On the night of Friday 30th August, at PAX West in Seattle, RPS will raise the dead. Using techniques too dreadful to comprehend, we shall puncture the mortal veil like a sheet of wet tissue paper, and drag something back from the other side. That spirit will be Ghoastus, the Roman Ghost: our first fully spectral staff writer, and the site’s occasional historical strategy correspondent. He’s erudite, he’s wise, and he’s in no way a person draped in a sheet and a replica centurion’s helmet.
Ghoastus will be interviewing a panel of strategy gaming’s leading lights: Ed Beach, lead designer for Civilization VI; Adam Isgreen, creative director for the Age of Empires series; Peter Nicholson, content designer for Imperator: Rome; Jeff Spock, narrative director of Amplitude's just-announced historical 4X Humankind; and Nicholas Tannahill from Stronghold developers Firefly. From within his circle of chalked wards, Ghoastus will ask them how they mix reality with fiction when making historical games, and how they’ve kept well-loved franchises fresh over the years.
]]>From 2014-2015, RPS's Senior Scottish Correspondent Cara Ellison wrote S.EXE, 29 columns about games about sex, games about love, games about the space in between those two things, games about sexuality, and games about schlongs. Unfortunately the series is on indefinite hiatus as Cara takes a break from writing about games after her spectacular but surely exhausting Embed With... project, but whether you missed it the first time, didn't catch all of them or are simply missing it already, you should absolutely revisit S.EXE yourself now. It's a by turns insightful and funny (and very often both) document of the wilder side of games, the darker side of games, the sillier side of games and a hugely important but often little-seen side of games. Here's the complete archive.
]]>This week I've been trying to think about a relationship between a man and a woman in a game where they become close, but don't actually have romantic involvement or a silly damsel in distress situation. There's a strange set up that is echoed throughout our culture that [heterosexual] men and women can't be friends, just like in Billy Crystal's famous speech in When Harry Met Sally. 'You realise of course that we can never be friends. ...Men and women can't be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way.' 'I have a number of men friends...' 'They all wanna have sex with you. No man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.'
Well BILLY CRYSTAL. Why don't we start up Full Throttle and prove you wrong you silly Monsters Inc-voicing maniac.
]]>In the middle of the sort of teen love you only seem to get in ‘edgy’ Channel Four dramas I heard the Primal Scream track Come Together for the first time. It played at the end of the British rave culture movie Human Traffic. Strange to me to hear such a slow, elated thing in an era where fast pop beats were ruling my life, where Girls Aloud, Sugababes, Beyonce’s Crazy In Love were the things I danced to. It was a time at which euphemisms did not occur to me. Now to the ear Come Together seems so nineties, so optimistic, like it is actually putting up utopian buildings in the mind like they would appear as you scrolled over the world in Populous. It made that one relationship I was in seem like it was constructing a glittering wall around us. “We are together”. “We are unified”. “We are together”, Jesse Jackson says over and over in the track. Here are two games, What We Did, and reProgram, that are about being together. Unified. Together.
]]>The first time I ever wrote anything about games, it was because I was still brokenhearted about a relationship that had dissolved years ago. PC Gamer edited the 4000 word essay into a six pager about Dota in 2012 and it is still one of the best things I have ever written. But wherever I go, whatever I do, games participate in a meaningful way in many of the relationships I see. Welcome to a special edition of S.EXE: the love letters edition. Brace yourself, you are in for chop. Here are seven stories about falling in love next to a loading screen.
]]>"You have made a career of playing stupid shit," my friend tells me, as she stares at me playing a 2D MS-DOS platformer that sees a naked man with a semi erect cock jump around collecting beer and pissing on doors to open them. "It may be true," I say, grazing the man's knob-end off the side of a floating platform that is strangely reminiscent of Sonic The Hedgehog levels. I leave the naked man to idle for a moment, and his John Thomas drips. This is the eternal metaphor for video games, I think, looking at my character fire urine at things and try to locate a woman to bone, both using a thing that is just more flesh-coloured than usual. It's time to go back to the old school of MS-DOS, friends! Come and visit Romantic Encounters At The Dome with me via Dan Dolme and Sex Vixens In Space. I promise one of them will be good.
]]>RPS, I have been having a good time. An extremely good time. I mean a good time in every way: A new gay dating sim has snuck into existence, it is called Coming Out On Top, and it is funny, sexy, nervewracking, tense, charming... and it has fully naked, good-looking dudes in it. Who kiss each other! And do other hot 18+ things. Also there is a goldfish who keeps talking to you. The goldfish is a little overbearing. But we can get past the goldfish.
Tune in after the jump to read about a full release of the gay dude dating sim Coming Out On Top.
]]>When Max Payne, the dark bullet-time Sam Spade-'em-up game came out in 2001, I thought it possessed a most ingenious game meta-narrative moment. (I was sixteen, and I was easily wowed.) If my memory serves correctly, at one point our raspy-voiced Phillip Marlowe stand-in Max is injected with an overdose of the drug Valkyrie, a heroinesque substance, and hallucinates for a few levels. At one point he remarks in horror that he can see his own health bar. He's in a nightmare, he's in a video game.
I am now twenty-nine and really difficult to please, but I can say confidently that Creatures Such As We is an elegant, intricate meta-narrative about player emotional investment and romancing non-player characters. Max Payne would do a Keanuface at it.
]]>Someone sent me this 'All-Girl Sex Simulation' Girlvania because I guess I have this reputation now. What I did was I got some All Girls together (women who have sex with other women) in the New York Museum of Sex bar, plied them with alcohol, and asked them to look at the game. Is this a thing you can count as your job? I guess this is my job now. Asking New York lesbians what they think of virtual women fucking each other over outlandishly named cocktails. Anyway this is not going to be safe for work (in text or images) and prepare yourself for Jeff Goldblum sweats.
]]>Stars glint off the side of the hull as the wartorn ship slowly turns in space. She sits in her underwear, staring out at the far-off smear of white on the blue-marbled orb and the drifting neon love hotels by the casino station. She is hung, suspended, her stomach grumbling, her muscles barely remembering what seiza is like, or what fish and chips taste like. Dirty laundry and wax strips drift by her face. Once she was stationed on space station Britannia, working regularly for the Rock Paper Shotgun outfit, but now she drifts in space, for hire only by those who can find her. She remembers the ones she left behind to the tune of Orbital's Halcyon On And On.
The monitor bleeps, waking her from her hyperspace-lag. INCOMING COMMISSION it flashes. INCOMING COMMISSION. INCOMING COMMISSION. $100 WULONGS FOR THE HEAD OF A GAMES DEVELOPER. She scrambles for the button, her tummy growling, accidentally opening a tab on a game instead: Gateway Shuffle. 3,2,1 let's jam.
]]>This is the second part of my Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines Diary. You can read the first part here.
All of this is huge spoilers so it's only your OWN fault if you read any of this and then ruin your whole life because you spoilered this wonderful game and then you will never like anything again and love will seem hollow.
]]>Some of my favourite people in the world have been bartenders. I mean, I didn't speak to many of them for more than ten minutes, and I know how it works - I used to tend bar too - you flirt for tips and for kicks. But a bartender has an uncanny way of being able to flip a switch in you. Not just with their sticky fluids, but also with their damn fine smiles, the ability to pay you attention for just those five minutes you want to order a drink after work. Sometimes you can make up stories about them, that the smile was really because you are the most handsome thing in the world, and they are going to Tom-Cruise-in-Cocktail you after their shift.
But ah, being the bartender. It's a different sort of thing all together. It's a real performance.
]]>Quentin Tarantino has a monologue about Top Gun in the little-known Hollywood metamovie Sleep With Me. In it, Tarantino discusses in his typical teenage terminology how Top Gun, as well as being a romantic Cold War macho-off, is a film about the main character coming to terms with his own homosexuality. Tarantino names this subtextual narrative 'fucking great' and 'subversive'. But it would probably have been much more subversive had it actually been text and not subtext. In game terms, that narrative probably would have been The Fullbright Company's Gone Home. Yeah I said it. Gone Home is a more explicit Top Gun.
GONE HOME SPOILERS FROM HERE ON~
]]>A long time ago, when I was just a fledgeling writer who had just attended her first Game Developer's Conference and only accidentally brushed shoulders with Tim Schafer at a bar, I was surprised to get a message on Facebook from Noah Falstein. He had noticed that my cover image was of the 1992 LucasArts point and click adventure Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. He saw it on my page thanks to a connection of a friend of a friend. He 'liked' it. And I realised: Noah wrote that game.
I guess that was the moment I knew I was privileged to be able to talk to the people who make the things I care about, and that I should spend my time critiquing their work. This week's S.EXE is about the 'team' narrative strand of Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis. It's got clinches worthy of Hollywood. I've not seen a kiss in a game that's ever topped Sophia and Indy's frequent tonsil-scraping embraces.
]]>Well, it's been a hellish two weeks, RPS. This week's S.EXE comes to you from the heart of one of Europe's most beautiful and sexually liberal cities, Amsterdam, where I am sat with a glass of Pinot Blanc, bread and some sort of Gouda, watching the internet try to hack away at the self-esteem, security, and self-belief of women who make and talk about games. I know it got to me: I sent a message to a colleague to ask his professional opinion. If I, a woman, wrote about a feminist game maker in this climate, would it be an irresponsible act?
I decided, with the gamemaker's permission of course, to fuck all that worry to one side. It is not Regency England. Women do not need to ask a man's permission to do fuck all, least of all worry what some anonymous ones on the internet think about anything. That's what art is about: expressing what you want to. Let's go on a journey into some real weird shit, RPS. Women are here. We are going to stay if we want to. We are going to talk about what we like. Today what I want to talk about is fucking chairs, fucking women, fucking men, and fucking monsters. If you don't want to come that's okay, but this here peculiar territory at 9pm is mine and no one else's. This will not be safe for work. Let's Fuck Everything.
]]>I usually discover the best stories about games over a quiet drink with a friend. This week I am residing in the Isle of Wight, working with the artist Howard Hardiman, author of The Lengths. The Lengths is, amongst other things, an exploration of the world of male gay escorts based on real conversations with sex workers; illustrations and dialogue of the feelings and life of someone who lives to please other people. I found myself in The Mess asking Howard which games he liked that expressed something about the relationships between people. This will contain spoilers for Dragon Age II.
Howard explained to me that Aveline's crush on a coworker in Dragon Age II almost broke his heart. So we went back home to play The Long Road.
]]>This week on S.EXE I am bringing to your attention the slowburning intimate relationship of two people in Matthew S. Burns' The Arboretum. The Arboretum was just released on the always excellent Unwinnable dot com, a place that welcomes experimental writing and game design and published yours truly before she really knew who she was. The Arboretum is a gentle and deftly-written text adventure, linear and beautiful in texture. It is a delicate exploration of the feelings of two teenagers whose only dating advice came from hentai and anime, and their fumbling fights their own expectations of romance.
]]>I have been aware, for a while at least, that for S.EXE you wanted me to do something on Hentai/eroge/H games, and so this week I fulfilled your wish with Da Capo.
For a pretty long time I didn't want to cover Hentai, the main reason being that I couldn't find one that appealed to my personal libido and I am very selfish. (Though when living in Japan I did spend a lot of time in manga shops and in sex shops merely attempting to understand the discourse around sex in Japan (I wasn't getting laid at all).) (Maybe my lurking in those places was the reason?) But the other reasons I didn't negotiate these waters sooner is that I find them full of problematic approaches to youth, incest, to consent, and to sex that even as an adult who enjoys a perverse fantasy or two it breaks me out of that and into the 'this isn't hot this is a nightmare' mindset. It turns out even Hentai games with all men in them can be predicated on sexual assault scenarios. But I delve into Da Capo just for you, my dears.
]]>My circumstances have changed yet again as I make my way around the world on a silly adventure with game developers. I find myself writing this week's S.EXE in the muggy heart of the most boisterous American city, New York. It is currently pissing it down, and yet, as my friend Rob Dubbin remarks, it is hot like 'a city on the surface of Venus' and comes accompanied with a particular pungent smell.
My computer is hating Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, so before I wrestle the next instalment of my diary into the RPS featuresmachine, I thought I'd utilise the things around me to bring you a change of scenery. These things are: my partner in crime and Kotaku comics Elizabeth Simins, beer, and a copy of Andrew Gray's Groin Gravitators on Ouya or internet. Join me to play a game about Peter Molyneux's groin!
]]>When you think of California, you probably think of sun, people wearing shades, the wide, flat pavements sunbleached and neat. But when the night falls in Santa Monica, CA, it gets mortuary cold. I'm staying there this month and I found myself thinking of Jeanette the other night. Something about a tumultuous relationship, smudged kohl, and Jeanette.
So I paid for another copy of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, and I went to visit video games' most animated goth chick seductress. She lives above the Asylum club in a Santa Monica where the sun never comes up. For this week's S.EXE I thought I'd write you the first part of my spiral into the dark, sexy overtones of one of the best-written western RPGs we've got, and my quest for someone there who gives a damn about me.
]]>Ah, mes cheries. This week's S.EXE is a romantic tale of two hot-shots in a clinch. It's hard to find well-written romance in games, but it's also hard to find dialogue that's naturalistic or flowing... Unless you go to the tenderly-kept gardens of the Interactive Fiction forums, where, somewhat ignored by Gamers At Large, the wordsmiths of choice and nuance solder their delicate meanings together, folding out words, opening up new landscapes purely constructed with the master knowledge of parser instructions or hypertext. So today we're heading that way to the lovely little romance game Snowblind Aces, a short, replayable adventure in the vein of the Saturday afternoon matinee movie. It stays on just the right side of Indiana Jones cheesiness. It's parser-based, so get ready to type GET YE FLASKE a lot, or MAKE LOVE TO BEYOOTIFUL WUMAN, and have the game stubbornly refuse to laugh. (Not really: this game is as straightforward as interactive fiction gets.) (Come the heck on!)
]]>This week's S.EXE entry is an interview with a person who speaks and writes regularly about sex in games and who has made games about relationships along the way. I first became aware of the multimedia artist & game designer Merritt Kopas through her shrewd skewering of games on the website Nightmare Mode, for which I was also writing at the time. The website has since passed away into cyberspace heaven, the archives of which are here, but Merritt has grown as a designer and game theorist in an inspiring way since we went down our separate paths, making games such as Lim, Consensual Torture Simulator, and Positive Space.
She started up the curation site Forest Ambassador [disclosure, my sex game Sacrilege also appears on this site] to "showcase a wide range of accessible, free games for nontraditional audiences". She now speaks regularly on the intersection of bodies, sex, and violence at game conferences, and recently spoke at the Feminist Porn Conference about sex in games. Paolo Pedercini says of Merritt Kopas: "as mutant practitioner-theorist, [she] managed to contaminate the living gaming discourse, emerging as a powerful and yet nuanced voice in the indie movement". I asked her about her work and outlook.
]]>Today's sex and/or relationship game is Increpare's puzzle game Striptease. I'd like to point out that this game, though it might seem from its title to be lighthearted titillation, contains depictions of violence against women and addresses issues of sexual assault. If this might trigger or distress you in any way, I'd recommend to take care in reading this, and consider whether playing this game might distress you before playing it.
]]>Many of Tale of Tales' games have erotic undertones, and you might begin to wonder exactly why that is. You remember I wrote about Tale of Tales' FATALE earlier in this column, of course. And after winning the Nuovo Award for Luxuria Superbia at the IGF Awards a few weeks ago, Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn explained in their acceptance speech that they did a lot of 'research' together for their award-winning game. Because Luxuria Superbia is about touch, pleasure, and joy, and can make you blush when you play it, you can imagine the sort of research they were referring to.
Well, the erotic undertones are because Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn are married and have confessed they are good at two things: making art, and f**king.
]]>No, not the beloved Homestar Runner animation, this fortnight it's a celebration of teenage girls and their sexual agency being front and centre of the narrative! "Hey Cara," I might hear you say, "I have never heard of a game that even gave the tiniest crap about teenage girls' libidos!" Well, I'd say, you've clearly never been near the Otome genre, or a copy of Duel Love, but that's okay. We'll leave Otome to another day, because I found two perfectly free games that give women a good sense of bodily autonomy without having to relate their self-worth to what a dude thinks of them. How healthy!
]]>The sound of the sea on the menu of the classic arcade racer OutRun 2006 is drifting through Tim Rogers’ Oakland apartment. For whatever reason I find myself in the ex-Grasshopper Manufacture designer’s house, and this guy is making a game, ‘Videoball’, that demands that the voice actor on his new game sound like she comes from OutRun 2006. So I am playing OutRun 2006. It is eye-wettingly beautiful. It is heartbreakingly so. I could cry but I’m dehydrated from California’s stubborn sticky hotness and how gosh darned vegan everything is.
The screeching of the children from the school from across the freesia-fragranced, sun bleached street has subsided, and Tim is cutting audio clips and swearing at the wi-fi. And the game’s menu, the game that Tim once called ‘Love: The Videogame’, well, the game’s menu is doing a perfect impression of contentment. This game is no longer available due to licencing troubles, but man, if anything was ever a game, this, THIS was a game. And I’m on a quest for the 'ejaculatory gag'. You know, the one that Kieron mentioned in 2008, and I have never found: "I’m still terribly amused by the hyper-cheesy ejaculatory gag half-way through."
]]>This week I have been inspired in my work for this column by the magnificent website Critique My Dick Pic, which attempts to rate the erotic quality of dick pics with 100% no size shaming. I enjoy that website because for some reason dicks, especially erect dicks, are conspicuously absent from our media, including videogames, and I think a good dick pic can certainly be arousing to look at.
Probably most interesting about the site is that the curator, moscaddie, suggests that for maximum sexiness the person possessing said dick holds it or at least caresses it a little for the picture, which gives the dick a less… well, melancholy feel like it’s the loneliest snake in the world (she calls these ‘log’ pictures). Perhaps it gives the picture a sense of movement or purpose. Surely with the help of the best animators in the world, games would be the best place to give a dick a little something to do. Or at least get them to cast a cute shadow over exotic environmental art.
]]>Shakespeare's Helena once said 'Love don't cost a thing'... Hang on, that wasn't it.
She said, 'Love in an elevator, living it up when you're going down...' No, that can't be right. That is somewhat anachronistic.
No, it was 'Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind. And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.'
But what about desire? What about lust? Isn't lust directed by sight? By the act of looking? Can looking be... dangerous? When someone looks at you in a certain way, is that your power, or theirs? When you behold something, can it manipulate you? Maybe Cupid can't tell us about that. But the Tale of Tales game FATALE is going to show you.
]]>IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a DOOMBRINGER.
Hello!
My dear friends, on this Valentines Day I shall teach you the ways and arts of attracting undesirable mates from the Jane Austen dating sim Matches and Matrimony.
]]>S.EXE is a new monthly column written by Cara Ellison which explores sex and relationship games. The column is published on the third Friday of every month and, like Cara herself, is NSFW.
Rhythm, thrills and bodies are all things games are good at, so where’s the goods my friends, readers, players? Where’s the junk all up inside that trunk? Wherefore does the mainstream ignore our fiery loins and blustering hearts, and refuse to lay claim to our feelings and intimacy? Why do mainstream games render our lives as placid jogs through sanitised, picket-fenced streets, and never as joyful sprints through neon jungles lit up with the expression of our needs and our far-reaching hunger for pleasure?
I do not know the answer, denizens of netclick cities, but this column desires to devour the games that address the sexy parts with thought and consideration and perhaps a little experience. Are You Experienced? Well it’s okay if you’re not because I’m here. My name is Cara. You may remember me from such puns as Highway To The Bonerzone and 'booty hall'. This is my new monthly column: S.EXE. Let’s start with Lea Schönfelder’s Ute. THIS WON’T BE SAFE FOR WORK YOU KNOW. LEAVE YOUR COAT AT THE DOOR.
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