Friday, April 3, 2015

"Stick Shift" as activist autoerotica


This is a post detailing my process and intent in making Stick Shift. It has SPOILERS; if you care about that kind of thing, then you should probably play the game first.



(Again, SPOILER WARNING is in effect. Last chance!)

Stick Shift is an autoerotic night-driving game about pleasuring your gay car. It is the last of my recent erotic gay sex game trilogy, alongside its sisters Hurt Me Plenty and Succulent. I also feel like it is a fitting book-end to the past two games, incorporating themes and ideas from both.

Over the past two months, the game has changed quite a bit. Originally, I started from Paolo Pedercini's suggestion to riff off Andy Warhol's film Blow Job (1964).


For all 28 minutes of Warhol's film, a guy from chest-up contorts his face while someone supposedly services him below, off-frame. Is he actually being serviced, and do we find out at the end? How long will it take and what will happen? A lot of it is about watching his face and reading emotions.

Facial animation is something that I traditionally de-emphasize in my games, given my limited character art experience, and I usually go as far as cropping out the characters' eyes or facing them away (Hurt Me Plenty) or masking them with sunglasses (Succulent) to try to avoid uncanny valley effects. I could see myself spending days or weeks on trying to get his face to communicate some semblance of human arousal and still failing miserably.

But one of my rules of thumb is that the most obvious implementation is rarely the best one, so I started wondering if there was another way out, if I could avoid this work investment by having something else convey arousal. Maybe a "METAPHOR"?


Or maybe arousal is a metaphor for acceleration, and if that metaphor were driving a car, then I suppose it would have to be a manual transmission vehicle, so that the player can actually register discrete stages of arousal and quantify the "steps." I specifically abstained from having the driver make any grunts or moans -- this is arousal on the car's terms.

Gear sticks have the benefit of being fairly phallic, with a humorously masculine connotation in the US (an exercise for the reader: ask a group of men about manual transmissions, and you'll trigger a mansplanation singularity). I also liked the idea of making a driving game without any steering. Driving is a rich set of activities and habits, and I wanted to foreground less-emphasized aspects instead of the usual tropes.

I grew up in middle class suburban Southern California, where everyone is expected to know how to drive. Given how often you're in a car, you quickly develop certain superstitions about which routes are most efficient at which times, and which freeways in which directions to avoid at rush hour. As Ice Cube says in this fantastic video about Los Angeles, traffic feels different depending on the freeway. What is this feel?


Action films confuse acrobatics for driving. A more mundane but honest fantasy of driving feels more like the opening of the film Drive (2011), when Ryan Gosling's character expertly predicts the rush of traffic from a parking lot -- because dodging traffic without even trying is sexy as hell

The greatest rush in the world is not going faster than everyone else, but rather everyone going slower than you. Acceleration is relative.

Or maybe driving is fundamentally about avoiding other drivers so you can be alone with your car. The average Los Angeles resident probably spends more time with their car than their human family. You're always touching it, fiddling with the mirrors, checking for scratches, wondering whether to bathe it, nibbling it on the neck... There's a certain intimacy there, and that intimacy is what every car commercial tries to evoke. Your first car is like your first kiss.


And at night, driving actually has a chance of fulfilling that car commercial fantasy. Most people are at home or asleep, so there's finally enough room for everyone on the road. It's quieter, smoother. It's easy to imagine how villainous urban planners like Le Corbusier or Robert Moses thought the automobile would be the future of cities. When you drive at night, you're an astronaut gliding through constellations.

In 52% of Stick Shift playthroughs, you will accelerate, you will finish, you will fulfill all your autoerotic fantasies and slumber peacefully while your car cools down, leaking fluid into a wet spot pooling on the asphalt. (Exhaust pipe condensation is totally normal, by the way.) This is where the in-game music track "Crybaby" by Davey and the Chains comes into play -- it has a good rhythm to it, it isn't too synth-y or electro-y, and its lyrics speak about "wanting your love." Obviously, he was talking about jerking-off a car.

But for 48% of playthroughs, the player will be stopped by two heavily-armed police officers. Why 48%?


The point of this is that being stopped or harassed by police isn't really your fault. In fact, it is more or less out of your control, an arbitrary chance operation.

When you drive, it doesn't matter if you were driving completely safely and reasonably within the speed limit, you slow down anyway so you don't "give the cops a reason" -- but deep down you know that a cop doesn't need a reason to stop you and ruin your day. After all, police departments have well-documented "ticket quota" / "minimum performance standards" to meet. When someone actually argues with a traffic ticket and wins, the internet applauds them because we all wish we could do that.

The 48% chance to be interrupted is taken from a 2013 survey (from this March 2015 Williams Institute report) -- "of the LGBT violence survivors who interacted with police, 48% reported that they had experienced police misconduct." Clearly, police abuse and brutality is still a very real issue for many LGBT people, it's just that their basic safety loses political priority when weighed against whether your local neighborhood bigot florist will do your wedding flowers.


As a 20-something gay person living in Brooklyn, I associate Andy Warhol with an ancient era of New York City that nurtured ball culture, Beat poetry, street art, hip hop, Keith Haring, Basquiat... they are all part of this bygone legacy that barely seems real to me, so I can't help but romanticize something like The Stonewall Riots.

The original Stonewall Inn was a shit show, a mafia-owned restaurant turned dive-club with clogged toilets and watered-down drinks, but it was the only slightly safe place for poor homeless queers to hang out in Greenwich Village. The NYPD raided the bar regularly, and most people usually left quietly when they were released; cops reserved arrest for the "most deviant", the drag queens, women wearing "masculine clothing", and any transpeople.

As people tell it, June 28, 1969, was different. Instead of leaving, they stayed on the street and jeered at the police, resisting arrest instead of filing out in an orderly fashion. At some point an officer handcuffed a "dyke-stone butch" and struck her on the head with his baton -- she looked at the crowd and shouted, "why don't you guys do something?"


The crowd lit garbage cans on fire, slashed tires, chased cops down streets, and tried to flip the police wagon. Supposedly there was even a molotov cocktail involved. Two police cars sped off, abandoning the remaining dozen officers, who barricaded themselves inside the bar against hundreds of loud angry queers. The crowd uprooted a parking meter and used it as a battering ram on the door, and the cornered cops inside unholstered their pistols... but when the riot squad arrived, the crowd let the cops escape.

The stereotypical counterculture protest consists of students locking their arms and singing "We Shall Overcome" to a phalanx of helmeted riot police. The Stonewall Rioters were more creative: they sang about their pubic hair and formed chorus kick lines. They mocked the police and denied their authority through flamboyance. They kissed and made-out. Free self-expression was its own protest, and it utterly humiliated the NYPD.

When the cops interrupt play in Stick Shift, the player is afforded a similar opportunity: the player can blow a kiss at the two faceless men armed with riot sticks, grenades, and an M4 rifle.


When you blow a kiss at the cops, it adds another 10 minutes to the "penalty" timer pictured in the middle. My hope is that players quickly embrace this, voluntarily adding more time and locking themselves out of the game longer as a form of protest -- ideally, you force the cops to detain you to absurd extremes. Imagine a gay car and its lover, stopped by cops on the street, unmoving, for days or even weeks.

The use of a cooldown period refers back to my game Hurt Me Plenty (it even uses much of the same code, documented here) but it also invokes Warhol's Blow Job. The idea is to make the duration of the entire act "felt", whether it is cops detaining you for liking dick, or whether it is you and your car in the midst of a blissful post-coital cuddle. Stick Shift aims to visualize sex and sexuality as an ongoing process that occupies durations, not merely as instantaneous events or achievements. It might possibly be the first video game to simulate a refractory period.

Also, I guess the dude in the game kinda looks like the dude in the movie, I guess?