Intimacy in games has been traditionally conceived by developers as a means to reward the player, as relationships can often only be developed after completing a given task. Within this largely heteronormative lens, games frame emotional bonding and sexual intercourse as a goal to be achieved, rather than positioning relationship development as a core mechanic of the game itself. While these experiences can expand and develop the language of romantic narrative in games, it may also obscure the medium’s ability to directly engage with the mechanics of attraction and desire.
This exhibition explores the burgeoning field of interactive queer art, which gamifies the mechanics of intimate relationships and reinterprets traditional game concepts as a means to experience affection, desire, and love. While queer desire has been marginalized and pathologized in the mainstream, within LGBTQIA+ culture, a more inclusive acceptance of kink and diverse relationship structures is being articulated. Whether in the context of long-term romance, intimacy with multiple partners, or casual sex, these artworks place the practice of acting on attraction in the hands of the player, furthering our ability to express the personal experiences of an underserved culture and drawing a wider audience into conversations about gameplay and desire.
Genderator is a delightful twine generator that defines and rates your gender. I really wanted to put it right at the entrance of the show, because of it's supreme accessibility and disarming comic sense. It does a great job encapsulating the overall meaning of the show, defining how an infinite variety of identities all connect back to a core singular human experience.
ps i am an anarchist icey-black hole
Genital Jousting is one of the two games in the show that don't specifically come from queer developers, but I chose to include the game in the show because I think that beyond the artist's text, it does a great job with disarming the culturally-perceived dominance of the penis, and maintains tone of consent and respect throughout it's surprisingly well-conceived narrative. Plus, it's a fun little game about putting dicks in butts. It's cute, accessible, and is able to attract players who are new to more outsider and avant-garde game work.
One of the main struggles of the show was defining the mechanical limitations of what I wanted to show in terms of taking the concept of sex and intimacy and turning it into a game mechanic. With the recent influx of dating simulators into the international market, especially within the queer games community, I felt like a large majority of them still used sex as an end-goal objective, instead of a narrative component. Which isn't to devalue the work at all, but I wanted to ensure that there was a consistent thread through the show in terms of how you act upon your intimacy. But due to it's importance within the queer games scene, I wanted to make sure that dating simulators weren't completely eschewed from the show. Hardcoded does a spectacular job of contextualizing the feeling of otherness and sexual uncertainty as a meta-narrative. It's well written, sexually adventurous, and visually captivating.
When it comes to games dealing with the societal pitfalls of being queer, most tend to focus on the personal struggles of depression, anxiety, dysphoria, and acceptance. But I wanted to find something for the show that contextualized what it means to be gay in a pure technical sense. A Russian Valentine, a self-described "crap game," manages to encapsulate those potential traumas as a very simple retro-themed experience. It does a great job replicating the feeling of an Atari 2600 title, to the extent that I tried to cement the experience by running it on a CRT and NES joystick. But the game only contains a fail state. Even if you manage to "win" and find the few spots where it is safe to kiss your parter, your only victory is staying hidden for eternity, with the absolute certainty that moving even slightly will result in you being beaten to death.
The Longest Couch is a delightful piece of interactive romance about the initial connection with somebody you're attracted to. The game is surprisingly difficult, and requires an actual shared space, as both players occupy the same keyboard. I wanted to make sure this was represented in the show as well, and after curating a show exclusively about keyboard games last year, I noticed it was hard to actually get multiple people to crowd around a keyboard unless it felt like a real group, the intimacy of just two would cause them to stand apart, or on opposite sides of the keyboard. So we placed the game on a physical couch, to mimic the environment of the game itself, if not the actual context. It's an utterly charming experience, and does a great job take a scenario that is so common to the relationship experience, and replicate it digitally.
When I first began curating Polymorphism, the idea was to contextualize gay history through the lens of video games. But when I learned of Rainbow Arcade at the Schwule Museum, I found that their capabilities did a much better job at representing that history. I wanted to include one of Yang's pieces in the show, his work and hyper-realistic visual style have been significant attractors to getting people to observe this part of game culture, and while my initial intention was to show The Tearoom, I felt that Radiator 2 did a much better job representing the physicality of interacting with the digital piece in an erotic context. Additionally, the game serves as a real thought threshold to many visitors, as they intentionally break the consent with the game's digital characters, locking out the game to other guests. Some physical limitations prevented me from being able to show the game earlier in the space, but certainly by making the player experience actual consequences to the abuse of a digital character makes them treat the surrounding game experiences with some more respectful consideration.
Making a queer sex exhibit seems absolutely incomplete without including a piece by Anna Anthropy. Due to the prominence of some of her other work that has received widespread attention with other game exhibitions, I found Get 'Em Hard did a good job as a complementary piece to A Russian Valentine as it represents a specific queer experience, escaping the eternal crush of heteronormativity, as a piece of traditional retro gaming, something that's visually identifiable to somebody who may not have much experience with video games as a medium.
GENDERWRECKED fucking rules. It's a post-apocalyptic punk feast that has some of the best writing I've ever seen in video games, and an illustrative style that makes me want to get tattoos of every single character. And all within this, it makes a conversation out of the question "what is gender?," not only in terms of answering the question itself, but asking why the fuck we're asking it in the first place.
Kara Stone's most recent piece, the earth is a better person than me, is a very intimate experience of the artist, asking questions about death, sex, and how we view ourselves. It's emotionally engaging, taking the player on a walk through the woods, having conversations with the planet itself, and expressing the associated pain and joy of dealing the personal struggles of identity and intimacy.
queer space(?) is Eddie Cameron's contribution to Dreamcade 2018. I had a real hard time deciding what I wanted to include from the project, which was an initiative to create a physical arcade machine full of queer party games. Ultimately I gave in and included two, both this game and Fernando Ramallo's piece Raunchy Feast XXX. queer space(?) feels like a gay version of Toejam and Earl, there's action elements, and arcade elements, and a bunch of wonderful dumb jokes, but then in a traditional arcade-esque world, it also lets players stumble upon folks who might not want to fight, but just talk or fuck instead. It's a great casual free-form experience that transitions erotic and intimate themes into a traditional game construct.
Raunchy Feast XXX is a beautiful little multiplayer game about two people who are given a few minutes to eat as many people as possible. Players walk around a party, eating a bunch of cuties until the time runs out. It's a fun, casual, and hilarious celebration of queer culture, and the potential for honesty and openness that seems to elude the traditional representation of heteronormative relationships. The visual style is a peak peace of inspired work, creating a wide variety of human-esque forms with a mishmash of genitalia, taking an absolute opposite approach to Genital Jousting in the fight to erase genitals in the conversation of gender and identity.
Luxuria Superbia was an initial inspiration for the show, after we had shown it as a compilation of games exploring vaginal masturbation at Bit Bash 2016. While the game initially was designed for a touchscreen, the game's translation to joystick controls emphasizes the need for precision and patience in the goal to stimulate your cavernous surroundings. The conversations around the game find it near impossible to discuss the piece itself without at least touching upon the game's sexual inspiration.
It would be disingenuous to say I created a show with this theme without having a personal goal to create a place to show KMG. Not only is it a great parody on the extreme heteronormativity or male homosexuality of sports games, but a gay parody of a beloved indie game. Each sport in the game replaces its point-scoring objective with a goal to kiss your opponent. Taking such a widely-known genre and focusing it entirely on... well, kissing more girls, is a fun-as-hell take on appropriating mainstream mechanics for the goal of making it way gayer.
NSFWare is a WarioWare-esque microgame compilation where the player must interact with a numpad in different ways in order to complete a variety of sexual objectives. The game is literally porn, with its rotoscoped visuals taken directly from clips on PornHub. With a wide variety of scenarios, partners, and fetishes, the game covers a huge array of interactive fuckin' scenarios in just a few seconds.
