Forever BUTT

The cover of BUTT Magazine #18

This doesn't really have anything to do with games, directly, but: I want to talk briefly about a gay mens' magazine called BUTT.

I never realized before how BUTT was such an important influence to me, until a photographer asked me to pick out things from my apartment that informed my work -- so I picked out "Forever BUTT", a best-of compilation book. At first I thought about how funny it would be if the word "BUTT" was literally printed in the photo, but then I realized there was some truth to what BUTT meant to me.

Growing up, my early understanding of gay men consisted mostly of hiding random gay crypto-porn, talking with my mom's fitness instructor, and wondering about Tigger from Winnie The Pooh. I knew abstractly about AIDS, hate crimes, gay bars, musical theater, and mid-century modern art, but I didn't really connect any of those things to my life. All I knew was that I wish Zangief played more like Chun-Li.

And then one fateful day, while walking into an American Apparel store without any intent to ever buy anything, I saw the cover of BUTT issue #18 on the shelf -- a casual portrait of a smirking burly bearded dude printed on milky fuchsia-pink paper. He wasn't a glossy supermodel with perfect cheekbones, he was just some random cute guy somewhere, and so he deserved to be on the cover. It all seemed clearly gay, yet also didn't really fit my young idea of gayness at all.

What... was this... ?

Why I am one of the most banned game developers from Twitch, and 3 steps they can take to fix their broken policy

EDIT, 14 July 2016: this original post has been cross-posted (with a few additional excerpts, for context) to Polygon.

A few days ago, Twitch banned my newest release Radiator 2 from all broadcast by anyone throughout their entire site. This is the third release of mine that they've banned. I am now the 3rd most banned game developer from Twitch (or perhaps the 2nd most banned, if you count each part of Radiator 2 separately).

I'm no stranger to Twitch game bans, but this is new even for me: the games bundled in Radiator 2 are actually kinda old! For the past year and a half of press coverage, interviews, game festivals, art exhibitions, and viral videos, these games were OK to broadcast on Twitch. I had thought I found a safe ground of "acceptable sexuality" (an extremely dangerous concept in of itself) but with this move, they've now banned basically everything I've made. Now, nowhere is safe for me as a creator.

What's too gay for them, what's too sexual for them? Why did they change their mind when I re-mastered my games and put them on Steam?

I have no idea, and that's the biggest problem: Twitch never says anything. No e-mail, no notification, no rationale, no reason, no pity tweet. Am I just supposed to keep refreshing the ban list page to see if they banned me, for every single game I make, forever?

This is humiliating and dehumanizing treatment, and I wish Twitch would stop it.

Radiator 2 as loud and quiet

Radiator 2 is an "HD remastered" (whatever that means) bundle consisting of previously released sex games Hurt Me Plenty, Succulent, and Stick Shift, available on Itch.IO and Steam.

(If you're interested in knowing more about the process and intent behind the individual games, see the Hurt Me Plenty talk I gave at NYU Poly, or the write-up I did about Succulent or the write-up I did on Stick Shift.)

Originally, the plan was to package them together to avoid going through Steam Greenlight three whole separate times, but now I feel like they all function similarly and share code / assets, so why not put them together?

I'm also concerned with accessibility and preservation. I want this game to function on a wide variety of systems, now and for a long time -- and Unity 5.4 finally fixed an OpenGL crash a lot of players have been reporting to me, so that's a big reason I've had to wait until June. The engine upgrade also brings better lighting and physically-based rendering, and I also added some language localization and gamepad support while I was at it. I'm now pretty comfortable with this being a "definitive version" that I don't have to worry about or maintain too much.

There's also a lot more to this release, other than these boring technical details...

new game re-release: Cobra Club HD

Itch.io is celebrating Itch.io Week, and on Tuesday they featured a short interview with me and the creator of Emily Is Away. A bunch of indies are also doing random sales or non-sales of their games on itch too, so I thought I'd join the fun and re-release my free downloadable game Cobra Club as "Cobra Club HD."



This is basically the new build that has been going around at some events and festivals, like Now Play This and A MAZE -- it features a completely new rebuilt penis, pubic hair support, strap-on mode, and various other tweaks. Unfortunately, I couldn't get foreskins working 100% properly all the time, and dudes kept straight-splaining "what foreskins actually look like" to me, so I decided to just disable that feature entirely. Happy now? NOW NOBODY GETS FORESKINS!!

As always, if you encounter any problems, just follow the troubleshooting instructions on the game page, and send me an e-mail with your logs. Have fun!

"Why I Am Good At Bad Sex (... in games! IN GAMES!!!)" at A MAZE 2016 in Berlin, April 21 at 10:00 AM

My blog posts lately have been mostly talk announcements or transcripts... sorry. I think that's probably the downside of getting noticed and getting invited to do talks -- I end up having less time to write posts (I don't know how Emily Short manages to do it!) but I also end up "saving my ideas" for talks instead of posting about them.

That said, here's another talk announcement -- I'll be speaking at A MAZE 2016 in Berlin, Germany, on April 21st. I'm kind of anxious about it because the last time I gave a talk in Germany was GDC Europe 2012, and I fundamentally mis-read who my audience was going to be, and the talk didn't go very well. I'll try hard not to fuck it up this time, especially since I'm basically the first talk of the whole conference! Ahhhhh!

Here's the talk description from the A MAZE program:

If you always win a game as fast as possible, then you are probably very good at games... but if you always have sex as fast as possible, then you are probably bad at sex. (Why did no one ever tell you???) So what does it mean to be good at a sex game, and anyway, what is a good sex game? In this talk, I will talk about all the gay sex games I've been making, as well as many other sex games I've been enjoying, even some of the straight sex games. But it's also OK if you never play any of these games -- because it's even hotter when you watch.

Content warning: this talk contains sexual content

Basically, I want to (usefully) conflate notions of skill / quality / value / "goodness" with regard to sex and sex games, and I'm going to try to connect the past 3-4 "big ideas" I've written about... Ideas about how sex functions in games, about games and intimacy, and about how playing a game is now ancillary to witnessing a game.

Again, hopefully I don't fuck it up.

If you'll be around, feel free to say hello, I'll be around for most of the festival.

"Let's Get Lit: How to Light Your Game Like a Strip Club" @ 6 PM, April 30 at IndieCade East 2016, New York City

I'll be speaking at IndieCade East this year about video game lighting -- but to spice it up, I'm also going to talk about hunky dudes taking their clothes off in the seminal beefcake stripper movie Magic Mike (2012). The director, Steven Soderbergh, intentionally went for naturalistic "bad lighting" reminiscent of a strip club. Look at the shot above -- most of the men are in shadow! That's actually a pretty radical aesthetic for something that's supposedly a few steps away from commercial pornography. Plus, lighting can often be a bit of a dry topic, so I felt it was important to pair it with some sweaty studs to help the medicine go down. It'll be fun for the whole family.

IndieCade East 2016 runs April 29 - May 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, and thank god it's no longer in the dead of winter.

"The game industry needs to get laid and just chill already" @ GDC 2016

This is a lightly edited transcript of the 5 minute microtalk I delivered as part of a panel at GDC 2016. Thanks to Bennett Foddy and Richard Lemarchand for their advice and assistance.

CONTENT WARNING: I'll be showing and discussing some sexual content.

I’m an indie developer, and I make small experimental games about sex and intimacy. Games about spanking, about sucking, about dick pics in your mom’s bathroom, about showering... you know, things we all enjoy. I also try way too hard on my graphics. My shower game Rinse and Repeat is the most technologically advanced male shower sim on the market -- I waste so many draw calls on physically simulated refracting water particles BUT I DON’T CARE, it’s clearly worth it.

I kinda feel like I have to make these games because few people do. By and large, even AAA games you might associate with gay sex -- they aren’t really about gay sex. I firmly believe we can all do better in the future. (To learn more about sex games, see my sex games talk.)

In-progress: Radiator 2 for Steam

I'm putting Attract Mode (the gay bar game) on hold to re-think the core social sim system, and Maven (my open world Thief-like) is on hold until Unity 5.4 ships (I tried bringing it into the 5.4 beta and that was disastrous) -- so now I'm trying to get this Steam release for the first three gay sex games out the door instead.

I'll hopefully finish development in a week or two, and then ship this on Steam before GDC. We'll see how all that goes...

Sex games, part 2: sex as gesture / sex as poking

This post is part of a series about "sex games."

There were so many games about sexual poking that I had to give them their own category. I mean, poking is a very distinctive gesture. It's a very brief moment with a very small surface area, but we place so much significance on it anyway.

Early Facebook was witness to "poking wars" where Facebook friends exchanged pokes with each other -- but you couldn't just poke anyone, right? There was just something so so wrong about parents poking their children on Facebook. Instead, poking seemed tailor-made for situations like when you poked that cute boy from your biology class, and then he poked you back, and now you have to decide What All This Means. ("Well, he waited two whole days before poking back, so I guess he hates me?")

Poking is immature, yet also tantalizingly ambiguous and demure. It's the stuff that meet cutes are made of. But the sex-poking games I'm going to discuss now? They're still immature, utterly rolling around in their immaturity and silliness, but they are definitely not ambiguous -- instead they are gratuitous and deliberate gestures all at once, like some exaggerated caricatures of poking.

Sex games, part 1: sex as bodies

This post is part of a series about "sex games", based on a talk I gave at GaymerX3.
(CONTENT WARNING: these posts have sexual images and content.)

One definition of sex that I'm going to use here is "a negotiation between bodies." The shape and form of that negotiation will obviously vary, but so can the shape and form of the bodies themselves. Which bodies do we sexualize, and which do we de-sexualize? And if we are sexualizing a body, is it with the body's consent and knowledge?

To a certain extent, every game in this entire blog post series is about bodies. Just because I put a game in this category doesn't mean it doesn't belong in other categories. I selected these games based on the story I could tell around them, and in this post the story is about how these different games think about bodies. Because bodies are made of carbon and water, but they're also made of ideas.

Let's start with the amazing game that inspired the name of my talk ("That One Time I Repeatedly Gave Birth to Fully Grown Wolves, and Other Gay Sex Games That We Deserve") ...

Sex Games, part 0: the sex games awaken

This post is part of a series adapted from my talk at GaymerX. No, I don't know when the video recording will be uploaded, sorry.

So, let's talk sex games. As a possible "GAYmer" at GaymerX, maybe you're thinking of games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, or hot Ryu, or Mario and Luigi, or maybe even some games like Fallout which have specific game systems that support gay roleplaying.

These are OK, I guess, but none of these games are primarily about sex. In fact, they are mostly about jumping around and killing shit... which isn't bad, but it's not gay sex. Now, where am I going with this?...

"That One Time I Repeatedly Gave Birth to Fully Grown Wolves, and Other Gay Sex Games That We Deserve" at GX3 on December 12 in San Jose, California

I'll be in San Jose next week for GX3, a video game expo, to deliver a talk entitled "That One Time I Repeatedly Gave Birth to Fully Grown Wolves, and Other Gay Sex Games That We Deserve" about my recent gay sex video games as well as many other peoples' gay sex games.

The talk is motivated a lot by my experience as an independent game developer who sees countless players plead for more diversity from the triple-A game industry. Mainstream representation is important, but why limit your support only to the mainstream? Also, my industrial peers are good at many things, but gayness is definitely not one of those things, so why should people look to them for artistic leadership on this? Answer: they shouldn't, but they might because they're not aware there's an alternative...

You don't have to beg for gay scraps. You don't even have to settle for a game with a gay side dish, with some token gays sprinkled on top -- real people are already making real games where gayness is the center-stage MAIN ATTRACTION, and these games exist right now in the present, not in some distant future dream utopia.

In my talk, I'll be talking about 20+ different games that think about sexuality outside of a standard cis-hetero-monogamous-missionary paradigm. If you follow me or my peers, you'll probably be familiar with some of them -- but I'm betting I'll discuss at least a few hidden gems you'll have never seen before -- and to the majority of the GX3 audience, I'm guessing a lot of these games will be mind-blowing.

See you there, and feel free to say hey.

Rinse and Repeat as cup runneth over

This is a post detailing my process and intent in making Rinse and Repeat. It discusses in detail how some of the game systems work and what happens in the end, and IT SPOILS THE GAME. You are heavily encouraged to play the game and draw your own conclusions before reading what I think.



(Again, SPOILER WARNING...)

It started with Le1f's music video for "Soda." In it, two hunks spray themselves with gushing fluids, suggestively shooting up from the bottom of the frame.

The scene begins as a sort of aggressive competition of machismo and staring down each other, but then one hunk can't help but submit and opens his mouth to try to swallow some of the frothy fluid. I think what makes this "funny-sexy" is how the soda gets everywhere and how messy it seems. It's pretty brilliant and got me thinking about how sexy a fluid dynamics simulation can be, and how I could put such technology to use.

Cobra Club as ouroboros

This is a post detailing my process and intent in making Cobra Club. 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!...)

Cobra Club is a photo studio game about taking dick pics. Ideally, lots of them. As you take dick pics, you also chat with NPCs and potentially share / swap dick pics. It breaks with my previous three gay sex games (Hurt Me Plenty, Succulent, Stick Shift) in that there's little control of the character himself, there's a complex interface, and there is no visual innuendo. In this game, a dick is a dick.

But it's not just a dick, it's your dick!... Well, kind of. To me, that ambiguity is what elevates it slightly above a mere dick pic generator.

Hurt Me Plenty, patched to RC5 + now with Linux build

I've updated my spanking game Hurt Me Plenty to version RC5... by removing the Leap Motion support which seemed to be crashing for certain users. Thanks to all the people who e-mailed me to report the crash / sorry for any inconvenience.

If you want to play the game with a Leap Motion, download version RC4; if you don't have a Leap Motion or you were having problems playing before, then download version RC5.

I also updated the in-game graphics with an actual mouse graphic, so it should also be easier to play / figure out what you're supposed to do. Oh and I finally did a Linux build, it's x86 / x86_64 universal.

Game is available for "pay what you want" here: http://radiatoryang.itch.io/hurt-me-plenty

"Succulent" as hypnotizing homo hop homage

This post discusses my game Succulent and it completely spoils the ending, if you care about stuff like that. You should probably play it first.



There's a few scenes in the film Inherent Vice where you watch a man eat a frozen banana. They were unusually entertaining and not at all arousing, which got me thinking -- what if I made a game where you just watch a dude stick stuff in his mouth?

So for Succulent, I've put a fair amount of work into making this interaction feel "juicy", hooking it into particles, sounds, facial animations and "cheek physics"... here, the physicality of having his own arm do it, instead of a floating disembodied invisible player hand, was crucial to establish that he was doing it for himself and enjoying it. Inverse kinematics was finally good for something!

I borrow a lot of visual sensibilities from late period "homo hop" music videos, specifically those by Cazwell and Le1f. Both artists emphasize sweaty bodies glaring vacantly, bright backgrounds with intense lighting, and flat compositions focused on the center, evoking the go-go boy gay club / pin-up imagery that's thoroughly ingrained in US gay male culture.

Notes on sex, consent, and intimacy in games and tech

This is adapted from the talk I gave at NYU Poly about my free spanking game Hurt Me Plenty. It kind of "spoils" it a little, if you care about that sort of thing, so I recommend you play it before reading this post... Or watch Pewdiepie play it, I guess.

You can imagine Hurt Me Plenty with its realistic representational graphics as a critique of the sex in contemporary Western video games with similar graphics, such as in Bioware RPG games (Mass Effects, Dragon Ages) which regularly feature "romance" storylines that climax in a cutscene of two virtual dolls glaring at each other for a few seconds, with cold unfeeling eyes devoid of human warmth, before tastefully fading to black. (My game hides your partner's face as much as possible.)

These kinds of representations are dangerous more for their structural properties: players understand these romances as puzzles to be solved where sex is the reward -- and the idea that sex is a puzzle reward feeds directly into a pick-up artist (PUA) culture built on manipulation and perceived entitlement to bodies. This is essentially the "kindness coins" critique, that the logic of training players to expect sex, based on a series of so-called strategic actions, is super gross and perpetuates damaging ways of thinking about relationships.

Instead, sex must be more than a node, it should be simulated as a complex system in itself. Sex must not be some sort of reward or foregone conclusion. What if we represented sex in games as an on-going process? What if we actually did sex?

Several games have explored this already:

new game: "Hurt Me Plenty"

"Hurt Me Plenty" is a short game made for Leap Motion Jam 2014 where you spank the heck out of a dude and learn about how BDSM communities attempt to formalize consent / caring. I was really interested in how we can make games about intimacy without a "kindness coins = sex cutscene" trope, and how we can use expressive gestures to roleplay / think about pain and intimacy. (For the record, I don't think my game gets it right, and it has a lot of flaws... this stuff is hard to design!)

"Get Better Soon", dev diary 2: character art and production value.

This is a development diary series for "Get Better Soon", a commissioned game I'm making for Different Games 2014. If you want to see it and play it, then sign-up to attend Different Games in April in NYC (for free!)

Bodies, much like video games, are routinely commodified -- there are "cheap"-looking and "expensive"-looking bodies. Society devalues and discriminates against certain body types, while affording privileges to other body types. We read video games in much the same way, based on the shape of the game's body... the packaging and production values, and/or "paratext", of a game. Production values are a relatively quantifiable way to impress people and convince them to pay $60 USD for a set of mechanics that have remained virtually unchanged for decades.

What if "queer games" weren't popularly characterized by the do-it-yourself gumption of personal stories, expressed predominantly through webpage text, by artists with few resources? What if Electronic Arts directed their next-gen AAAAA commando-developer divisions to build big budget romantic comedies about time-travelling transgender witches who critique Foucault?...

The 2013 Queer Feminist Agenda for Games

Identity politics in video games are on the rise: there are more transgender, gay, or queer people in games speaking out about their experiences, and more women are speaking up about harassment and discomfort that pervades game culture. As we approach next year and consolidate / organize / build-up this wonderful "queer feminist game culture" coalition, here are the major issues currently on my mind: