Showing posts with label queer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label queer. Show all posts

Thursday, June 30, 2022

Zugzwang as a pole dance upward unto heaven





This post details my process and intent for making my new release Zugzwang (pronounced in German like /ts'OOK-ts'VAHng/) a tactical sex dungeon roguelike cum ritual game.

I first prototyped it back in 2019, but I didn't really know how to finish it. This marks its true public release, with finished graphics, gameplay, tuning, more sex, and finally an ending.

SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils what happens in the game. It also spoils a bit of Bioshock Infinite (2013) because why not.

CONTENT WARNING 1: I mention a suicide from a century ago.

CONTENT WARNING 2: the game is rather explicit, but I've kept the imagery in this post relatively tame, at a semi-NSFW / soft-R rating.

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Logjam as mourning wood

Logjam is the latest in my gay sexuality series -- a short small game about a middle aged lumberjack daddy processing wood and other hard things. It's about forestry, masculinity, and history, but on a surface level it's a simple work simulator with a burly stripper and occasional twists.

CONTENT WARNING: Some of the screenshots have some CG nudity in them. It is "NSFW".

SPOILER WARNING: This post spoils what happens in the game. If you care about that, then you should play it first.

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

We Dwell in Possibility as queer gardening simulation

all drawings by Eleanor Davis

"We Dwell in Possibility" (WeDIP) is a new queer gardening simulation game about planting bodies and ideas, and watching them grow into a kinetic landscape. You can currently play it in your browser on the Manchester International Festival's (MIF's) "Virtual Factory" website. The game should take about 5-10 minutes to play.

It was made over several months in collaboration with world-famous illustrator (+ co-designer) Eleanor Davis and Manchester-based rockstar musician aya as a commission for MIF. (Also shout-outs to illustrator Sophia Foster-Dimino and sound designer Andy Grier for their incredible work!)

Some people may be familiar with my past work: uncanny CG beefcake sex games that toy with hardcore gamer aesthetics, which only run on laptop / desktop computers. For the longest time, I've wanted to make a gay mobile game, but I was unsure how to get my queer politics past Apple and Google's anti-sexuality censors. It's impossible to get anything on a phone without their long withheld permission... unless... I made a browser game? 

The history of browser games celebrates the open internet that exists beyond Silicon Valley's sterilized closed garden. However, the photorealistic 3D graphics of my past games are too heavy and slow for a mobile browser, so I need to make a 2D game even though I've neglected my 2D visual skills. Fortunately, MIF's support has made my creative collaborations not only possible, but enjoyable.

NOTE: this post "spoils" much of what happens in the game, so proceed at your own risk.

Sunday, June 21, 2020

Hard Lads as an important failure



This post “spoils” what happens in my new game Hard Lads. If you care about spoilers, you should play it before reading. It takes about 5 minutes to play once, and maybe 20 minutes to play it to 100%.

In 2015, a phone video of young muscular White British men hitting each other with a chair went viral. Why make a game about this meme now? Some might characterize all my output derisively as "meme games", which is fine, but personally I’ve tried to avoid doing it on purpose. First, my games themselves should strive to be the original meme, and not merely a fan reproduction. Second, many memes are steeped in internet gamer culture, the only circle jerk I want to avoid.

However. I think British Lads Hit Each Other With Chair is one of those classic internet videos that merits special attention. It does so much in a single minute, and it's not about video games at all. So that’s why I made Hard Lads.

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Interview(s) with Mashable for Pride Month

Last month I ranted to Jess Joho (for Mashable) about sex games and the industry, and I also did a nice and awkward video interview (also for Mashable) filmed in the lovely Wonderville indie arcade bar in Brooklyn.

If you want to see me squirm, then maybe check out the video -- but whatever you do, definitely check out Wonderville if you're ever in New York City. It has one of those rare and coveted Killer Queen cabinets set to freeplay, it has an amazing Soviet flight sim cabinet where you destroy America (with real vector display), and it's also currently the home of the first queer community arcade cabinet The DreamboxXx for which I contributed my queer brawler defense game Dream Hard.

Happy pride, and have a good summer everyone!

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Panel for "Cruising Pavilion" at the Goethe-Institut in New York City, February 27 at 7 PM


Some of my gay sex games are currently featured as part of the "Cruising Pavilion" at the Goethe-Institut's Ludlow 38 gallery space in New York City (gallery hours: Thursday-Sunday, 1:00-6:00pm) until April. I imagine some of particularly gay and artsy blog readers might recall a popular Cruising Pavilion in the Venice Biennale; well, this is the exhibition's second incarnation.

I will be speaking at the institute's main location with artists John Lindell and Ann Krsul on February 27 at 7 PM. I suspect it will mostly be gay people and artist-types in the audience, so I'll probably be serving as an ambassador for video game world, apologizing for our industry's many sins, and so on. If you want to hear me apologize, feel free to attend tonight.

February 27, 2019 at 7 PM
(FREE)
Goethe-Institut New York
30 Irving Place (near Union Square)
New York, NY 10003

The full blurb for the Cruising Pavilion is quoted below:

Monday, December 10, 2018

The end of Tumblr (and Cobra Club?)


(UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 21, 2018: the game server has been patched to post to a Twitter account instead of a Tumblr. Feel free to follow @CobraClubPics for all your fake player-generated dick pic needs.)

If you haven't heard the news, Tumblr plans to ban all adult content on their platform starting on December 17th. As many point out, this will have disproportionally adverse effects on marginalized people, especially trans and queer creators, who have relied on Tumblr to build and maintain communities to explore their sexuality and identity. Now it's not really a surprise that this is all happening, but it's certainly cruel and harmful to the communities that can't easily pick up and move elsewhere.

I have some strange skin in this situation: my dick pic photo studio game Cobra Club involves a networked component that links with Tumblr. This had resulted in amassing what is technically the biggest gay porn blog across all of Tumblr, with over 100,000 user-generated CG dick pics uploaded from the game. (The nearest competing gay porn blog I could find had only 30,000 posts.)

However, this whole ordeal has made me much more reluctant to build any social network integrations into my games for the foreseeable future. What's the point, if these platforms are just going to devour everything in a few years?

I now see this is a difficult technical problem with making art on the internet: our current internet is heavily privatized and incorporated, and so to comment on the internet, we have to invoke these other platforms and brands in order to say anything at all -- and as many libertarian web programmers will love to remind you, these private platforms can do whatever they want without any accountability or compassion to anyone. Building art with their APIs is like building a house on quicksand.

Back in 2015, I had chosen Tumblr because it seemed like it was queer-positive and sex-positive, with a large enough infrastructure and community. But then in early 2018, Tumblr instituted a mandatory "safe mode" block on all adult content blogs, which basically broke my game already. And yes, Tumblr does have very real problems with abusive porn bots and revenge porn, but it seems they've given up on actually targeting these problems, and instead they've decided to raze their user base instead. So much for tech solutionism's bid to save the world, huh?

As for what will happen to Cobra Club, I'm evaluating whether I should try to patch the game to integrate with another social network, to preserve the game's functionality and meaning. Some have suggested that I hook it into Twitter, but honestly, how much longer do you think Twitter will tolerate adult content and queer community?

(To continue mourning what once was, check out Lydia Morrish's "How Tumblr became a sanctuary for outsiders"... I also spoke to Vice, twice.)

Thursday, October 4, 2018

Queer Futures in Game Feel


This post is adapted from a talk I gave at Queerness and Games Conference 2018.

Game feel is most known through indie game developer Steve Swink, who wrote an influential article and a book about it. While I like Swink's book and methodology, I also think it limits itself to a very narrow subset of games and feels -- focusing heavily on platformer action games, but never really thinking about the game feel of strategy games, interactive fiction, or dating simulators, etc. There's a lot of pages on the input curve in Super Mario Bros, or the camera feel in Gears of War, or the animation in Symphony of the Night, but it omits something like The Graveyard or World of Warcraft. Do those games not have game feel?

Claiming these other genres and games under the banner of game feel might've weakened Swink's argument for closely coupled cybernetic loops and virtuosic traversal across game worlds back in 2008. But now ten years later, I think the time is right to expand game feel's concerns.

Monday, September 24, 2018

Post-partum: "Ruck Me", a gay Aussie football TV game about men marking men

How the installation looked from the street; temporary transformation of Bar SK into a sports bar.
Ruck Me was a game installation commissioned for Bar SK as part of the Artworld Videogames event series, in conjunction with the MEL x NYC festival in 2018. It debuted on August 9th and ran until August 15th. For a variety of reasons, it will never be made available for download, and it will probably never be exhibited outside of Bar SK in Melbourne, Australia.

... so if you missed your chance, then, um, too bad.

This post focuses on the game's design and public reception / reaction, and it basically spoils the game. For more information on the game's themes and influences, see my earlier post "Ruck Me and its inspirations." You can also read this CNET write-up by AFL super fan Jackson Ryan for someone else's take on that night.

The Ruck Me installation consists of two parts: (1) an interactive video-based Aussie rules football league (AFL) TV simulation made by me, (2) controlled via a custom-made vinyl blow-up sex doll controller constructed by Bar SK co-proprietor Louis Roots.

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

My gay Australian football game "Ruck Me" and its inspirations


I'll be premiering a new game "Ruck Me" on Thursday, August 9th at 6 PM at Bar SK. As per usual, I'll eventually publish a more thorough artist statement that spoils the game's systems and imagery, but for now I'd like to talk about its general themes and inspirations.

Ruck Me is a game installation specially made for Bar SK in Melbourne, Australia for the Artworld Videogames event series. Because it's designed specially for this installation, Ruck Me will never be made available for download (because it simply wouldn't work without the right setup)... so if you want to play it then I guess you better go visit Bar SK!

For this commission, I wanted to do something site-specific that accounts for the local Smith Street / Collingwood neighborhood around Bar SK, while also stepping out of my comfort zone and trying something new.

To that end, I've made a homoerotic Aussie rules football league (AFL) game which makes heavy use of video footage starring the local Collingwood club, to be played using a custom-made blow-up doll alt-controller by Louis Roots (designer and Bar SK proprietor).

Sunday, June 24, 2018

The DreamboxXx Bundle


Me and my collaborators on The DreamboxXx project (the commission for my recent game Dream Hard) have launched a queer arcade bundle. In the tradition of past social justice oriented game bundles like Devs With Ferguson, the proceeds from this bundle will benefit local queer / trans / pro-immigrant nonprofits.

It's a limited-time offer, running from June 24 - July 24, and it consists of 8 games for $8, a 69% discount off the $26.23 retail value. (Nice!!) Here's the blurb / more info:
Most of these games are for two players, all can be played on the keyboard, and the majority are cooperative. Most of these games are also experimental, and don't really fit the standard idea of a traditional arcade game. These games include:
  • queer sex party simulator about lovingly eating cuties before the last train
  • stark auto-biographical explorations of social anxiety
  • a day at the beach, because you deserve it
  • an abstract notebook about migration and queerness
  • retro 3D brawler about fighting fascists, in glorious Playstation-era graphics
  • gay space RPG about fucking friendly aliens
  • a competitive arena game about gay orbs... I mean, it's orbtown, enough said
  • cooperative strategy game where you literally create a safe space large enough to rescue the entire planet
Most importantly, all these games were made by LGBTQ people to support their community! Proceeds from this bundle will go toward local social justice non-profits of each artist's choice, such as the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (local legal-aid organization serving low-income people of color who are trans, intersex, or nonbinary) and Make The Road New York (local grassroots organization dedicated to immigrant rights and working class communities)
We hope you consider donating toward these worthy causes, and thanks for everyone's support!

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Dream Hard as queer brawler defense



This post spoils the gameplay and ending of my game Dream Hard.

In collaboration with local arcade collective Death by Audio Arcade, me and several other gay / queer artists made games for a Brooklyn queer arts space called The Dreamhouse. My contribution was a retro low polygon 3D brawler called Dream Hard. If you ever find yourself around the Bushwick or Ridgewood neighborhoods in New York City, you can play this (and many other queer games) on The DreamboxXx cabinet at The Dreamhouse.

While making this game, I was interested in what it means to appropriate a game genre with queer intent, and I wanted to figure out why the brawler genre would be a good fit for this kind of aesthetic. Some of my early prototyping and design direction is already covered in an earlier post. I wanted something that recognizably belonged to the arcade era, while staying fairly simple and accessible to a general audience.

Much of my personal memory of arcades focuses on big licensed beat 'em up games like the X-Men brawler cabinet or The Simpsons arcade tie-in. I also liked playing old 16-bit console games like Golden Axe II or Streets of Rage 2 on the Sega Genesis, but neither of those franchises exists today. Other than a few notable indie releases, the classic brawler game is mostly dead. I wanted to channel my nostalgia for these games toward The Dreamhouse.

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Dreamhouse process diary and prototyping notes + a better retro 3D low precision vertex shader


In collaboration with local NYC-area arcade collective Death by Audio Arcade, me and several other gay / queer artists are making small games for an event at a Brooklyn queer arts space called Dreamhouse / (formerly known as The Spectrum). My contribution is shaping up to be a retro low polygon 3D brawler called "Dream Hard."

If you want to play it, you'll have to visit The Dreamhouse, which will house the only public display of the game in the world (for the time being), starting in late May 2018.

I don't have much time to work on this, so grounding the concept firmly within a clear retro arcade genre helps me work quickly with less realistic visuals and simplified character art, while also engaging deeply with the arcade tradition of game design. Specifically I'm riffing off one of my favorite genres, beat 'em up games like Die Hard Arcade, X-Men Arcade, Simpsons Arcade, or the iconic Street of Rage series, which all offer breezy brawling with strange setpieces and colorful sets.

Here's some prototype GIFs and notes from my development process...

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

On "Marathon" as an almighty whoosh



This post spoils my game Marathon.

Marathon is a 0-99 hour game about the athletic endurance required to masturbate for very long durations. I only spent about 6 hours making the game at this year's Nordic Game Jam, but I do intend to revisit this prototype and update it later. (Coming in Q4 2018: Marathon HD?)

The game is a pretty simple one-button timing game: you have to hold down [SPACE] on your keyboard to arouse yourself, but you must avoid arousing yourself for too long or else you might prematurely climax; similarly, if you avoid holding [SPACE] for too long, then you will fall flaccid and you won't be able to get it up again. I wanted to keep the mechanic simple because I didn't want to focus particularly on strategy or skill. Instead, I wanted to test endurance, and how long a player would be able to keep edging themselves without getting sloppy and/or bored.

The game concept is heavily inspired by merritt k's article "The Man Trying to Break the World Record for the Longest Time Spent Masturbating", an interview with a man named Drake Hardy who is competing for the world record in time spent masturbating:

Friday, November 10, 2017

Behold the bildungsspiel: the coming-of-age game


NOTE: There are somewhat vague spoilers about the general plot for several games in this post.

US high school students are generally required to read novels like The Catcher In The Rye -- stories about growing up and finding a place in society. Many of these students also learn about the technical literary criticism term for these narratives, the German term bildungsroman. (Bildungs means "educational" and roman means "novel", and so we usually translate this as "coming-of-age novel")

While there are many well-recognized coming-of-age films, I'd like to figure out the equivalent bildungsspiel -- the coming-of-age game. This also seems like an especially urgent genre for game criticism to consider, since there are so many children and young people who plays games, and form their identities partly around these games. (Meanwhile: something like opera has a much weaker association with youth culture.)

One small obstacle to this critical project is that "bildungsspiel" already means something. Based on my cursory Google searches, it seems to refer to rudimentary educational toys for very young children, to help them develop basic cognitive abilities and motor skills. Curse the German toy industry!...

Well, I'm taking the word back. Let's talk about the bildungsspiel, which isn't for babies, it's for teens!

Sunday, August 6, 2017

Recent developments in queer game studies, Summer 2017

Here's a few recent updates in the """discourse""" within the exciting world of QUEER GAME STUDIES!!!

First, there's a new call for papers in the long-running Game Studies journal -- this time the focus is on "queerness and video games."  The full CFP is here. If you're a student or academic (or anyone with a perverse tolerance for academic citation styles) then you should consider sending-in some original scholarship and/or maybe trim your thesis into a submission; full articles of 6500-8000 words are due by December 31st, 2017. Good luck!

Next, Miguel Sicart wrote a piece about "Queering the [Game] Controller." Sicart, as far as I know, doesn't identify as queer, so some may argue he thus cannot really "queer" anything -- so please allow me, a certified gay person, to try to unpack some of his ideas here:

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Paseo, devlog

the original prototype from early 2017, with a weirder style to match the artist's vibe
A few months ago, a big record label asked me if I wanted to make a short gay sex thing set to one of their artist's tracks -- for a few weeks, I thought the collaboration was going well, but then one day they just stopped answering my e-mails. Oh well, that's just how it goes sometimes...

I still kind of like the basic idea, so I'm going to replace the music and expand it to be part of the Radiator cycle. It's tentatively called "Paseo" (but the name will likely change before then) and it's about stripping, which is a popular intersection of sex and money. As a male performer, you will do strip routines and incorporate beautiful dance movements, but you also have to work the crowd and collect your tips.

Thursday, June 29, 2017

The Tearoom as a record of risky business



WARNING: This post spoils what happens in The Tearoom. If you care about that, you should probably play the game before reading any further.

The Tearoom is a historical public bathroom simulator about anxiety, police surveillance, and sucking off other dudes' guns. In it, you basically cruise other willing strangers for sex, and try to have some fun without getting caught by undercover police. It's heavily inspired by Laud Humphreys' epic Tearoom Trade (1970), a meticulous 180 page sociological study of men who have quick anonymous sex with men in public bathrooms ("tearooms" in US, "cottages" in UK), along with interviews, diagrams, and derived "rules" for participating in the tearoom trade.

My game is set in a small roadside public bathroom in Ohio in 1962. Much of the game sequences and gameplay are based on Humphreys' notes (in his book, Humphreys even calls it a "game" himself) and the layout of the bathroom is based partly on diagrams from his observation reports. And while I wanted the game to be about gay history, I also wanted it to speak to how video games think of sex and violence.

This is also the most complicated sex game I've ever made. It took me ~8-9 months of on-and-off work to finish it, it has several different systems going on, so it's going to take a while to unpack the history and my intent. Buckle up!...

Sunday, June 18, 2017

On "Let's Meat Adam" by Soulsoft


Let's Meat Adam is a short gay erotic-horror visual novel puzzle game about being a hunky West Hollywood white dude trapped in a gory escape room. It was released back in March 2017, but I didn't see anyone talk about it, so now I'm bringing it up, and I want to unpack both its commendable bravery and its mistakes.

I think my main beef is the inconsistency. First, it's as if 3 different artists worked on this game, and none of their visual styles cohere. But "inconsistent" also describes the game's politics: it admirably wants to reconcile intersectionality with the gay eroticization of white muscle dudes. This is a difficult design problem that I also struggle with in my own games! So much of the culture of gay sex, touchstones like Athletic Model Guild or Tom of Finland or Kenneth Anger or Joe Gage or the vast majority of gay porn, focus on a small subset of body types. It's surprisingly difficult to refer back to that history without perpetuating that same narrow focus.

Let's Meat Adam, bravely, tries to address this problem head-on. However, I think it doesn't quite succeed...

(⚠ SPOILER ALERT: I'm going to discuss the plot, structure, and ending of the game!... ⚠)


Tuesday, March 21, 2017

"Take ecstasy with me": a manifesto for Gay VR


Before I explain what the heck I mean by "Gay VR", let's review why Gay VR would be necessary. I gave a MVR talk on this topic at A/D/O a few weeks ago, and someone tweeted my slide above and it went mildly viral. A quick explanation:
  • "failsons" (failure + son), coined by popular "dirtbag left" podcast Chapo Trap House, are a particular type of 20-30-something men who have failed to fit into capitalism for whatever reason -- they don't have promising jobs, or careers, or relationships, or futures -- and they definitely feel the shame of it. When they hit rock bottom like this, do they blame capitalism and start listening to Chapo Trap House, or do they blame women + people of color and they join some Reddit hate mobs?
  • But when they buy video games, the right-wing failson finally fits into capitalism in some small way, and so they stake their self-worth on it. Instead of philosopher-kings, they are consumer-kings, who think they're so good at consuming video games that they can impose their radical conservative racist misogynist politics on the rest of gamer culture...
  • ... and they basically succeeded, thanks to tacit support from the game industry. It's now way too late to reverse this deeply unhealthy attitude toward art and media, and gamer culture is never going to get "better." These toxic conservatives have basically shit the bed, and now that shit will stay there forever.
To save a newly emerging VR culture from this poisoned gamer culture, I believe that we must act now, to fortify and insulate pockets of VR culture from the inferno. Ideally, we all pursue many different strategies in tandem, and here's a tactic that I'm working on, it's two short sweet words: Gay. VR.