Writer Eli Cugini tracks the shared pasts of adult content and video games, and what this means for X-rated queer representation in gaming.

WRITER ELI CUGINI

What do you think of when you think of ‘sex games’? Maybe strip poker. Maybe some of those gimmicky erotic dice couples get each other as stocking fillers. ‘TOUCH’ ‘FEET.’ But what about video games? Probably not that much comes to mind; maybe a hilariously low-res ‘meet ‘n’ fuck’ Flash game, or a pornographic visual novel. Erotic games have about as much cachet as ‘mature’ AO3 fanfiction – maybe less, even. We’re in the midst of a Gen-Z driven backlash against sex scenes in film and TV, that questions whether they’re synonymous with misogyny and oversexualised culture; games that focus on sexual content can feel like a relic, something seedy, shallow.  

Gaming culture and sex has a vexed history when it comes to gender, given the industry’s long history of bad assumptions that ‘real’ gamers are straight men, and that building an adult game audience means sexually appealing to straight men. Female characters in adult games are often expected to have sexualised designs, with entitled male gamers complaining about characters like Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy or The Last of Us II’s Ellie not being sexy enough; meanwhile, the BBC has reported about female games workers also being affected by a blasé culture around women’s sexualisation, such as graphic, distressing sexual content being thrust upon female games actors without warning. The few semi-famous titillating console games, like the Leisure Suit Larry series or Playboy: The Mansion, don’t exactly seem like they’re interested in feminism. 

Gaming culture and sex has a vexed history when it comes to gender, given the industry’s long history of bad assumptions that ‘real’ gamers are straight men.

But understanding sex in video games means understanding it as more than just cheap eye candy for straight guys. Sex is central to how many video games work, including games that don’t technically have any explicit content. Nintendo games present themselves as bastions of childlike, lightly heterosexual wholesomeness – Mario gets his kiss on the cheek from Princess Peach! – but I’ve written about the gay and trans innuendos common throughout the Zelda games, for instance, and how they’re used to both build Link’s androgynous character and to make use of covertly gay and covertly homophobic comedy. Levels of awareness of sex, from basic focuses on satisfying touch to creating sexual tension, are intrinsic to games in various ways, and the games that play with this awareness often find new and interesting ways to tell their stories, and to reflect on why we play games in the first place. 

 

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How video games and porn have been twinned for over a hundred years

Why is sex central to gaming? Well, everything that involves ‘play’ has some things in common with sex – many a film has brought out the sexual tension in music, sport and gambling – but video games are perhaps the form most culturally associated with masturbation and with watching porn. Both video games and pornography are generally associated with solo play, shame, and wasted time. The association isn’t just a likeness – video games and porn have been twinned for over a hundred years. From the end of the 1800s to the mid-20th century, fairgrounds and piers and penny arcades included mechanical and electro-mechanical arcade games – early examples of pinball machines and mechanical shoot-the-target games, for instance – and also peep shows and mutoscopes: machines where you could look through a viewfinder and turn a crank to see a succession of pictures or a flip-book reel. These machines could include all sorts of material, but the machines were most associated with lightly erotic reels, such as one of a woman partially undressing. 

Both video games and pornography are generally associated with solo play, shame, and wasted time.

So, precursors to video games and to softcore video pornography sprung up in similar places in the US and UK: public recreational sites that enjoyed both popularity and a certain hum of social discomfort, an association with moral griminess that, under pressure, could blow up into a moral panic. This happened in the US in the ‘40s with pinball: a swathe of American cities banned pinball machines, fearing that they’d encourage children to gamble and become dissolute. (New York City kept its pinball ban in place until 1976!) But cultural anxieties around both games and pornography have intensified since both became uncomfortably integrated into private, domestic life. Games aren’t relegated to arcades anymore, porn isn’t relegated to specialist cinemas; both are mostly experienced, now, at home, but this has created anxieties that access to video games and to pornography will lead to addictively bingeing both, staying in one’s bedroom forever, never going outside. Generally, this fear is assigned to boys, supposedly the ‘infinite libido’ gender, and also the gender given more licence to avoid domestic duties.

 

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Queerphobia and the moral panic about sex in video games

So says the fear: if we can’t control and limit access to forms of pleasure, what kind of effects will that have? The sex and games controversies that arose from the ‘80s through the 2000s were grappling with a lack of control over the private worlds of both children and adults, which included both their private choice of games and their private sexual exploration. Various discussions arose about whether to ban particular extreme, troubling games that might normalise violent misogyny, such as those whose gameplay centred on rape. The biggest controversy, however, was easily 2004’s ‘Hot Coffee’ incident, where blockbuster hit Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was discovered to have an unfinished sex minigame in its code that wasn’t accessible in normal gameplay but could be accessed with mods. Legitimate concerns about unadvertised sexual content were mixed with lack of knowledge of context (such as GTA having a 17+ rating to begin with), which tapped into wider cultural anxieties about teenagers privately accessing sexual and violent material, without oversight from parents or the state.

This fear covers teenagers being injured or scared by material they’re not ready for, but it also can’t be divorced from anti-gay anxieties about kids being ‘groomed’ by learning about different kinds of sex. There’s never been a major panic about gay sex in video games per se – though if you dip into 2009 articles about Dragon Age: Origins, say, you can see culture-war bickering from far-right news sites about “homosexual seduction” – but the GamerGate movement was tied up with right-wing ideas that the games industry was being poisoned by a feminist, pro-diversity agenda, one determined to push pro-LGBTQIA+ messages against what gamers ‘really’ wanted. Even when no kids are involved, sex is a kind of cultural battleground in games: a way, supposedly, to signal who belongs as a player, and whose pleasure is being catered to. That’s why gay sex can create so much resentment for straight players; so can sex that doesn’t work the way players expect it to. 

Sex scenes can consummate tension, deepen characterisation and relationships, reveal power dynamics, show us characters at their rawest and most vulnerable, drive plot.

Sex scenes in any media can be erotic for eroticism’s sake – it’s hot to be hot! – but they also use eroticism as a key for storytelling. Sex scenes can consummate tension, deepen characterisation and relationships, reveal power dynamics, show us characters at their rawest and most vulnerable, drive plot. When games play around with the power of sex scenes, they can use the specific properties of games to create specific experiences for the player: eroticism can provide shortcuts to emotional intimacy, platforms for nostalgia and humour, and heightened sensitivity. Players are immersed, but can also easily be put on edge by subversion or by threat. 

The best queer sex games or, rather, the best games which queer sex

PC Gamer recently put out its list of the best sex games on PC, and some of their picks are narrative visual novels that use sexual content in similar ways to film and TV, but others are focused more on using sex as a place of exploration in a way that only games can really do. There are tongue-in-cheek sexual reinterpretations of games from people’s childhoods, like NSFWare’s madcap take on WarioWare, and Hypnospace Outlaw-esque evocations of older porn eras as, themselves, nostalgic: You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter recreates the feeling of being a teenager accessing dial-up porn on the family computer, with a deliberately retrofuturist and low-tech porn style to evoke an entirely different internet. 

These games are exploiting the ways awareness and unawareness work together in games: WarioWare throws you into new microgames and makes you speedily decipher them, using your knowledge of how other puzzles have worked, so NSFWare throws you into different 16-bit sexual scenes, making you quickly figure out their logic from the inside through your adult understanding of sex. You’re dropped into scenarios you might not be familiar with (whipping and fetish tickling, for instance), and while sometimes your preexisting knowledge makes the movement easy, sometimes you’re confused about how to accomplish your goal, or even what your goal is. 

Gay sex games use their forms to explore, and give form to, queer experiences.

Sexual knowledge marks you as an adult, but grappling with inexperience can make you interested and newly engaged with your surroundings, like games may have done to you as a child. NSFWare is, therefore, both a parody of WarioWare and a re-exploration of how WarioWare works. You Must Be 18 or Older, meanwhile, recontextualises everyday, embarrassing memories of being a teenager trying to access porn in the family house as a rich adolescent psychodrama, full of strangeness, discovery and tension (is that my dad in the driveway?). The makers of these games have really thought about what sex is actually like in practice, using it as a place to think about discovery, uncertainty, freedom/restriction, and culture – all topics where sex and games slot neatly together.

Specifically gay sex games also use their forms to explore, and give form to, queer experiences. Mice Tea, a fetish visual novel, uses its central conceits – body transformation and hypnosis – as the premise for its sex scenes, but it also uses it to produce cathartic story arcs for its queer and trans characters. Hypnosis allows characters deep insights into their insecurities and repressed desires, meaning they can have resolutions that are both general (characters learn to present and dress more confidently, accomplish goals, and address their social issues) and specifically queer (one character discovers her transness during a hypnosis session, while another manages to let go of some dysphoria-related grief; meanwhile, two women resolve their conflicts and misunderstandings and become lovers). The sex scenes themselves are focused on deep connection, and on the eroticism of changing bodies, including explicitly trans bodies. An element of the game’s sexuality is creating a bright, comfortable space, where queer and trans sex are held and celebrated, and queer and trans intimacy more generally is celebrated, too. 

 

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At the complete other end of the feelings spectrum is a game like CLICKOLDING, a technically non-explicit queer sex game that is designed to feel the opposite of cathartic and comforting. CLICKOLDING is a clicker game, in the sense of games like Cookie Clicker – you click a button, a number goes up. Clicker games are usually bright and mindless, almost idle (or, for some, entirely idle); the clicking becomes a hardly noticed background hum. But in CLICKOLDING, you are sitting on a man’s bed in a seedy hotel room, pressing a clicker for him. He is wearing an unnerving mask and promises to give you $14,000 if you click the clicker 10,000 times. He speaks to you breathlessly; at sudden moments he asks you to slow, or speed up, or go somewhere else in the room, or face him, or face away from him. You become hyper-attentive to the press of your finger as an erotically charged movement, not so far away from other fine motor movements used in sex, and to the clicker, which obediently, silently responds to your actions. When you look away, you can feel yourself being watched. 

Sex in video games is a bit of a poisoned well at times, given the vast entitlement straight guys feel towards the medium.

CLICKOLDING is a game that players could just experience as a shock-value reversal of expectations, but its duration works against that idea; if you click fast, you’re still in that room for about 40 minutes. You’re immersed in your strange erotic ties to the man in the corner, and in the experience of clicking, which he watches you do because he just…can’t…do it satisfyingly anymore. Maybe you think about your fingers, and the kinds of pleasure that come from doing successful manual moves in games; maybe you think about what will happen when you get to 10,000. Maybe you’re desperate to get there. Or maybe, when you get near 10,000, you slow, trying to stave off the ending. Nobody’s clothes are off, so the game asks you a very gay-coded question: you know this is sex. Why?

Sex in video games is a bit of a poisoned well at times, given the vast entitlement straight guys feel towards the medium. But developers and writers are continually finding new ways to use sex to push the boundaries of gaming, and to use gaming to disassemble and reassemble sex, just like games can explore all kinds of movement, enjoyment, and social play. Bo Ruberg’s famous introductory book on games studies, Video Games Have Always Been Queer, is right; games have an amazing capacity to be queer about sex, and a stigmatised but useful affinity with private sex play and sexual shame. But the most exciting moves won’t come with high-resolution graphics and VR; they come in games that quietly change our minds about what it means to touch a controller, to face away from a character, to move. 

Read more GAY TIMES gaming content here.

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To mark the release of his poetic memoir Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, the writer reflects on twenty years of writing and living queer life in candid conversation with Eli Cugini

WORDS BY ELI CUGINI
HEADER DESIGN BY YOSEF PHELAN

Anyone who thinks that polymaths don’t exist anymore probably hasn’t met Brontez Purnell. The Oakland-based novelist, musician, dancer, filmmaker, zine maker — and overall ‘pretty Black boy’ extraordinaire (to quote his interview with Steve Lacy) — can now add ‘poet’ and ‘memoirist’ to the list. Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt follows Pernell’s 2022 Lambda-winning novel, 100 Boyfriends. His new work is a captivating verse memoir full of his signature blend of sorrow, wit, and sex: “The most high-risk / homosexual behaviour / I engage in / is / simply existing“. 

Careening from lyrical loving tributes to friends to searing excavations of inherited trauma, Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt is an uncompromising collection that explores thinking and working as a Black gay man across 20 years in the Bay, through dance studios, poetry conferences, bars, family houses, nighttime streets.

Purnell spoke to GAY TIMES about finding his style for Ten Bridges, looking for loneliness and self-love, and his expansive record collection.

You work across a large range of mediums and have three books out in the UK so far, but Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt is your first poetry collection – a ‘memoir in verse’, as the blurb bills it. What brought you to poetry?

It was a bit of a gamble – poetry just doesn’t sell as much as fiction – but I just really needed something else. Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger got republished and it’s so crazy to me that a lot of people have read that now, this very specific snapshot of a very specific time in San Francisco that I wrote in my 20s; I’m glad I had the wherewithal to write about it then, because I think if I tried to write about those experiences now it’d be pretty watered down and boring, or maybe overly sentimental. But after that, and after 100 Boyfriends, I needed to rewire my brain about how to write about an excruciating amount of personal evaluation of memory. Memory is always this kind of fragmented archaeological dig. I think poetry is a really good way to deal with that, or to rewire the brain for it. My writing journey is a lot about me finding a way to fall in love with writing, this spouse that I chose, and I think every decade you have to find a new way to love somebody, to try to keep the magic new. 

Where did your poetic style for the book come from?

Growing up I mostly read a lot of confessional poetry. My mother had the entire collection of Langston Hughes on the coffee table, so from the time I could start reading I read all of that. When I was in 9th grade my drama teacher gave me Nikki Giovanni’s Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, I was probably a little too young but I could just about understand it. It was something wonderful, right? I also read The Bell Jar and Ariel when I was 12. Maybe that shouldn’t have happened, but I came from a very confessional Black and/or feminist concept. Then I worked through flash fiction, the 800-word short story, which lends itself to poetry really well. My style is an endless set of entry points, but that’s the best way I know how to condense it. 

Oh, also, battle rap. I’ve always loved listening to Remy Ma freestyles [and] Connie Diamond freestyles. I think all poetry should have bars.

Ten Bridges is a very communal book, and cautious about the idea of getting subsumed into other people’s desires: ‘everyone wants my soul’. Poetry and memoir can both be reputed as quite solitary, but this book feels like it’s humming with the presence of other people.

Humans are very carnivorous, they feed off each other. I don’t know if there’s ever really a way to have space from people. My life has been very communal: I realised recently that I’ve never lived alone in my entire life. When I moved to Oakland I was in this house with 20 other kids, then with 12 people, then with 15 people, now I live with three other people, I don’t know if I’ve ever been truly alone. In order to feel alone it’s this really deep place I have to go to within myself. Maybe I like that place because physically I never actually get to be alone, so there’s something romantic about my loneliness for me.

But when it comes to ‘personal’ things, as well, I don’t believe that there is something so personal or so private that if you told someone about it a large, large group of people wouldn’t understand. We’ve spent all of language, from the beginning of time, mapping out the human experience – every quirk, every idiosyncrasy, every paranoid thought that we think we’re so alone with is actually shared by a lot of people. 

There’s a really fun poem in the collection about writing for TV: ‘drama tends to surround me / so I decided to get paid for it’. It’s very clear-eyed and humorously cynical about creative work. How do you deal with that tension between knowing the pitfalls and drudgeries of that work, and still having to go show up and be enthused and get paid?

There is no way to love any job. Anything that becomes a job just feels like a chore – I used to complain about trimming weed for a living, but even when I trimmed weed I had one boss and one task. Now, living the dream of a freelance writer, work may come and may not, and I have 12 different people who get to yell at me about deadlines. It’s totally fine, but it does feel like when you get to these gilded positions that others are quite envious about, you often have that Wizard of Oz moment when you pull back the curtain and see that it’s just a bunch of guys pulling weird levers. Everything has felt like that, but it’s always nice to be brought down to scale. There is something comforting about the fact that everything is disappointing.

There’s a lot about your personal arc in Ten Bridges, but it’s also very tapped into specific gay subcultures, as all your work is. You’ve got some interesting gender stuff in there too, and you also mention Juliana Huxtable, you talk about the dolls. You’ve been writing for 20 years, so you’ve written through and within that period of trans people becoming more culturally visible. How’s that registered in your work?

Sometimes I feel like I’m watching the rest of the world catch up to things I and my friends have been talking about for 20 years. I remember when the only people who self-described as ‘queer’ were sex-working dykes in the Mission. The average gay dude in the Castro didn’t refer to himself as queer. I remember walking down Market Street, and this woman who hired me for her pot garden, she thought I was a lesbian…it was something like 2 weeks later in the pot garden and she was like  ‘you’re a lesbian, right?’ And I was like, no, I’m a faggot, I have a dick. I’m a girl, but I have a dick… there’s always this realm of possibility. 

Back when I was 25, young andro gay boys like me were called ‘dyke tykes’ and ‘tomboy fems.’ There was so much specificity of language then, and once people started using terms like ‘non-binary’, it actually erased a lot of intersectional language that had been used by the older guard. In some ways, it’s cool that the language changes, but I feel a lot of ways about the sort of McDonaldisation of various concepts, and the ways in which they can get turned against us in ways we never thought they would.

It’s cool that the language changes, but I feel a lot of ways about the sort of McDonaldisation of various concepts, and the ways in which they can get turned against us in ways we never thought they would.

At the end of the day, I think it’s better that the world is watching. But we pay a huge price for visibility. Being from Alabama, and from Black cotton field workers in Alabama, my father never went to school with white people, my mother didn’t go to school with white people until she was in her eleventh year of schooling. What’s happening with gender right now is essentially integration. Any Black Southerner will tell you the pitfalls of any integration movement. We always think it’s going to be this soaring utopic thing, and then for every step forward you take five steps back, and it’ll be like that continuously. Will we do the work? Of course we do, we have no choice, we do it or we die.

I really want to throw your books at some queer people who don’t understand how gay manhood has always included this element of fluidity and gender jeopardy. Your books are really thick with that understanding. 

Being understood as a man was a thing that I had to fight to be, and I was born with a dick. The cult of masculinity is fucked up; men review each other’s manhood all the time, that’s where ‘faggot’ and ‘cuck’ come from. Who gets to be seen as this kind of virile masculine man? Not most of us. I think there’s the same thing with femininity – this whole capitalist cult of the unattainable. When I was in my 20s in San Francisco and believed that as long as I worked out at the gym for 5 hours a day and had the muscular body, I would finally win the boyfriend and the apartment. It was never about that. Oh, you have the nice body, but do you have a 9-inch dick? Oh, you have the nice body and the 9-inch dick, but do you have the 90,000 dollars in the bank account? It’s always about what you don’t have. 

Looking for any type of mass acceptance is not going to happen. Society is not happy for any person who’s happy. As corny as it sounds, self-love is the hardest and most important thing. You can find acceptance from society well before you find self-love.

Finally, is there any music you’d recommend listening to while reading Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt?

I have two new records of my own out, one with Upset the Rhythm called Confirmed Bachelor, one called No Jack Swing, they’d make a good accompaniment, check those out! Aside from that, I love Brijean, they’re from LA, they’re the best band ever. Robert Johnson’s ‘Cross Road Blues’ would be good…and basically any Northern Soul compilation, as well.

Brontez Purnell’s Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt is out now with Cipher Press.

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‘Thirsty Suitors’ is a queer South Asian take on a Scott Pilgrim story, featuring skateboarding gameplay and a bear-based cult

WORDS BY ELI CUGINI

Overloop Games’ debut, Thirsty Suitors, is so fresh, fun and smart that its writing feels like it’s skipped an evolutionary stage: how did we go from barely having any queer game protagonists a decade ago to this? It’s one of the most exciting queer releases in years, from the mostly-fulfilled ambition of its premise – a queer South Asian take on a Scott Pilgrim story, featuring skateboarding gameplay and a bear-based cult – to its bouncy animations, bright colours, and top-notch writing. There’s a lot of areas in which Thirsty Suitors makes an impact, but one of the biggest is its innovations in breakup narrative: I can barely think of any media, let alone just games, that looks at breakups as incisively, kindly, and queerly. So, what makes this game so groundbreaking in its depiction of youthful relationships and their often-messy aftermaths?

In Thirsty Suitors, you play as Jala Jayaratne, a 21-year-old South Asian-American woman (her mother is Indian, her father Sri Lankan), who has just dropped back into her hometown after some…time away. It’s quickly apparent that you’re on an apology tour: three years ago, you dumped your long-suffering girlfriend with a collect call, left with your new, older girlfriend without saying goodbye, and have barely spoken to your family since. Now, you’re freshly dumped and slinking back home to piece your life back together. Throughout the game, you encounter and battle six of your exes (the ‘battle’ is half-fight, half-intense conversation, ending in a reconciliation when you succeed), through which it becomes apparent that you were quite the romantic terrorist in high school. At the same time, you’re also rebuilding your relationships with your family in the run-up to your sister’s wedding.

There’s so much thought and care put into Thirsty Suitors, so much emotional depth: this is so obvious in its focus on Desi life and culture, which is visible everywhere, but takes centre stage in the recipes you make and the conversations they facilitate in the rhythm-based Cooking sections. (Every recipe has a rich family narrative behind it; Jala’s sister’s Palestinian fiancé making makloubeh for his in-laws is a particularly genius one.) It’s a game eager to sink its teeth into and complicate stereotypes: both Jala’s mother and grandmother are stern, overly critical matriarchs, but the story is quick to humanise them and contextualise the way they act, while Jala’s kindly father is frank about the mistakes he’s made in the past. And the emotional intelligence of the game takes centre stage during the confrontations with Jala’s exes.

Jala isn’t a bad person, but she has genuinely hurt people. She’s cheated, she’s lied, she’s been self-centred, she’s charmed people and then dropped them when the novelty wore off, she’s chosen cowardice over emotional honesty and run away rather than having hard conversations. You can’t dialogue-option your way out of Jala’s flaws and bad actions. But you can have confrontations that face and apologise for those mistakes, and that ask why they happened – and in the process, Jala’s exes also come to terms with their own insecurities, needs, and grudges that they’re projecting onto Jala. (We all love to mythologise our first loves, after all.) It’s an approach to breakups that feels very queer in sensibility, particularly in relation to queer women: you don’t need to demonise and cut off all your exes, you can be a positive force in each other’s lives, but you should work through your shit first. Also, maintain some boundaries. I’m not going to say every queer woman I know has followed that advice…but it’s an ideal, at least.

In focusing on being a ‘breakup simulator’, a game about past relationships rather than future ones, Thirsty Suitors gets to be really incisive about the parts of relationships that dating-based games usually avoid: the bad reasons we date people, the reasons people cheat and lie and sneak around that aren’t just ‘I’m a bad untrustworthy person’, the things that happen in our lives that impact our relationships. This is where the queerness of Thirsty Suitors reveals itself as more than just a reason to give Jala a fun gender-mixed suite of exes – it’s really embedded in the game’s story. The game has an intimate understanding that while Jala’s attractions may be pretty equal across genders, her relationships don’t have an equal standing. At times, she makes bad decisions based on who she ‘should’ be dating in her family and culture’s eyes: ‘handsome, brown, a man.’ (It’s pretty clear that none of Jala’s male exes are actually good partners for her, no matter how shiny their eyes are or how pumped their biceps.)

Diya, Jala’s lesbian ex, was disowned by her family after she came out, which creates complicated resentments between them: very understandably, Diya is angry that Jala has an accepting family and still ran away, but Jala knows she needs to be able to have conflicts with her family without just being grateful that her family didn’t kick her out. Diya is projecting far more onto then-16-year-old Jala than Jala can hold, but of course she is; she was Diya’s first love, and the blueprint of free, shameless queerness that Diya has since struggled to reach herself. The game carefully integrates the nuanced cultural and gendered expectations that Jala and her exes struggle with, from Diya’s casteist and classist inner critics manifesting as beautiful crystal enemies, to Andile cycling through physical forms, struggling to find legible embodiment as a nonbinary South African and eventually accepting their own fluidity. It’s a really impressive formal achievement.

Thirsty Suitors is specific about queer pains and joys and regrets, even as it integrates them into its wider exploration of being young, navigating generational trauma, and trying to figure out what to do with your life and how to stop f**king up. Jala has a big task in the game where she doesn’t really succeed, and she’s not sure if she made things worse. She doesn’t want to go to college, at least not yet, and even if you (the player) disagree, you can’t make her. This is not a game about winning at relationships or at life. It’s about trying to get the insight you can, and trusting that you can survive confrontation, with both other people and with yourself. It’s really hard to bring that mixture of evolution and uncertainty to a game, and it’s one of the reasons Thirsty Suitors feels like such a joy to play.

The care given to the cast does make it conspicuous where the game could have pushed further, though. I loved Tyler, Jala’s longest-term and longest-suffering ex – it was really nice seeing a trans woman character be both so cool and so sympathetically flawed, and I’m so glad Christine Rose Schermerhorn played her VA – but the game’s writing feels a little cagey about her. It really wants to have Tyler just be Jala’s ex-girlfriend, without a bunch of transphobic baggage (everyone accepts her uncomplicatedly as a woman), but in the process it misses details that would specifically flesh out Tyler’s life experience. When Jala apologises for jealously keeping Andile away from Tyler, we can hear the unspoken subtext: she kept probably the only two trans kids in the school from being friends with each other. When we hear about Tyler’s low self-esteem, her propensity to forgive all of Jala’s transgressions, her ’intensity’, it feels frustrating to not hear the subtext of that named: Tyler is a trans woman, Jala is a cis woman, Jala is given social power and value over Tyler, and she’s acted like it. And Diya bullied Tyler badly enough for it to kill her relationship with Jala, but it turns out she bullied her…for being a goth. Really? In any case, Tyler has won a huge emotional victory separating herself from her cis ex’s regard;
that should have gotten more explicit recognition.

So, sure, Thirsty Suitors isn’t a perfect game. It’s somewhat mechanically repetitive, occasionally slow to register inputs (at least on my computer), and its background animations while moving are a crime against the motion-sick community. But its dive into family and romantic conflict gives us a completely new, queer take on the fighting game, where you can ‘win’ not through firepower, but through riding through the harsh truths conflict gives us about ourselves, and understanding that conflictual relationships can still be worth having. You can’t always be the better person, or give the perfect answer, but as Jala’s ex Irfan learns, avoiding conflict doesn’t necessarily make you the better person, either. Who knew a horny skateboarding game could have such good insight into community-building?

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GAY TIMES gaming columnist Eli Cugini explores what makes The Legend of Zelda’s Link unique gender appeal to LGBTQIA+ players.

WORDS BY ELI CUGINI
HEADER DESIGN BY YOSEF PHELAN

Link, the protagonist of the Zelda games, is designed to officially be a boy, but a strange kind of boy: a boy who’s supposed to make you question his gender. After early Breath of the Wild artwork hit in 2016, featuring a conspicuously androgynous Link – soft-featured, big-eyed, face framed by long, loose strands of hair – the elfin protagonist’s look sparked rumours that maybe Link would, this time, be playable as a girl. Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma quashed those rumours in an interview with Time, asserting that Link is ‘definitely a male’, but that Breath of the Wild marked a return to the character’s original ‘gender-neutral’ design in the Ocarina of Time period: ‘I wanted Link to be gender neutral […] I wanted the player to think ‘Maybe Link is a boy or a girl.’’

In the official Nintendo narrative, Link is safely marked as a straight boy, but allows for some gender fluidity as a marker of inclusivity – girls can ‘relate to’ Link, just like boys can. This isn’t a symmetrical relationship, though: if girls think of Link as a girl, they have to do so quietly and internally, submitting to the official canon that he’s a boy-hero. Other communities can claim Link, but they’re not going to get official recognition or validation in doing so. This relationship also characterises the queer and trans community’s relationship to Link, but there, the relationship of identification and secrecy is more intense, because Link is coded as gay and trans in a way that is obvious to many but is also dangerous to claim as anything other than just a ‘possibility’ or a vibe.

There is a very careful dance being done around gaming’s most famous ‘fairy boy’. The Zelda games implicitly understand that Link cannot actually be the kind of figure he is designed to be – beautiful, elfin, ambiguously childlike, a measure apart from traditional masculine heroes – without being understood as potentially gay, potentially trans, and potentially a woman. He is regularly treated as such within the games themselves. But the Zelda games craft layers of plausible deniability around Link’s gender and sexuality, and one of their ways of doing this is the way in which other gay/trans characters are used in the games.

The history of the Zelda games, as well as the history of Nintendo more generally, is a history tied up with both Anglo-American and Japanese gay archetypes and homophobia. Just as one example, the Carpenters in Ocarina of Time are effeminate, wear bright colours, call Link ‘cute’, and appear to have tried to join the all-female Gerudo tribe: they are clearly affiliated with the Japanese idea of okama, an often-pejorative term encompassing both gay men and trans women. This is also the franchise that birthed Tingle, a 35-year-old ‘man who wants to be a fairy’ who was once named ‘gaming’s gayest character’, and who triggered IGN’s 2004 “Die, Tingle, Die!” campaign, which is clearly rooted in Tingle’s apparently odious queerness. “You know and hate him. That nutty clown freak that spoils the lands of Hyrule like a poison,” laments IGN, connecting the “great, dark mystery” of Tingle’s sexuality to both his “hideously deformed figure” and his “selfishness” (part of Wind Waker is taken up by doing fetch quests for Tingle – but most fetch-quest characters don’t lead to calls for the death penalty). Aonuma has officially pronounced Tingle to be ‘not gay, just an odd person’ – a claim that bears no relation to the reality of how Tingle is received and treated, but that sidesteps certain forms of scrutiny.

https://www.gaytimes.co.uk/originals/history-of-queer-video-games/

Overtly gay and trans-coded characters in Zelda are defined against Link’s mute prettiness. They are strange, often abject, often mockable; Link is lovely, young, and free of markers of seedy adult sexuality. His reticence is marked against the Carpenters’ flamboyance. His story-granted power as the Hero of Time, his clear purpose, and his affiliation with the Princess contrast with Tingle’s apparently pitiable stagnation and low status. Not all the gay characters are framed negatively, per se, but all of them are doing a form of gayness that Link is conspicuously not doing, while also understanding Link as part of their world. This gets dangerous at times, because acknowledgements of Link by queercoded characters also often consist of flirtations from adults towards a child, which puts queer players of the game in a bind: seeing Link as gay means you have to think about, and be discomforted by, those flirtations. If you see Link as safely straight and impenetrable, however, you don’t have to think about it.

Confirming a character in a children’s game as gay or trans is seen as inherently corrupting. There’s a reason that Vivian is cis in the English-language Paper Mario release, or that we haven’t got an answer on Birdetta for 35 years. Naming gayness gives the game away: it acknowledges the gay sexual imagination as present and active within a set of children’s games, and we all know from current anti-gay legislation in the US alone how the idea of gay sex and gender change in children’s media opens a chasm of fascist rhetoric. Nothing of this must get named. But this conflicts with the fact that the Zelda games have made a world in which gayness and transness is present, based on a culture in which those things are also present – as real phenomena and as objects of a swirl of dreams and fantasies, both positive and negative, about how non-normative gender and sexuality can change how the world works. This brings us to Breath of the Wild and Gerudo Town.

As Jennifer Unkle talks about in Paste Magazine, the joy many trans Zelda fans felt at gaining access to feminine clothes for Link in Breath of the Wild was undercut by the transphobia in its Gerudo Town storyline. Link needs to enter Gerudo Town to reach one of the four Divine Beasts and defeat one of Calamity Ganon’s forms. But only women can enter Gerudo Town, and Link is forcefully expelled if he tries to enter the city, with the guards informing him that no voe (men) are allowed in the city under Gerudo law. However, someone lets Link know that a ‘man’ has been sneaking into Gerudo Town to trade; you eventually track down this ‘man’, Vilia, who is wearing feminine Gerudo attire and flirts heavily with Link. “Link confirms Vilia’s identity by scrutinizing her body, and is then prompted to either exclaim she’s a man or compliment her beauty,” Unkle notes; “the latter convinces Vilia to sell you a convincing outfit before the wind hits her veil, revealing her beard to a shocked Link.”

Vilia’s character model under her mask does not look like a cis man, but like a transphobic caricature of a trans woman, with a highly discoloured lower face; it matches closely to other okama caricatures I’ve seen in Japanese game art. The game’s uncritical presentation of a trans woman within a ‘sneaky man’ rubric, as well as its reliance on a ‘shock’ reveal, is unnervingly transmisogynistic. That being said, when I played the relevant storyline, I found myself with a different read of it than Unkle’s, who says this experience makes her see Link as “a brat looking to circumvent his way into an exclusive society”, and argues that Link doesn’t deserve to wear the Gerudo’s clothing. Link is defined against Vilia’s lasciviousness and beardedness in a way that is clearly transmisogynistic, but Link is also subject to transmisogyny: the Gerudo guards are the ones who define him as a voe, expressing surprise that Link doesn’t ‘know’ he’s a voe, and lock him out. Link blushes and looks pleased wearing feminine clothing, and while the reveal of Vilia’s appearance causes Link to look shocked, there’s no apparent rancour in his shock.

Moreover, if we think about the wider storyline of Breath of the Wild, we might rethink the logic behind the Gerudo’s gender exclusivity. Link is trying to help save a city that is unable to effectively fight Ganon – the singular male Gerudo and the Gerudo’s King by birthright – because of the binary gender logic Gerudo Town holds to, which keeps Link and his powers out. It’s possible to argue that Link is therefore acting as a de facto patriarch, sneaking in as the Gerudo’s new male champion to defend them, but it’s also possible, and arguably more intuitive, to read him as a slippery, androgynous combatant against a patriarchal villain: he exposes how restrictive, myopic views of gender prevent the exact connections and collaborations that must be used to take down Ganon.

Plus, Link doesn’t act like an entitled cis boy in his interactions with the Gerudo, nor is he received as one by the Gerudo Chief. If Link appears to Riju in male clothes before they fight Ganon together, she replies “Well then…That’s what you really look like, huh…Hehe…With voe banned from town, it’s not very common for me to see someone like you.” Crucially, Riju is not angry or shocked here – she immediately moves on to battle strategies – and she also does not explicitly call Link a voe: her precise phrase in English allows for the idea that Link is a trans woman, nonbinary, or another gender that may be caught up in the voe ban. It’s not a sensitive reply, but that ‘someone like you’ marks transness as present in the game’s world.

Link is thus a frustratingly ambivalent and rich character for queer and trans players: he’s a ‘good’ avatar of gayness and transness, full of beauty, mobility and possibility, whose existence is dependent on defining his goodness against ‘bad’ figures like Vilia. Even as Link is ‘good’, though, he is still subject to the same forces and norms that create and shape Vilia, Tingle, Bolson, Ghirahim, and many other incidental characters across the franchise. He is held within a protagonist archetype that is not permitted to explicitly recognise his affinity with other queer characters, let alone to decide his relationship to their overtures; he has to tacitly obey the logic that he is a heterosexual man, even as the character’s own attachments to both ‘heterosexual’ and ‘man’ have always appeared vague at best.

Is Link gay and/or trans? Yes. But what’s going on is more foundational than Link’s precise gender identity or who he might be attracted to. Link and his story cannot exist without gayness and transness, as both a set of references to tap into and a set of fears to define Link against. He is a hero shaped by both gay culture and the backlash to gay culture. Loving Link, therefore, comes with its share of grief – but that’s never stopped queer people before.

The post Explaining Link’s gender in Breath of the Wild appeared first on GAY TIMES.

If you ask people about trans video games, you’ll usually find that the same few names recur: games with trans characters, or trans player options, or that focus on a trans storyline. And then there’s one outlier – Celeste.

WORDS BY ELI CUGINI
HEADER DESIGN BY YOSEF PHELAN

Celeste is one of the most critically acclaimed and beloved platformers of the past decade; players are still making discoveries and accomplishing incredible feats in the game six years after its release. (A recent favourite? EuniverseCat’s minimum-grabs speedrun, which took three weeks). But it’s not an ostensibly very trans game. It’s mostly about a woman climbing a mountain. There’s a short cutscene where the protagonist has a miniature trans flag on her desk, but you only see that if you complete the Farewell DLC, which is a very tricky, long DLC that less than 20 per cent of players finish. And it’s only a little flag, anyway.

So why is this game so iconic to queer and trans gamers? Celeste is an influential trans game despite not being ‘explicitly’ trans – and the reasons why go against a lot of prevailing wisdom about what makes a game queer.

In Celeste, you play as Madeline, a young woman with pink hair who seeks to summit Celeste Mountain (a fictionalised version of a real mountain in British Columbia). You move through each room through jumping, dashing and scaling walls, and restart the room if you fall. Motion in Celeste feels good, fluid and intuitive; at times, deep in the game, you can feel like you’re flying. The climb is a ‘real’ climb in the world of the game, but the game phases between dream and reality with little signal of where you are at any given time: inner demons manifest as tangible monsters, a spirit stalls a cable car, a hotel is run by a ghost.

https://www.gaytimes.co.uk/originals/best-lgbt-video-games-2023/

Accordingly, it’s not really a game about athleticism – ‘real’ climbing. Rather, the rooms in Celeste represent psychological challenges and snarls of thought (sometimes visible, tentacular snarls) that must be handled and moved through physically. This has particular resonance for trans people: our physical grappling with gender and living – how do I want to be perceived? What am I? What does this transformation mean? What will it do? – is played out through strange tests of embodiment: presentation, movement, gesture, speech, even posture. Accordingly, representing that bodily fluidity and mind-body relationship requires a balance between realistic movement – physical exhaustion mechanics, for instance – and dreamlike movement.

The game fluctuates between that zen game state of moving through the rooms, and the narrative cutscenes, where we get a sense of Madeline as a character: determined, cynical about other characters’ mentions of hauntings and people ‘seeing things’ on the mountain (“You should seek help, lady”), low on self-esteem. Later, talking to her new friend Theo, she reveals a dimension of intense anger and frustration with herself, where she feels like she can’t move past “stupid THINGS that happened forever ago…I should be over them. None of it matters.”

There are subtle cues that reward people looking at Madeline’s portrayal through a trans lens

Her issues feel overwhelming, yet intangible; all-consuming, yet supposedly trivial. She has depression and panic attacks, and a wealth of things left out of that simple description. She’s “barely holding it together.” It’s a portrayal that’s relatable to anyone who’s struggled with mental illness, but there are subtle cues that reward people looking through a trans lens: Madeline protests that she’s “just not…photogenic” when Theo wants to take a picture of her; she’s battling a distorted version of herself in the mirror.

But why use this lens in the first place? Well, Madeline isn’t confirmed as trans in the game, though the scene at the end of Farewell deliberately includes a few elements intended to imply her transness (the flags, a bottle of pills, a photograph where Madeline’s hair is shorter). But the game’s director and writer, Maddy Thorson, confirmed that Madeline was trans in a blog post, and that Celeste’s composition was entangled in a long process of her realising her own gender: “During Celeste’s development, I did not know that Madeline or myself were trans. During the Farewell DLC’s development, I began to form a hunch. Post-development, I now know that we both are.”

So, Celeste, without the developer explicitly intending it, captured preconscious transness. This is part of what makes it so beloved and thought-provoking in trans communities: it authentically renders the experience of transness before it is understood as such. It gets at the feeling without naming it, which means that it can slip the bonds of how overwhelming, even cloying, transness can sometimes feel when it is first named – the initial deluge of stereotypes, assumptions, questions, fears, all coated in baby blue and baby pink and white.

It feels real, and the reasons it doesn’t name transness feel connected to early transness, rather than being a byproduct of cowardice or a drive for profit. Early transness and pre-transness is often full of the things Madeline struggles with: incomprehension, fear, anger, self-hatred, feeling trapped and driven to dangerous experiences that promise transformation, or else to “drinking and arguing with people on the internet”, as Madeline says when asked how she responds to her problems.

Yet, also, even as it embodies an authentic element of trans experience, Celeste’s journey is an incredibly archetypal hero’s journey. To risk a very obvious spoiler, Madeline climbs a mountain (albeit nonlinearly), and experiences personal growth in the process. She has a complex story, but it’s not in a complex form. In using a ‘universal’ type of story structure to tell a trans story, Celeste presents Madeline’s life as available for understanding and empathy, and connected to basic forms of human struggle and change. As Thorson herself puts it: “if you’re a cis person and you personally relate to Madeline […] you could take this as evidence that trans and cis feelings aren’t so different, that the chasm between transness and cisness isn’t such a wide gulf, and that most of the ways that trans existence is alien to you are the result of unjust social othering and oppression.”

https://www.gaytimes.co.uk/culture/best-lgbt-video-games/

In Kotaku’s “How the Celeste Speedrunning Community Became Queer As Hell”, Jeremy Signor talks to queer speedrunners, modders and fans of Celeste about their relationship to the game; nonbinary speedrunner frozenflygone attributes their discovery of their gender to “reflection on this game” and feeling “empowered by” the queer community around it, while trans speedrunner Blobbity21 speaks about how its treatment of mental health resonates with her struggle with “actually confronting your inner demons and getting stronger by moving past them instead of just running away from them”.

The multiple possible interpretations of Badeline, Madeline’s doppelganger, in the game can further the game’s resonances through and beyond transness: does Badeline represent Madeline’s pre-transition self, full of anxiety and anger, who Madeline thinks she can sever from her? Does Badeline’s focus on averting risky, scary experiences mean that Madeline is stalling on aspects of her transition out of fear? Does her transness mean she believes she is undeserving of, or incapable of overcoming, her other issues?

Celeste is a trans game in a way we have little access to, in a landscape and marketplace that demands tags, labels, explicitness

None of these are the canonical interpretation of the game; they’re all swirling in the field of abstraction around its art and story, available as methods of reading. Celeste is a trans game in a way we have little access to, in a landscape and marketplace that demands tags, labels, explicitness. Every year we get lists of ‘queer games’ coming out the next year, and it’s very difficult to determine what ‘queer game’ actually means, particularly prior to release. Does a minor character have a throwaway line? Are there central queer themes? A question none of these get at: is it good? Substantive? Meaningful?

Celeste is a separate story to Maddy Thorson’s story – the game shouldn’t be simplistically projected onto her journey – but her testimonial about the game’s relationship to her own transness reveals a half-hidden kind of trans and queer art: art that is full of queerness and transness, that embody and shape that experience, but that doesn’t name it or precedes naming it. This is commonly talked about in literature, television, film. But games, we seem to think, are more explicit, more upfront. They are focused, first and foremost, with ‘representation.’

Explicitness isn’t the problem. God knows we’ve had enough coy, market-friendly hinting. But there’s a level of interpretation that gets left out of the ‘representation’ paradigm, the ‘guy on Steam Communities asking you if this game is woke or not’ paradigm. The mechanics and stylistic choices of a game, its flow, its directionality, its vocabulary of images, are as or more crucial to why a game is queer – its sticking power with queer people – as its definitive queer statements. Celeste’s movement and form ends up shaping itself around transness, chasing it through both reality and fantasy. It is loved by many of us because it is of us. It reminds us how we get here.

The post How Celeste became an icon of trans gaming appeared first on GAY TIMES.

The festive period means more time on your hands. Why not celebrate with the best LGBTQIA+ video games of the year?

WORDS ELI CUGINI
IMAGE YOSEF PHELAN

Queer games won big at the 2023 Game Awards, with Baldur’s Gate 3 – Lanian’s long-awaited D&D-based CRPG – clinching Game of the Year. Baldur’s Gate 3, alongside being one of the most critically acclaimed RPGs ever released, is a veritable wonderland for queer players: there’s a plethora of gay romance options, alongside canon gay content and a nonbinary gender option. (The gays can’t even agree on the best companion to romance: Karlach? Lae’zel? Shadowheart? Astarion? Can’t we have all of them at once?). Meanwhile, Cyberpunk 2077 (which includes canon gay love interests for any gender of character) won Best Ongoing for its new DLC expansion, Phantom Liberty, while sweet, mesmerising open-world adventure game Tchia took Best Game for Impact.

Summations of 2023 in games are consistent on two things: the unusually high quality of this year’s releases, and the bleak working conditions for game developers in an industry that has seen almost 10,000 job cuts this year, including Embracer Group shuttering three studios in six months. Conditions are, as always, precarious and difficult for queer developers: over a third of the games in January 2023’s ‘LGBTQ+ releases this year’ prospectives have yet to be released. But despite the difficulties they face, developers are still managing to create great queer content. PS5 reboot Mortal Kombat 1 finally confirmed that Tanya and Mileena are a couple; iconic lesbian road-trip RPG Get in the Car, Loser! released its third DLC, The Fate of Another World; gay BL visual novel and dating sim Jock Studio received over $500,000 on Kickstarter, ten times its initial goal. And amidst the discussions of BG3, Tears of the Kingdom, Starfield, Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Alan Wake 2, you might have missed some of the queer gems that dropped into this year’s packed schedule.

2023 and Queer Gameplay

Because of the financial constraints of being a solo/indie queer dev (as well as the history of queer gaming culture), queer games tend towards visual novels and text games, but we’ve had an unexpected bounty of queer fighting gameplay in 2023. We got two gay Metroidvanias this year: Paradiso Guardian combines retro Castlevania aesthetics and combat with steamy gay sex scenes, while in Romancelvania, you play as a thirsty bisexual Dracula who has to fight, befriend or seduce the other contestants in a supernatural dating show. Plus, Gayming Magazine’s roundup of the best gay entertainment moments of 2023 shouted out colourful swashbuckler En Garde!, where you can flirt with a rival while swordfighting her. What’s not to love?

We also got a gay deckbuilder this year: Up Multimedia, the devs behind My Ex-Boyfriend The Space Tyrant, dropped OscarWildeCard in March, one of my favourite short games of the year. It’s a fun, characterful game where you must battle to host successful dinner parties against your nemesis: famous wit and socialite Oscar Wildecard. Cards represent guests on your side of the table, and their powers and synergies can be used to try to outscore the other side – lest you be judged unworthy and cast out of the most fashionable building in the city.

There’s one game, however, that takes the cake for stylish, varied gameplay in queer games this year: Outerloop Games’ Thirsty Suitors, a madcap ‘90s-style Scott Pilgrim-esque adventure that combines ‘turn-based RPG battles, skating and over-the-top cooking mechanics’. Basically, you’ve gone back to your hometown and now you have hot exes to fight, gossipy family members to outwit, and delicious South Asian recipes to cook. It’s a gorgeous game both for and beyond its representation, giving a rare substantive and sparkling story to a queer woman of colour; it’s a true joy of an addition to the queer games canon.

Joy, nostalgia, and heartbreak are also easy to find in two of my other favourite releases of 2023. One is Frogsong, an adorable hand-drawn RPG where you play as a little nonbinary frog who wants to become a warrior. (The top Steam review just reads ‘gay frogs.’) It’s an endlessly charming little game, ideal for those who want a relaxed experience. The other is VIDEOVERSE, a game about early fandom nostalgia ideal for fans of Hypnospace Outlaw; you explore a fictional ‘00s social network attached to a fictional retro gaming console, diving into fan art, drama and conspiracy. (It’s also got a custom-built soundtrack from composer Clark Aboud, who’s best known for Slay the Spire.) If you were online in the MSN era, VIDEOVERSE will feel like reliving a past life.

A Good Year for Gay Visual Novels

Visual novel fans ate well this year. We got space yaoi in The Symbiant, whose follow-up comes out in January; a romance between women in time-loop VN Beneath Her Starry Sky; and veteran devs Gallium Games released their newest offering, Guilded Hearts, where an MMO fan pursues love among his guildmates. We also finally got a Fallen London VN, with a murder mystery, and a dating sim, and bats! Here are some of my other favourite VN finds of the year.

Mice Tea is now my second favourite erotic visual novel in existence (the first being Ladykiller in a Bind). Playful, sweet, narratively rich and exploring a wide array of kinks, it’s bisexual catnip – or mouse-nip, I suppose. My other favourite pickup this year was Insert Rich Family Name, a perfectly cathartic gaming experience if you’re experiencing family drama over Christmas: solve your grandfather’s murder, choose to support or backstab your other family members, and pursue a little romance on the side.

I’m a big fan of what visual novels do with fairytales – I’m buying Slay the Princess as soon as I get paid – and Chronotopia: Second Skin is an interesting, dark take on the Donkeyskin fairytale, itself a grittier variant of Cinderella; Chronotopia has a lot of formal tricks up its sleeve and culminates in a beautiful emotional journey. Solace State: Emotional Cyberpunk Stories is also great for people who prefer their VNs serious, sharp, and involving, from the sci-fi side rather than the high fantasy side. Conspiracy, revolution and community are all at the heart of this VN, and Steam reviewer GaryJKings articulates its appeal succinctly: ‘I feel like a lot of left-leaning political games occupy quite a cynical space […] Solace State makes a compelling case for something more hopeful. Like yeah, **** sucks. But what if we wrangled a gang of good friends and actually did something about it?’

Oh, and shout-out to one of my favourite subversions of the VN genre this year, com _ _ et, where you are locked into a particular path until you start to find words and options that have been hidden from you. It’s a short, innovative exploration of heteronormativity that packs a punch.

Looking Forward to 2024

2023 was an incredibly exciting and rich year for games full stop, and for queer games in specific. Luckily, we already have some concrete things to look forward to in 2024, from the promised drop of the Switch 2 (and the Switch rerelease of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, which includes one of the only canon trans characters in a Nintendo game), to Hades II entering open access, as well as a dizzyingly long list of promised new releases. I’m stoked for Dungeons of Hinterburg, Princess Peach: Showtime, Lost Records: Bloom and Rage…who knows, maybe we’ll even get Silksong this year!

There’s very little information yet about which of this coming year’s big games will have LGBT+ content, however, and the prospectives of queer 2024 games won’t hit until January. So for now, have a pleasant rest of 2023 with this year’s amazing catalogue, and we’ll be back with you in the new year.

The post The best – and queerest – video games of 2023 appeared first on GAY TIMES.

Queerness in games didn’t just show up in the 2010s. It was always there, or it was kept out.

WORDS BY ELI CUGINI
HEADER DESIGN BY ANISA CLEAVER

In 1990, Capcom was in talks to port its Super Famicom game Final Fight – a beat-‘em-up side-scroller adapted from a planned Street Fighter game – to Nintendo’s Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo heavily censored the port, including objecting to female enemies Roxy and Poison, on the grounds that it had a policy against depicting violence against women; the Japanese developers responded that Roxy and Poison were either ‘transvestites’ or trans women, and would therefore not cause controversy by being attacked. Nintendo was unsatisfied by this, and replaced Roxy and Poison with male enemies called Billy and Sid for the English SNES port, as well as renaming a boss called ‘Sodom’ to ‘Katana’.

The Final Fight saga is representative of a lot of gaming history: queerness and transness often peek from under the surface of video games, buried and/or corrupted by censorship and pejorative assumptions, but visible if you dig a little. The hidden gay and trans history of game development is rich, and important to connect with, given the false assumption that gayness and transness are new, ‘woke’ invasions into traditional gaming. But it’s also a complicated and difficult history, full of frustrations that temper the joy of finding hidden queer figures: Roxy and Poison are aesthetically cool characters who are fun to fight, for instance, but they’re symptomatic of how trans women are considered more culturally acceptable to injure than cis women. Gaming is sometimes thought to be in such an embryonic stage for queer and trans people that we’re expected to be grateful for any representation we’re given, rather than interrogating the nature and context of that representation. But gayness in games didn’t just show up in the 2010s. It was always there, or it was kept out.

Nintendo and Sega’s censorship codes heavily limited allusions to homosexuality or being transgender through the 80s, 90s and 2000s, under the label of blocking “sexually suggestive or explicit content”. The pattern of Roxy and Poison has repeated multiple times under these censorship codes, where a character whose gender is inconsistently understood in a Japanese game – she may sometimes be referred to as a trans woman, and sometimes as a ‘crossdresser/transvestite’ – has her transness erased, both by players and by the American ports. One famous example is Bridget in the Guilty Gear series, who was eventually confirmed as a trans woman in 2021’s Guilty Gear Strive. But they appear in games for children as well: Vivian, a main character in the recently remastered Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, is a trans woman in every release except the English-language one, while Super Mario 2 character Birdo was originally described in the 1988 manual as someone “who thinks he is a girl” and who would rather be called Birdetta. (Nintendo’s response to questions about Birdo has essentially been to filibuster for 35 years, changing pronouns or referring to her as “of indeterminate gender”; the British English version of 2018’s Super Mario Party refers to Birdo with male pronouns.)

There are better representations of queerness during gaming’s early period. A few explicitly gay video games from the early era survive, most famously C. M. Ralph’s 1989 point-and-click adventure Caper in the Castro (where lesbian private detective Tracker McDyke must save her drag queen friend Tessy LaFemme), while 1998’s Fallout 2 and 2004’s The Sims 2 were two of the first games to allow gay relationships and gay marriage. Will Wright actually dedicated the original Sims to the memory of Danielle Bunten Berry, a brilliant trans woman game developer who developed the 1983 multiplayer game M.U.L.E., a game regularly cited as one of the most important and influential early computer games. Berry is a bittersweet figure in gaming history, a trans woman who had an immense effect on the industry but was shunned by it when she transitioned; Brian Moriarty, the creator of Loom, recalls being approached by developers in the mid-90s who wanted to found a game company, and asking them “Why aren’t you talking to Dani Bunten?”: “I mean, Dani Bunten is the world’s foremost authority on multiplayer games and they just looked at me and…I knew why.”

A lot of the archive of queer game development is lost, as people died or left the industry – Berry herself died of lung cancer in 1998 – but an important testament comes from Tim Cain, the creator of Fallout, who has worked in the game industry since the 80s. Cain talks in a YouTube video about 42 years being a gay man in the industry, 20 of which he spent closeted at work: “I’ve never met anyone gay in the industry older than me.” He describes a pervasive atmosphere of homophobia at some of the studios he worked at, particularly Interplay (where he made Fallout), and of transphobia towards a trans woman colleague in the ‘90s; he also describes getting pushback from Atari about content in 2003’s The Temple of Elemental Evil, including having to cut a lesbian character. (Another gay character, the flirtatious pirate Bertram, stayed in the game.) He does describe a relatively positive experience coming out in the mid-2000s, however, with the president of his studio telling him “if you have any problems with homophobia, call me, we don’t put up with that”.

By the late 2000s, queer gamers and developers seemed to be conscious of being at an in-between point, where the desire for major queer and trans releases was significant enough to be recognised, but still felt a little way off from being feasible. A fascinating time capsule can be found in gaming magazine The Escapist’s 2009 issue, ‘Queer Eye for the Gamer Guy’. You can still read its guest editor note from Flynn Demarco, editor-in-chief at the now-defunct GayGamer.net, which paints a vivid picture of the queer gaming landscape in the late 2000s: “Until very recently, homosexuals in games were mostly treated as limp-wristed sissies, jokes on the player or sometimes, as in the case of lesbians Hana Vachel and Rain Qin in Fear Effect 2, an enticement for the horny teenage boys game companies assume make up their audience.” Demarco also notes the lack of trans characters, and that “with the exception of Bridget [from Guilty Gear], trans and cross-dressing [sic] characters [are] always represented as some kind of enemy to be vanquished.” He praises Bully, Fable II and The Ballad of Gay Tony for better, non-stereotypical gay representation, but says that he doesn’t expect to see “a game with a gay central character” anytime soon.

Queer game development has proliferated through the 2010s and 2020s, particularly with the launch of indie platforms like itch.io and Bitsy; we also now have a handful of AAA releases with “gay central characters”, and one with a trans protagonist (Tell Me Why). Tim Cain is openly positive about the future of queer game development, and has said: “I know a lot of LGBTQIA+ people in the industry, they’re well-received in their teams, they bring a lot of interesting experiences, we get a lot more interesting characters in games – everything’s better.”

But it’s also a fragile time to be a queer developer, player or critic, given the continued marginalisation of queer and trans people in gaming culture and the long shadow cast by GamerGate, the devotedly misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic harassment campaign that defined mid-2010s game culture. The cultural treatment of 2023’s Hogwarts Legacy has reflected our precarious position: a few outlets acknowledged the ethical issues with supporting a game that directly funds an anti-trans activist, Wired got substantial right-wing backlash for its negative review of the game, most outlets didn’t comment or commented in studiously neutral terms about the ‘culture war’, the game continues to be massively popular, and the entire media circus implicitly dismissed trans people and their oppression as irrelevant: something far-off, to debate or mull over or feel a twinge of guilt about, but not real people worth sticking your neck out for.

But Danielle Bunten Berry, Emilia Schatz, Lena Raine, Rebecca Heineman, Jennell Jaquays, other trans woman creators and developers and artists who aren’t public for fear of reprisal – they stuck their necks out. Their fingerprints are everywhere in modern gaming. Gay and trans fingerprints are everywhere in modern gaming, full stop. The fiction that we are far away from the centre of gaming is one through which gaming sustains its apolitical veneer and profit margins, but it’s a thin fiction, easily pulled apart.

The future does look positive for queer game development, and for the art that will be made and enjoyed in the coming years. But to understand where we’ve got to – and the problems with representation as it exists – we have to stay in contact with the murky, fascinating, and at times very upsetting history of queerness and transness in gaming: the effeminate villains and censored content, the developers who were pushed out of a quietly hostile scene, the erasure and fetishisation of trans people, and the ways in which queer content in games is still often built to be conspicuously avoidable. Only then can we push past the placid face of big gaming companies, and excavate their continuing complicity in a violent history of queer suppression.

The post The bittersweet queer history of game development appeared first on GAY TIMES.

Want to get into video games? Already a gamer, but want to know about the world of queer gaming? This guide will help you get started

WORDS ELI CUGINI
ARTWORK ANISA CLEAVER

The world of video games can be a strange place for queer people; we’re everywhere within it – ‘game developer’ is a trans stereotype at this point – yet we’re still marginal to the scene and rarely centred in big-budget releases. We’re also still dealing with the shadows cast by GamerGate and the related right-wing harassment campaigns of the mid-2010s, where fascists sought to drive women, people of colour, and queer and trans people out of the industry. But they didn’t succeed; gaming is a richer place than ever for queer people, and queer games have massively exploded in the past 5-10 years. Some of the most brilliant works of contemporary gay art and narrative can be found on Steam or itch.io, as can a lot of hours of good, silly, sexy gay entertainment. 

So, where can you find good gay games? Almost everywhere – but we’ll give you some good recommendations in a range of genres, for both big, modern-classic, gameplay-heavy games and smaller indie gems, and for gay men, lesbians and trans people. Gay and trans stories have a close affinity with visual novel and text game forms, which will be reflected here; but we also have a good foothold in all sorts of role-playing and storyline-heavy games, from action-adventure to puzzle-platformer to cosy management sim. We’re focusing on games that have substantial queer content, but it’s also common now for many big games to have customisable queer options or to have gay characters on their roster, like Apex Legends and Overwatch.

There are still some glaring limitations on this list; the games industry skews heavily towards funding white developers and representations of white cis queers, and there is an immense scarcity of games that centre Black queer and trans people. (Keep an eye out for action-puzzle game Spirit Swap and its cast of Black “witchy demons” in 2024, by the way.) But if you’re looking for an entry point or to find some new gems, it’ll hopefully be a useful resource. 

Try the soon-to-be-classics

It’s too early to have a solid queer ‘canon’ of games, but a cluster of games have become giants in the queer community: three of them are Celeste, Hades and Undertale. If you haven’t played many games, one of them would be a good place to start. 

Celeste is a beautiful, fluid 2D platformer, where you must guide Madeline, a trans girl travelling up a mountain, through a range of levels with grabs, jumps and dashes. Madeline’s transness is subtly cued, and her journey through anxiety and self-doubt is raw and beautiful. (It’s a tricky game, but there are ample customisation options to make levels easier.) If you prefer fighting monsters and flirting with half the Greek pantheon, Hades is a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler where you play as Zagreus, Hades’ disgruntled bisexual son, who is trying to escape the underworld; each time you die and wake up again in your Underworld home, you gain new abilities, learn about Zagreus’ motives, get to know your friends and romantic prospects – and get a little closer to getting out. And Undertale is a role-playing game that follows a child who has fallen into an underground world; it’s a game that defies explanation but it’s both a work of immense darkness and a brilliant comic romp, with a very sweet lesbian storyline.  

Enter a new world

If you’re a fan of D&D or fantasy novels, and want to throw yourself into a big, colourful, combative adventure where you can romance mercenaries and elven warriors, you’d probably have fun with 2023 Game of the Year contender Baldur’s Gate 3. (A Twitter mutual who plays BG3 just informed me that his non-binary character is hooking up with a tentacle monster, a wizard, and “maybe a devil lady.”) If you want a cheaper option, try 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition, another role-playing fantasy game where you must rescue the world from demons; it has a range of bisexual and gay love interests, and one of the first trans characters in a major release, whose characterisation still mostly holds up. 

RPGs are often beloved of queer players, both because of their queer cast members and an apparent gay affinity for role-playing. The Witcher 3, Disco Elysium and Fallout: New Vegas all have gay cult status, particularly F:NV, given both its iconic gay companions and its ability to explicitly adopt homosexuality or bisexuality. (Bisexuals get a 10% boost to all damage.) If you end up preferring Disco Elysium’s old-school tabletop-style gameplay and lack of combat, Citizen Sleeper is a quietly immersive, immensely deep and very nonbinary game that follows a cyborg, who has escaped its corporate ‘owners’, trying to survive on a space station without access to its owners’ patented fuel. And I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a similarly sharp narrative RPG with card-based battles, where you live out your teenage years on an alien planet and try to keep your settlement alive. 

I’d also be silly not to mention Dontnod Entertainment’s episodic adventure games, including the Life is Strange series, which all feature queer protagonists (including several queer protagonists of colour), and Tell Me Why, which features the first trans protagonist in an AAA game. The games follow teenagers with psychic powers, navigating relationships and traumatic events; I have my issues with the first Life is Strange – it’s much more harrowing than advertised – but they’re beloved of many queer players. 

Get cosy

Cosy queer games usually do have some emotive and hard-hitting themes, but warmth, connection, pretty art and soothing music are the order of the day. Visual novel Butterfly Soup – which is pay-what-you-want on itch – is an adorable game about “gay Asian girls playing baseball and falling in love,” while Game Grumps’ dating sim Dream Daddy is a funny, tongue-in-cheek, yet surprisingly thoughtful dad dating sim, where you date the seven other hot dads who coincidentally all live on your cul-de-sac. Meanwhile, one night, hot springs adopts a very cute art style to tell a quietly lovely story about a young Japanese trans woman, who is nervous about attending the hot springs with her friends. 

Face the worst

Cosy nights in are good to have, but sometimes you need to confront the worst, and few artists do that better than queer game developers. Post-apocalyptic survival horror games The Last of Us and The Last of Us II have received widespread praise for their hard-hitting queer storylines, and some of my favourite games on the market are queer games that stare into hell, such as Aevee Bee’s hour-long Christian camp horror We Know the Devil, Porpentine’s intimate and monstrous Twine game With Those We Love Alive, and Infinite Fall’s Night in the Woods, one of the most intelligent and aesthetically distinctive video games ever made. All three of these games are not unrelentingly bleak – they are, at times, full of hope and love and humour – but they stick with you for years after playing, full as they are of the complicated catharsis of depicting and releasing queer pain.

Stare at hot people

Erotic video games tend to not be well-advertised on major platforms, but there are some real gems out there. My personal favourite is Christine Love’s Ladykiller in a Bind, a madcap lesbian BDSM visual novel where a woman must disguise herself as her twin brother and attempt to win a popularity contest without being rumbled. (Prior warning, there’s a few deliberately troubling scenes of sexual manipulation.) And Mice Tea, a visual novel “full of transformation, sex, and steamy, hot beverages,” is sweet and sexy and full of pretty much every transformation-related kink you could think of. If you’re more of the gay guy persuasion, Robert Yang’s games explore public/illegal/taboo sexual practices and game conventions, such as The Tearoom, a game in which you engage in oral sex at a urinal, but all penises involved are replaced with guns. (Notably, games are much happier showing murder than sex.) 

Trans women in particular are also making incredible work on itch, which is a flourishing platform for erotic games: check out Nadia Nova’s can you say my name again, boarlord’s Plot Hole (a rare haven of fat, queer sex), or Ana Valens’ Blood Pact.

Come out changed

Games have a close association with frivolity, but queer games can be genuinely life-changing, from providing a first experience of being gendered correctly to plunging you into intense experiences of cruelty, culpability and loss. Whatever you choose, we hope these games can mean something special to you, too. 

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