one came together — people contributed entries which were then complicated and built upon by other folks in a really ecstatic and fluid way.

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I had initially planned on making a dating game where the player took on the role of a sentient (but silent and immobile) gun in a first-person shooter for the Pulse-Pounding Heart-Stopping Dating Sim Jam. I got tired of the idea a few hours in and around 2 AM decided that it was really important that I write a poem about some first dates I’d been on over the past few years. The next day I plugged them into Twine, using Leon Arnott’s replace macro to allow the player to read each piece at their own pace (and end each date earlier than I did, if they so choose), and the result is 1STDATEMEM.EXE.

I finished my first zine today — it’s a short compilation of some of my poetry and photography from my personal/self-documentation blog. I haven’t figured out a good way to get physical copies to people yet, but I’ve made a digital version for easy distribution.

In other news, anna anthropy has been facing a lot of financial hardship lately. I think people sometimes have this idea that because anna is well-known, has made highly-regarded games, and has written two books, that she’s well-off. This is not the case — most of her work is released for free and she doesn’t see much income from her books or many, many speaking gigs. She does a tremendous amount of work for games as a medium and most of it is unpaid.

So here’s the deal: send a dollar or a few anna’s way, email me to let me know you have, and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the zine.

The email route is getting a little cumbersome to deal with, so I’ve made the zine freely available for download. If you like it, please send a dollar or a few to anna.

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Videogames have a problem: they aren’t very erotic.

As my friend Porpentine puts it, “there is a vast chasm between human bodies and the repetitive soulless porn of AAA games.”

Consider a game like Mass Effect, in which sex is a goal, the reward for a series of obviously correct dialogue choices — as my friend Kim Moss puts it, “kindness is a currency“.

Sex in Mass Effect is a cutscene in which the player puts down the controller and watches two bodies awkwardly interface with one another.

It is precisely the moment at which the player is no longer touching the game.

Sex is a movie, sex is a show, sex is a two-minute, pre-recorded, predictable sequence of events.

It may involve two parties of the same gender, but it is never queer.

When sex isn’t a cutscene, the prize, it’s totally mechanistic, linear.

It’s about increasing a gauge, building up a number.

Orgasm = level-up.

Leonore Tiefer, a psychologist who’s written extensively about sexuality: “I always say to people, orgasm is very American. Because it’s a score. It’s short. You know when you’ve had it. You can put the notch on your belt.”

Insofar as games incorporate sex mechanically, that’s how they’ve done it.

Sex in games is about control in the most unsexy way possible, the fantasy of bodies that bend to our perfect wills and always perform just like we expect them to.

So how can we incorporate sex and eroticism into games in ways that are mechanical — that don’t resort to exposition or cinematics — yet non-mechanistic — playful, exploratory, and expansive?

I think we need to realize that this won’t necessarily look like one organ penetrating another, or even two organs rubbing against each other.

We’re seeing more small independent games that provide the player with a space to explore and interact with, without much in the way of a goal or endgame. So maybe eroticism in games won’t be best explored in literal terms, as an act involving one or more human bodies, but will be suffused throughout a space, conveyed through an abstract experience created by a game’s rules.

Independent games are exploring more and more facets of human experiences — I hope to see more which treat sex thoughtfully and that present a diversity of erotic expression.

Here are two events that are confirmed:

In a little under two weeks, I’ll be heading down to the bay area for my first Game Developers Conference. I’m not giving any talks, but I’m looking forward to meeting new folks and spending time with friends and sweeties in the area. I’ll be around from the 23rd to the 30th — if anyone’s going to be in town and would like to meet up, please let me know.

In April I’m headed to the Different Games conference on diversity and inclusion in digital games, where my game lim is being shown. I’d heard about this conference months ago and it sounded like something I’d love to attend, but I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to afford the flight to New York City. At the urging of some friends, I put out a crowdfunding call and received the $400 to cover my flight within hours. Once again I’m blown away by the generosity and support coming out of my twitter communities.

And two that I’m waiting to hear back on:

anna anthropy and I submitted a workshop on making games to the Allied Media Conference taking place in June. I’ve heard so much about it in the past and I’d be thrilled if our proposal is accepted to the Imagining Better Futures Through Play track.

Finally, Tobi Hill-Meyer and I submitted a proposal to Gender Odyssey, an annual Seattle conference on gender diversity. Our workshop is going to look at the history of trans representation in games and talk about the ways that trans folks have begun to create our own imagery in the medium.

A cephalopod wealth accumulation sim for two players

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sad octopy: wasd | happy octopy: arrow keys

happy octopy uses mouse to control the cursor, sad octopy uses spacebar to place coins/spikes at the cursor

collect five coins to win | do NOT collect spikes

WEALTH IS ALL IN THIS UNDERSEA DYSTOPIA

at game over place cursor over winning octopy and press space to replay

inspired by cactus block

Game critic John Brindle recently interviewed me for a piece at the New Statesman about political games. We ended up speaking for nearly three hours and most of our conversation didn’t make it into the piece, so he’s also posted the full transcript of the interview at his blog.

I like doing interviews because they force me to make my thinking explicit in a way that I’m otherwise rarely required to do. Here, John confronted me about the intentionality question with reference to lim, an issue I’d been intentionally avoiding commenting on since the game’s release.

A) how much of this stuff was completely unintentional and how much of it became intentional when you noticed it but then thought “fuck it, that kinda works”? B) what responsibility do you feel you and other devs making things like this have towards the unintended consequences of the systems you create? (go litel boke etc)

I’m not going to pretend that Lim represents a perfect expression of my will. It’s the second game I made and I think the results speak to that, in a way. But it’s not just a reflection of my inexperience at the time, I think that systems have a tendency to get away from us. So we intend to portray or produce one thing but the systems we’re creating seem to resist or reshape our intents – at least that’s been my experience. I definitely had some intentions when I started making the game but by the time I released it there had been this back and forth process of trying to map my imagined game onto this system, the system resisting or fighting back or doing something different, my reacting to that, and so forth.

I can’t speak for other devs but for me this quality of systems makes making a game very different from working in some other media, because there’s this wrestling or dialogue with the system as it’s being built that shapes the final direction of the work. Sometimes the unintentional consequences can be illuminating and useful, and sometimes they’re just experienced as bugs. For me the distinction between bug/feature then isn’t what the developer didn’t intend versus what she did, but more of, is this useful or interesting to the player, does it fit within the experience the system has been developing or does it break it. Maybe that’s just me as someone without much programming background speaking – I don’t encounter systems as someone who has command over them, which might be the experience of someone who is a trained programmer.

The interview closed with this exchange, which is a line of thinking I’d like to explore further:

Is there a production difficulty with procedural politics? is it easier to build a big model if you’ve got a fuckload of time and/or resources? Twine for instance is the hyperdemotic medium du jour, but is typically used for quite different things (although I’ve yet to play this new batch of twine jam games that are challenging the CYOA stigma). How feasible is proceduralism for outsiders? 

Yes, good question. So if you check out that latest batch of games, I think you’ll see that quite a few do involve systems (the one I put together does, though it’s not meant to model any specific real-world social system). As scale and complexity increases, so does the difficulty of putting the model together. But I think the barrier to entry is actually not that high. I mean, I don’t have a programming background and Lim was the second game I’ve made, and people have done interesting procedural things with Twine. I think it’s often less a matter of specific coding knowledge and more of an ability to think procedurally or systematically, which can be a very difficult and counterintuitive means of thinking.

Actually, and this just occurs to me, but I think people who have experiences of marginalization are often forced to see things systematically in a way that people who are privileged on particular vectors aren’t. And I think that experience might actually lend itself to an ability to craft more compelling procedural systems, if only the same people weren’t told over and over again that coding/math is something they can’t or shouldn’t do. That’s one reason why tools that abstract code in such a way that they’re less intimidating are so exciting to me.

I’ve been thinking a little about bodies in games since a recent meeting of the Keywords for Video Game Studies group at the University of Washington on the topic of BODIES/SEX. A few scattered thoughts that I’m still working out:

The question of abstraction — games abstract bodies in different ways, to different degrees, etc. But there’s a difference between purposeful and non-purposeful abstraction. Games like QWOP highlight the degree to which abstraction is accepted and unnoticed most of the time. For instance, The Elder Scrolls series: so much is simulated in really fine detail, and then bodies are just these empty vessels for exploring the world (no need to eat or sleep – the body as an inexhaustible vessel with total freedom of movement.

I wonder if games abstract bodies so much because of an assumption that people want to experience a fantasy of disembodiment. I have a feeling that that’s actually what a lot of people want in games but it’s pretty frustrating sometimes.

(I think the most embodied I’ve ever felt in a TES game is as a vampire: having to pay attention to hunger, weather.)

Queer/indie representations of sexuality/the body in games, e.g. anthropy, increpare deal with the body in formats and genres that are less obviously immersive and “realistic” than simulation games but that can evoke more of an embodied response due to the deliberate nature of the abstraction involved.

(image from increpare’s striptease)

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