On games, bodies, and queer rights.
The scene is scored with a thrumming, meditative track.
It was an exquisitely poetic, and highly erotic film.
Even I once described by a classmate at grad school as “gay as fuck” was titillated.
The porn film expects, anticipates, and dare I say stimulates physical self-pleasure.
Compare movies that are merely sexy to those that are created as porn.
Few other art forms engage the body like this.
Then, there’s the world of games.
He compellingly illustrates features that make the process of playing a game on a “human platform” unique.
His most interesting arguments concern “experiential side effects”.
Take Alex Roberts’award-winning tabletop roleplaying game Star Crossed.
Maybe they’re rival kings.
Maybe one of them is a bird and the other a mermaid.
Maybe they’re nuns at a convent.
Whatever the explanation, interpersonal tension mounts.
What makes the game ingenious is that this tension is physically represented by a tower of Jenga blocks.
As the characters interact, more and more blocks are removed from the tower.
Each time your character acts, you must remove a block.
Consequently, each move your character makes is laden with meaning, possibility, and stress.
Star Crossed’s emotional momentum is intimately tied to the physicality of the players.
Pornography and roleplaying, in some ways, are bound by similar logics.
Both situate stories in bodies.
I can root the feelings and desires in my own skin.
The link between analogue games and the erotic is hardly a new discovery, though.
Think of hormone-fuelled games of Spin the Bottle, Truth or Dare, or Seven Minutes in Heaven.
Think of novelty dice or card games that have you randomise sexual acts with your partner.
The authors proceed to point out the many similarities and links between BDSM and roleplaying, especially larp.
Indeed, I recently experienced something along the lines of these intersections firsthand.
To contemporary queer politics today, art that forces us to examine our relationship to our bodies is vital.
They are invited to touch others' bodies in agreed-upon ways and co-create what these landscapes are like.
Lucian’s game questions the “truths” and “fictions” we clothe ourselves in.
We like to think of ourselves as civilised.
Marvels of engineering to hold and carry us, the virtual world at our fingertips.
