At the Games for Change 2019 conference, Sharang Biswas gave a presentation on “Promoting Sex-Positivity Through Analog Games.” He won a grant from The Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity to curate an Erotic Art Games Anthology to be published by RPG publisher Pelgrane Press. [UPDATE March 4, 2020: This anthology is now titled Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games]
Biswas is an artist, game designer, and writer who I first interviewed about Live Action Role Playing at the Immersive Design Summit 2018.
When I ran into Biswas at Games for Change, he said that he was going to be giving a talk exploring whether or not sexual acts could potentially be used as a game play mechanic in analog games in order to symbolize narratives around sexuality identity and sex positivity. Needless to say, it was a provocative idea and so we sat down to chat about how games could be used to break taboos around sexuality, and some of the work that has been happening over the last number of years of using games to explore concepts like consent, like in Naomi Clark’s Consentacle, and in Nordic LARP experiences like Just a Little Lovin’ or Beat Generation, which we covered in depth in our previous conversation.
While many of these indie erotic game experiments are happening in the analog world, it’s fascinating to hear Biswas break down the fundamental component parts of a game, and to see how embodied actions with other people can start to be layer on top of other narratives and game mechanics.
How can these erotic art games challenge the taboos around sexuality, sexual identity, gender expression, abortion, asexuality, or a range of other sex positivity topics? With the support of a foundation, the publishing platform of a major RPG distributor, and a speaking slot at a conference like Games for Change, then the creation of these cultural artifacts of erotic art games can start to provide a context to explore the liminal boundaries of our sexuality in a fun and playful way.
There is a lot of violence that happens due to a lack of education around sex and sexuality whether it’s around safety or consent or hate crimes stemming from homophobia. Biswas says that games can be a great medium to break taboos around sex and sexuality, and provide a context to have important conversations that are otherwise really difficult to have.
We had a fascinating discussion that made me think about games in a completely new way, and it was definitely a fun thought experiment to think about what would have to shift in our culture in order to imagine what type of contexts could be created to be able to play some of these games, and what if it would be considered completely normal.
There are a number of provacative and transgressive game design ideas in the series, and Biswas emphasized that people don’t actually have to play all of these games for them to make a difference. Just reading about them, and imagining playing them can lead to introspective reflection and shifts in perspective. So be sure to have a listen to our conversation, and then check out his Games for Change Talk for more academic references, indie erotic game examples, game design theory, and using games as a catalyst for change.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So, continuing on in my series of looking at XR for Change and Games for Change, now I'm looking at a number of different specific individual experiences that are looking at different ways of using either games or immersive experiences to bring about some type of change. So, at the Games4Change conference, I had a chance to run into Charang Biswas, who's an artist, game designer, and writer. I first met him at the Immersive Design Summit, the first one, back a couple years ago, and we talked about LARPing, live actual role-playing, back in episode 615. And so, Charang was there giving a talk at Games4Change, and it was specifically around using games and indie games as a way to bring about information and education for sex positivity. So he had actually gotten this grant from the Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity. And in the grant, it was to write a number of different games. So they're going to have this major publisher, Pelgrim Press, and they're going to be publishing this whole anthology of these different erotic art games. And they're trying to see how they can use different analog games to be able to bring about specific change within the world. And so to bring about education around these larger issues around sex positivity, it's around gender, around abortion, a whole range of different issues around sexuality. And Sharon specific experience is actually quite provocative and transgressive And so I think you know in some ways he's addressing these different issues around different taboos around sexuality But also sexual identity and so his big question is can you start to use? Different sexual acts as a symbolic way to be able to talk about these larger issues around sexual identity and sexuality and I just sex in general. And so just a quite interesting discussion, because, you know, he's talking about these different things, but I think he's breaking down the different elements of game design and what games can do, because within the series so far, we've been mostly focusing on narrative experiences. But I think there's a whole other Games for Change conference that I went to back in New York City earlier in the year, and they're much more focused on the interactivity in the agency. And so I think he starts to bring in different aspects of how these interactive game contexts and experiences can start to bring about change as well. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Sharang happened on Tuesday, June 18th, 2019 at the Games for Change conference in New York City, New York. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:36.222] Shirang Biswas: So I'm Sharung Biswas, I'm an artist designer, game designer and writer, and I'm happy to be talking to you again for the second time. And I focus a lot on live-action and analog game stuff, so things like live-action roleplay like LARP, or interactive theatre, or immersive theatre, which are slightly different, or strange, unclassifiable live-action experiences that people have like playful times in, so.
[00:03:02.980] Kent Bye: So we're here at Games for Change and you're giving a talk here. So what's your talk about?
[00:03:07.824] Shirang Biswas: So I am giving a talk tomorrow on using analog games for sex positivity. Recently, my friend Lucian Khan, who's another indie game designer, and I got a grant from the Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity, which is a small foundation in the States. that does a lot of work with helping artists and activists and educators spread sex-positive themes. So we got a grant to make a book of tabletop role-playing game and live-action role-playing games. So bringing together a diverse, diverse being a keyword, a diverse group of game designers and artists to create various games which are live and live-action tabletop that spread various different messages about sex, sexuality, gender in some cases in various ways. So not when people ask me is it about like sex ed like are they all about like how to use a condom and contraception and I'm like some of them might deal with those issues I'll mention some of them in the talk tomorrow but that wasn't what we were necessarily looking for. We have a wide variety of topics such as abortion and destigmatizing BDSM things like that we've been we've received applications about so.
[00:04:27.847] Kent Bye: And so have you built this game already? Have you playtested it and everything?
[00:04:31.711] Shirang Biswas: So it's going to be eight different games in the book, each by a different writer. So where we are right now in the project is we collected pitches from, I think we ended up, I don't remember, but in the dozens of pitches that we got. They're all very different. Some of them are very conceptual at the moment, like, oh, I have this idea, I want to make this game. Some of them are like, we have playtested this twice in this city. So there are different stages of completion. I personally am making one of the games, which most likely, unless I change my mind, is about determining your sexuality. It's based on a book by this queer studies scholar, by Jane Ward. It's called Not Gay, colon, Sex Between Straight White Men. It's an academic book. It's all about constructing one's own idea of one's sexuality and does it depend on the actual sex acts you are doing and what other people view them as. So I'm probably, and I'm viewing this, it may change, but most likely make a game about frat boys jerking each other off. deciding whether or not they're gay. And I went to a school with a lot of fraternities. I know about fraternities. So I'm like right from experience.
[00:05:46.532] Kent Bye: Interesting. So what happened? I'm just trying to get a sense of like how this is a game.
[00:05:51.618] Shirang Biswas: So that's the thing. So a lot of people, especially in the live-action role-playing game world, the definition of game is very wide. Something I like about the Indiecade Festival, for example, they have very broad definition of game. So many of these games have no win condition. In fact, out of most of the submissions we got, about like a handful, maybe like four or five, had a win condition, right? Most of them were procedural explorations, right, where Actions you do represent certain meaning or convey certain meaning and then it becomes a shared space where you do various actions in a prescribed rule-based way to explore these concepts, often to create new narrative and story around these concepts. And then at the end of the game, you're like, oh, we created this story. We created this shared meaning together based on sex and sexuality. And what does that do? How do we feel about that? An interesting thing that I should mention is that as part of the grant, we are interested both in games that discuss aspect sex and sexuality but also games that use sex acts as part of their gameplay as part of the rules of the game to explore other things because another thing we had is on one hand we're like we want to explore discussions about sex sexuality explicitly on the other hand can sex acts as verbs be used to explore other concepts, which is what games are, right? Games are series of verbs that are used to explore other verbs, right? When I'm doing a game about, I don't know, shooting people, I'm not really shooting someone, I'm pressing a button, so pressing a button becomes an action that represents shooting someone. So I've been really interested in my artistic field about what can certain actions mean, so I won an Indicator Award for a game where Eating food becomes this idea of consumption and memory and things like that. So for this one, I'm like, can sex acts mean other things? And what does that mean about the sex acts then?
[00:08:00.607] Kent Bye: So I'm very curious about the experiential design of this and the process of working with a foundation that is trying to promote sex positivity. So you get this grant, and we're here at the Games for Change, which is all about looking at how you can create these interactive, immersive game experiences. where you are trying to, in some sense, impart a deeper theme or message and get across to people through encouraging them to interact with some sort of magic circle where they're interacting in some way. So you're setting up a set of rules within these contrived interactions. Maybe you're trying to break down into step-by-step instructions, but I'm just trying to get a sense of this design process, of like, where do you begin to be like, we want to get some positive messages about sex positivity, and then how do you sort of create this symbolic interaction that then is supposed to then get translated into a story and meaning?
[00:08:53.715] Shirang Biswas: So, okay, so where do I begin? It started, the idea took root, well the seeds of the, oh, nice metaphor, the seeds of the idea came last year at the 200 word RPG contest, little internet contest, where I made a game about stripping, where you and a partner strip, according to certain rules and use it to tell stories that contextualize the act of stripping, both as an act of intimate reveal, but simultaneously as an act of, let's say, vulnerability, where you are making yourself vulnerable by removing clothing, right? So I made this game and I was into it. I'm like, oh yeah, this is kind of a sexy game. It's about teenage demigods playing seven minutes in heaven. And if you do certain things, you can destroy the world because you're demigods. But anyway, so I would think that I'm like, that's interesting because the mechanic of the game is about removing one's clothing. So that's where it started. I'm like, that's interesting. This is a sexual sort of act, though not always, but in this case it was. And it becomes a metaphor for something else. And it's an exploration of what does that sex act mean to a person? Because I know a lot of people who have hang-ups about being naked with other people, for example, right? even in a sexual context. And so that made me think about, okay, this is cool. And then I saw this grant. And I'm like, wait a minute, what if we made a bunch of different games about this? And then I'm like, well, I don't want to do them all I want because I only have a certain perspective about sexuality. Some people say my perspective is very open and liberal, right? And I'm like, well, are there other people with other kinds of bodies, other kinds of socializations, other backgrounds that have interesting commentary as well? For example, I don't know a lot about what having an abortion might be like. I will probably never have one. I do not have a womb. So that kind of thing, I'm like, this is interesting. I want to apply this grant and get a diverse set of designers to do this. That's where the project started. Then I found a publisher. We're going to be published by Pellegrin Press, who made the hashtag Feminism Collection, which is a collection of LARPs about feminism. So that's how the project as a whole started and is moving forward. As to the design of the games themselves, I was just, so once we secured we're making this project, I'm like, okay, well, what am I making my game about? And I'd already, I'd been to a talk by Jane Ward at NYU where she signed a copy of her book with lesbian love. And I'm like, I fell in love with her. I'm like, yes, I like her. I had the book but I hadn't really read the book yet because you know what happens, you buy a billion books and some of them are very dense, some of them are very light. I'm working my way through Persepolis in French right now. But then I was thinking about what am I making for this collection because I came up with the idea of the collection before having the full game. And I was ruminating about various concepts. So I had this idea about making a game about clergymen and penance because a random medievalist on Twitter, well not random, for me it was random, but she sent me a book about Catholic penance and how a lot of them were very hypersexual focused. And so that's interesting and using that as my process. I had this idea, I was thinking of these things, I was brainstorming, I was trying to come up with Well, what physical acts are you doing? What do those acts mean? And I couldn't get it to gel. And so I started from the drawing board again, and I remembered, wait a minute, there's a talk, and I have the book, it's sitting on my shelf. So I started reading the book again, and this concept of What do you call your own sexuality, even when other people call it something else? Even when you are told what you are doing is not concurrent with your perceived sexuality? So that really interested me. And to be completely honest, I really like the stories and movies and stuff about, like, frat boys who turn out to be gay. That's an aesthetic thing I like. I will be honest and say that is also porn that I enjoy. So that resonated with me because her book was a lot about people, a lot of these people who do same-sex sexual acts with other people still don't consider themselves queer. They rationalize those acts in many ways. And I don't want to use the word rationalizing. They are wrong and they're rationalizing it, but they conceive of them in different ways. In fact, many of them are used to affirm their white hetero masculinity. That's a big theme of the book. So I'm like, this is fascinating. Can you be jerking someone off and still say, no, this is completely straight? And so that crystallized for me and I'm like, okay, I'll make a game about this. What if it's a game where you actually are jerking someone off? What does that do to the game? So in some regards, they're like conceptual and experimental, but we do have a requirement in the book that when you submit your game, you must have play tested it at least once. We put at least one because we recognize it may be hard to playtest some of these games with the number of people required to playtest them. Because some of the games are like for 10 people, right? And many of them are not. Many of them do not use any sex acts. They use metaphors for sex and discuss it. But some of them do. But we do want to be playtested. And so I do have people who have said they would be willing to playtest some of the ideas I have because I find playtesting an essential part of game design. So we'll see what happens.
[00:14:13.640] Kent Bye: Well, this feels very transgressive in the sense of the normal boundaries of what you would think of as a game. And what type of context do you think is set up for people that would be in an environment where people would start playing this game? Because it feels like this is a very open-minded, polyamorous... How do you define what the context is where you would expect this specific game that you're creating to be played?
[00:14:37.575] Shirang Biswas: Sure. So on the whole, the book will have a varied type of project. Some of them, while the themes are sexual in nature, the games themselves are not. So some of them are more forgiving and more context, I would say. But we're also, we have an important part of the book is we're having Naomi Clark, who's a professor of game design. at NYU write an artistic foreword, like what are these games and contextualizing them. We're also having a chapter written about safety. In the LARP world, safety is very important. When you're doing embodied actions and playing as other characters, the potential for negative emotion or traumatic things can be very high. So we want safety to be a big part, especially in this context where if you're doing about sexual things, you know, you want to be able to be like, stop, I don't want to continue this anymore. So that's a big deal. But for the content, for like the what content is played in, I don't know, like I can imagine, let's say I finish up this game about the two people jerking each other off. You can very well play it as two partners. You don't have to own a penis to play the game. I'm conceptualizing it that way to begin with, but you don't have to. I'm designing the game that way. So I'm trying to be a bit more broad. I mean, my game in particular, you will want to play with someone you're comfortable doing those things with. And sometimes that's your monogamous intimate partner, maybe, and sometimes it's not. And for some people, they may never play the game, but they will read about it. They will read the game. And that itself will maybe and hopefully make them think about, A, what can games do as an art form? And B, what can sex mean? and the various things about sex, because we have all these harmful associations with what does sex mean that perpetuate and can perpetuate other like violence and things like that in society. So maybe if you don't play the game, because your question seems to hint at the fact that maybe not many people play the game, maybe even if you don't play it, reading about the game will have an effect and make you think.
[00:16:39.932] Kent Bye: Well, I'm just, this is a new genre that I haven't heard much about, you know, this sort of intersection of sex and gaming and, you know, this is an organization, a foundation that's looking at sex positivity. And so, have you personally had many experiences of this exploration of looking at these different types of games that had a sexual component or sex positivity?
[00:17:00.462] Shirang Biswas: So I have never played a game that uses explicit sex acts as part of its rule set, unless you count like role playing with a partner, which is a loose form of play. Can you argue it's a game that goes to definition territory, which I won't go into. But I've never played like a codified game where you must do this. Except, of course, these games do exist in that, you know, Spin the Bottle is a game that uses sex acts. as a core feature of the game, right? It's not as risque as the game I'm thinking about, but it does use sex, or like Seven Minutes in Heaven is similar. So they do exist. They don't maybe have the same intentional purpose, but they do act as people's explorations of sexuality at a young age, right? Like, people often use these games to be like, oh, explore sexuality, my first kiss, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not as rare and wild as people think. But yeah, I will agree that there are very few games that are like, here are rules and this and that to play a game where you have sexy things. However, there are a lot of games, especially in the indie scene, that discuss sexuality very explicitly. So Naomi Clark, who I mentioned, has a game called Consenticle, which is a two-player board game about an astronaut and a tentacle alien having sex. And the game is all about communication and what does it mean to communicate with a partner. It's a board game. I was part of a LARP, I think I mentioned on the last time you interviewed me, called Just Little Loving, which is a LARP about queer people with AIDS in the 80s in New York, and that had explicit mechanics for how do you simulate sex and sexuality, and it explicit things about like, Are you going to use a condom? If you are, you are going to actually physically use a condom and put it on a dildo to represent that. Because, you know, using the decision to use a condom back in the 80s could mean life or death. And many people didn't even know that, right, in the early stages of the disease. So there, sexuality was a big thing. There was a LARP I was part of called Beat Generation, where we played the poets and artists and stuff of that time period of the 60s and the like. where we had a sex mechanic because the idea was to explore what it's like to be a hippie artist and who has sex a lot, things like that. And then I'll talk about some more in the talk itself. So there are definitely games that talk about and deal with, there are definitely games that are more of what I mentioned or what I alluded to early on which actually teach people sex ed. There are games that teach people about masturbation and things like that. So they do exist. They're less well-known. They're less mainstream. They're often less available because people love clutching their pearls or people worry too much about other people clutching their pearls. So I'm excited about this coming out because it is a bit transgressive. It's published by a major role-playing game publisher, which will hopefully make people stop and be like, a major publisher publishing this? What does that mean about our conversations about sex and sexuality? So, yeah.
[00:20:03.208] Kent Bye: Well, a common theme that I'm hearing amongst all these various different games that you've mentioned is that there's a certain amount of taboo where the people aren't necessarily explicitly talking about things, either their direct experiences or their stories or the expressions of their identity. And so in some ways it feels like the game mechanic is allowing people this safe magic circle to then talk about it symbolically, but they're also talking about the deeper meaning of things that may actually may give them access to things that they haven't been able to access themselves or that they are now for the first time being able to communicate with another person. But there seems to be a whole layer of morality and taboo that you're playing with here. So I'm just curious how you make sense of the taboos around sex and the initiatives for sex positivity to start to try to break those taboos.
[00:20:53.408] Shirang Biswas: Well, so first off, you know, Mary Douglas in what, Purity, and I forgot the name of the book, talks about that human societies always have taboos, right? She says that you cannot have a human society without a taboo. So that's, get that out of the way, right? And we know that humans love metaphors. Stories have existed since the dawn of humanity, and we use stories and what they represent, i.e. the stories act as metaphors, to explore and understand our world. So in that way, this isn't something, in that regard, this isn't something particularly groundbreaking. We're just doing it about a taboo that is often more taboo, like people talk about it even less so. So yeah, so in that way, that's the thing. And the other thing is, I often find it very frustrating that sexuality is such a taboo to talk about, especially in a world where such harmful things can happen as a result of inadequate education about sexuality, right? I'm at Games4Change. I firmly believe in education having the power to change the world. I also firmly believe that a lot of harassment issues happen because of a lack of empathy and education. I don't believe that everyone who does a sexual harassment thing is an evil person at their very core in the like satanic binary sense that they are evil and irredeemable, right? I believe a lot of it is about education and the fact that we do not address these taboos. And so in the gaming world, this is slightly, I would say it becomes more relevant because there's a great quote that Lizzie Stark, famous LARP writer, talks about like, we play guns and battles. We do not play love, relationships and sex. And I was just at a talk right now where the Anti-Defamation League was presenting about harmful things, harmful hate speech that can happen as a result of games, right? So, if we can talk about the harmful things that happen in the game, we can talk about the positive things. And in a space where we talk mainly about violence and not about the very, I believe, positive thing of human relationship and sexuality, I think, hopefully, like this sort of a collection of games, again, published by a well-known, well-respected publisher, backed by an actual foundation, with diverse designers who don't all come from the same background. Hopefully, that can shake the world of games a bit and be like, look, We are and we can talk about games and queerness and reproductive justice and gender and these things in a healthy and a fruitful way. And we should, even if you think it's a little risque, you should think about these issues.
[00:23:31.935] Kent Bye: Well, as soon as you said that this was from a foundation about sex positivity, I immediately thought, well, what about the people who are not sex positive? Will they be playing these games? So there's a little bit of, like, a mixture of context of, like, is there any of these games that you've curated or looked at so far that are trying to encourage people that may not already be on board of sex positivity? Or if you talk about various taboos around sexuality, would it be trying to include people who maybe have very strong opinions from a religious or moral perspective around these topics?
[00:24:03.821] Shirang Biswas: So first off, we actually made an effort to solicit games about asexual experiences as well. So that's one thing. Isn't exactly a question, but it's related. Secondly, so my game, the one I'm planning, certainly does not do that. It assumes that you are comfortable with this with another partner slash player, or it assumes that you want to read about this even if you don't play it, right? But some of the other games, I do think so. So we're trying to be very cognizant about a wide variety of perspectives when we curate the games and the designers. And so not all the games are, for example, that we received are about having sex, right? Like I said, one of the games received was about abortion access, for example. So that's a particular stance that we have. that we want to be diverse in the topics. Do they address people who may be resistant and will it change their mind? That I don't think I can speak to at the moment because we haven't seen the full games yet, right? For the most part, we've seen proposals, pitches, methodologies and plans. When the first drafts are due, that's when we'll start seeing. And what we're doing is we're paying a bunch of designers to send in a first draft and then we're going to pay a subset of them to be included in the book. So we'll be able to curate further. We'll look at the first draft and actually see, might these games have the potential to convert someone else? I think, though, that people who have very strong opinions about anything most likely are not going to be convinced otherwise, barring a life-threatening incident that opens their eyes completely. So I would imagine that someone who is completely opposed to sex being a positive thing, which some people are, I doubt we would be able to change their minds with these games. However, what target audience that it could change their mind are people, which I would say are the majority of people, who are nervous or not knowledgeable. There are so many people, because I was a sexual health educator in college, right? Not to say I'm fully trained as a sex educator, but at a collegiate level I was a peer educator. There were so many people who are like nervous or unsure or get conflicting signals from the media about what is or is not moral, what is or is not good, or even what is or is not considered good sex, right? Like we have all these messages. This is like, you must have a large penis, otherwise you are deficient, which is a silly, a very silly thing, right? But all these messages exist, so people are very confused, and I don't mean people in a derogatory way. I, as an agent and actor within society, I'm also under the influence of these like Durkheimian voices, right? But, hopefully, People who are on that border level will be able to look at these games, maybe play them, hopefully play them, and think about their own relationship to sexuality. Which may end up being, you know what, I don't like doing this. Which is fine too, they still learn something about their own relationship to sexuality, to bodies, to gender, to things like that.
[00:27:10.582] Kent Bye: Well, it sounds like you're still very early in the design process, but a big topic of being here at the Games for Change is assessment and making sure that you're trying to meet some sort of criteria that you're actually able to make some sort of shift. So, what kind of possible metrics for success would you have for a project like this?
[00:27:27.242] Shirang Biswas: So that is definitely a challenge in this project, right? Because in addition, we just talked about the topics being taboo. In addition to the resistance and even playing a game like this, for example, there's probably resistance even talking about it afterwards. So that is something we've had to like try and wrestle with and we haven't really solved yet. We've been thinking about Well, we've been thinking about, can we partner with other organizations? So, for example, the Museum of Sex in Amsterdam, the Museum of Sex in New York, the Museum of the Penis, or other sexual health advocacy groups. Can we partner with them? work with them to disseminate the game. It's going to be at the moment the plan is to have a digital only version because part of our grant mandate was we want to make sure our artists get paid a living amount. So we decided to cut costs and not make a print issue. Maybe if it sells really well we'll be able to use that to make a print issue. So one of the ideas is maybe we can partner with organizations to spread this, to disseminate these, and maybe they can talk to their clients or visitors or whoever to get info. I will definitely, when I test my game, I'll be collecting like participant observer information and asking people When they played the game, what did they think? I don't think the scope of the project is to, like, this isn't funded by a, you know, public health organization that we're going to see what is the global tangible impact of this game. We're more going to collect thick data. Data is a bad word, but like participant observer data, people who experience the games and tell us about it, people who read the games and tell us about it. Yeah, I think that is the angle we're going for more as an artistic project rather than a public health initiative more.
[00:29:10.498] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I was at IndieCade this past year, there was a game called The Game, created by more of a feminist perspective looking at the pickup artist community, and it was more of a first-person interactive roleplay where you're going in and you're getting approached by all these pickup artists who are giving you all these different lines and you have a choice to be able to respond to it, but in some sense it's giving you this experience of this whole philosophy of the pickup artist scene, both to understand it, but also to maybe have defense around it. So there's this kind of awareness of different dimensions of this sexual subculture. But just curious if you think of other games that are out there that are really trying to look at the issue of sex or sexuality.
[00:29:52.454] Shirang Biswas: I played it first at the Museum of the Moving Image and it's kind of a creepy game. I felt like it's a creepy game, but I felt not being a woman. meant I got less of the creepiness. I'm sure I've had, actually I'm not sure, I know some women, friends of mine who played that were like, this is super creepy because this happens to me all the time. And I was like, wow, I cannot speak that experience. So that was, it is a really interesting game. And funnily enough, I was asked that exact question about that at another conference I was at on Sunday. So that's really funny. I was on a panel about romance. So that's cool. But yeah, so like I mentioned, Consenticle does that in a very interesting way because it's about communication and it's in a positive way. Very often people talk about the negative aspects like assault and abuse and how to combat that, which is important and valid. But Consenticle talks about, let's talk about consent in a positive way. You play the alien and the astronaut, like, what would you like me to do to you that will bring you pleasure and bring me pleasure so that we mutually make so much pleasure the universe implodes. That is actually an end state of the game. You can reach, if you have so much pleasure, the universe would, like, implode in pleasure or something like that. It's great. So that talks about that in an interesting way. There's a very interesting small, I think it's Danish, tabletop roleplaying game called My Girl Sparrow that's really interesting. It's set in a dystopian future where humans do not have physical sex anymore. They go inside virtual reality booths and have cyber sex with each other. But the players are transgressive people who have sex and they go into a cabin. In the fiction, they go into a cabin and have an orgy in the weekend. But when you play the game, you're supposed to describe sex scenes, except you cannot describe any internal thing. You can't describe a thought or a feeling that a player has internally. You have to describe it using an observable thing. So if you want to say, I got really excited, you cannot say that. You have to maybe say, my breath sped up, right? And that is a game that makes comments about what you literally what you were saying about the taboo of talking about sex. Like we have so many words and phrases and poetry and stuff about feelings. But the thing that causes those feelings not all feelings, but many things, things that cause many of those feelings, we don't have a lot of language for, we don't talk about. So that's the game that discusses, well, what if we only can talk about that, and we talk about feelings only through the language of physicality. So that's a really interesting game. I apologize, I cannot remember the designer of that game. I was at the Game Center Thesis Showcase recently, and there were some really interesting games about sex and sexuality there. I've prepared stuff to talk about in my talk. I can't remember what all of them are at this minute. But yeah, but there definitely are, I've seen like indie video games. A friend of mine told me that an indie video game that was meant to teach girls how to masturbate in an attempt to let women take control of their own bodies and know about their own bodies because very often it's taboo for women to know about their own like vulva. So there are little video games like that. There's a board game made by some European designers about the Volvo and what it is, which I thought was very interesting. I haven't played it. I read about it. Yeah, there are a bunch out there, but most of them are very indie and niche. And hopefully by getting a major publisher to publish this book, It'll be slightly less niche, it'll definitely be indie, but slightly less niche and hopefully there'll be more games that are about sexuality that someone can bring to mind when asked a question like that because the fact that I can't bring many to mind easily without going through my talk notes does say something about how we represent relationships in the game world, which is not a lot. Or like I talk about on Wednesday in a very transactional way, like I will give this character enough rings and enough shiny baubles, and then I will trigger a cut scene where I can sleep with them, which is not the most healthy way of thinking about a relationship, even though it's fun in a video game.
[00:33:57.762] Kent Bye: Well, I'm just curious if you've seen the first episode of the latest season of Black Mirror. The latest episode? The latest season, I have not. All right. Well, it sort of explores, well, I won't ruin it, but it sort of has sexuality that is included.
[00:34:10.266] Shirang Biswas: Is it about the gamers? I saw a poster of it, and I'm like, ooh, this I have to watch. But I haven't seen it yet. OK.
[00:34:15.967] Kent Bye: So for you, what are some of the either biggest open questions that you're trying to answer or open problems you're trying to solve?
[00:34:22.753] Shirang Biswas: So I would say it's more like artistic explorations rather than questions. So the big one that spurred me was, can a sex act... We know that sex acts represent other things, right? We know that sex between two people isn't always about, I am madly in love with you and you are madly in love with me and we're consummating a beautiful, wonderful relationship. I don't think it needs to be that all the time, right? I've had sex with like, we're friends. Oh, we're having a good time, you know? And without the like deep spiritual connection. So we know that sex can mean lots of things. And so my vision is, can sex mean things that we don't expect it to mean? Like, can we layer other narratives onto sex acts? That's something that we're doing with my game, for example. Other designers have other things. So my co-designer is going to put a game where you touch bodies and layer fictions onto those bodies, right? So like you touch each other and then describe fictional landscapes that that body represents. And to me, One of the things that game can comment on is about the fictions we already layer onto our bodies, like I am fat, I am too skinny, I am too brown, or this is a body that is too masculine, I would like it to be feminine. You know, these like metaphors, fictions, ideas we layer onto our own bodies. So that is a quest that someone else is talking about. So yeah, I think to generalize maybe is about can we Can we use a sex act to mean other things or can we talk about sex in a way that's deeper, more experiential, but is not actually done while having sex, which many of the games are, right? They're talking about things, but you don't have sex in the game. You do other things. You're like clapping hands or whatever. But can we talk about in an immersive, experiential way these issues with someone who I may or may not want to actually have sex with?
[00:36:12.381] Kent Bye: Well, as we've been having this conversation, it's been really striking to me to think about games and the artistic expression that happens, but also the definition that you talked about. Indiecade has a very open, liberal definition. How do you define what is a game?
[00:36:27.894] Shirang Biswas: Okay, that's like a huge question, right? So we have everything from like Sid Meier has opened like a series of interesting choices, right? Which is what he says a game is. And then we have Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, who I think are both here. They're like very definition of the book about quantifiable outcome, things like that. So it's very broad. I always ask my students this, and I'm like, which do you think is a game? And then I'm like, do you think I chose to make something for dinner? Is that a game? It is a series of interesting choices. Or, oh, with the more rigid definition, would you say XYZ is not a game? So rather than defining, because I think that's a question left for the academics, I'm semi-academic, I would say, and ultimately maybe a little bit moot. I would say characterizing the features is a more interesting exercise for me. So something that, things that interest me a lot in games are about procedure, right? For me, what's interesting in the game is I am taking action and the actions convey meaning. So I may, a painting is a visual thing. I look at it and the visuals convey meaning. A piece of food could convey meaning through its like scent and taste. A song conveys meaning through the words or the music. So similarly, what I'm interested in is how a game conveys meaning, and that could be learning. We're in Games4Change. It could be learning, it could just be story, it could be artistic intent, it could be emotion. How a game conveys meaning through the process of doing something. So for me, what's less intellectually important is not like playing a video game. I love video games, but like the graphics and the sound design of the video game are less intellectually interesting to my practice than the actions you are taking within the video game. That's not to say I don't value graphics and sound. A, I like a game with good graphics and good music, and B, I think they are very important in conveying meaning and aesthetic. But in my artistic and intellectual practice, I'm currently very interested in what the processes within the game do less so what the fact that that is a pretty castle or I mean even very strikingly rhetorical things like there's a great article about the color purple in Dark Souls I read on Kill Screen and talking about what can that rhetoric be. That's super interesting but my practice is less on that more about what actions you take and what do those represent. There was a great talk at the conference I was just at Nariscope where someone very simply said What you choose to reward and punish in a game makes a political argument about what the game designer values. And those kinds of questions about processes are what I'm very interested in currently.
[00:39:08.039] Kent Bye: Fascinating. Yeah, I've been taking much more phenomenological turn as well in terms of looking at the qualities of presence, the context that you have, the character of that experience, but also how it changes over time. And so you have like the mental and social presence, active presence, so the making choices, taking action, but the immersive experiences, you also have like your sense of embodied presence and sense of an environment and your sensory experience on top of the emotional Engagement that you have so you have the different qualities the experience and then the context you know in this we've been talking about sex and sex is a specific context and but you're talking about sex and games and so but there's also Your home and your relationships and your family and your career and so there's different Contexts that each game is setting a certain context by the world but there's how it's connected to the larger world and the language and the culture and Context, I think, is really difficult to pin down all the different dimensions of context. But the character is like, for me, there's different aspects of your will, your mind, your beauty, faith, justice. There's different dimensions there. And then finally, how it changes over time. And so there's some sort of process that's unfolding. So for me, I see that there's like the quality, the context, the character, and then the story that happens.
[00:40:21.381] Shirang Biswas: Yeah, I think, I mean, content is important, right? And one of the things that games do is they allow you to explore a context at a certain level that you can't normally explore, right? So Just Little Loving, which I've talked about ad nauseum, perhaps, puts you in this context of this, like, AIDS-ravaging society and this unknown danger and how to deal with that. not to say that you can play the game and come out being like, I know all about AIDS, aha, that's not true at all, but does like to explore kind of the emotions of that context. And that's like, like LARP, which I've talked with you about before, is a lot about putting you in a context you don't know. And how do you react in that in that context? So I might argue that that is what many games or that nearly all games try and do in a certain or at least all game which have a narrative and a setting try and do at a certain level.
[00:41:07.112] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive experiences are and what they might be able to enable?
[00:41:15.202] Shirang Biswas: So there's a lot of talk right now about empathy and sympathy in immersive experiences and how you can put yourself in other people's shoes. I think that's pretty cool, though, again, to underline that you will never fully put yourself in their shoes because you are not them and you have not gone through the real experiences. Me feeling danger in a game is very different from me feeling danger in real life, for example, right? So that's empathy and sympathy, but like tempered empathy and sympathy. Another thing, however, is it does allow you to explore yourself a bit more, right? It allows you to explore what do I think about these contexts and issues in a way that's different from when I just read about it or watch it or talk about it. Because embodying, like embodied embodiment, does tricky weird stuff to your brain. So, like, I think it allows some self-exploration about, like, what do I feel in this context? What do I feel here? Which is cool. Also, at a superficial level, it's really fun to play act. Everyone does it when they're young. We just stopped doing it because we're older. And so, like, the, like, fun or entertainment context of it is very powerful, where you can feel very immersed within an experience by actually physicalizing and vocalizing it with real meatspace people and not just in a digital space.
[00:42:29.881] Kent Bye: Great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:42:34.345] Shirang Biswas: Yeah. So I would say challenge what you think a game or immersive experience can be. Think about topics that aren't often talked about. There was a great talk today that was like, we should and can talk about serious topics, but we do have a responsibility to our players. And that's why we're paying attention to having chapters on safety and thinking about that. So think about challenging issues. Think about how you can represent them with other media rather than just writing or film or whatever. And as always, support indie designers, because they are the ones making the groundbreaking things. Buy their work. Look up their work. Share their work. Yeah, indie designers are really cool.
[00:43:09.067] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me and exploring all these topics. And yeah, just exciting to see where this all goes. So thank you so much.
[00:43:16.678] Shirang Biswas: Thank you so much. I might have scandalized some people here at Games4Change talking really loudly in the open about this, but thank you again for having me for a second time, because it was really cool, and I'm glad I squinted at you from a distance yesterday, and I'm like, I think I know that person. So, yeah. Awesome. Great.
[00:43:32.224] Kent Bye: Thank you. So, that was Charang Biswas. He's an artist, game designer, and writer, and we were talking at the Games4Change conference and about his erotic art games anthology that he's putting together. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, I don't know if I should have given it a little bit more of a content warning at the very beginning of this. We're talking about different taboo topics, and this is very provocative, you know, to start to use different aspects of sex and sex acts as gameplay mechanics. The thing I love about this conversation, though, is that it's trying to abstract different aspects of what does it mean to have a game? And what Sharang is saying is that there's certain verbs that you do in this magic circle, in this game-like environment, and those acts are actually referring to something that's larger. And so in a video game, you're pressing a button, but those buttons are representing different hacks that you're committing within that game experience. Within a basketball game, you know, you shoot a ball through a hoop, but that shooting the ball through a hoop has a score and that is symbolically reflected into this larger rule structure of ways that that game is played. Can you start to use different sexual acts as a whole gameplay mechanic? Can you start to overlay other narratives on top of these existing acts that we do in a more embodied way? So getting away from these abstractions of video games that have mostly used pushing buttons to be able to have a virtual representation in these virtual worlds, but can you actually have dynamics that are created within a specific context to be able to create a game out of it, but to have that game be addressing different aspects of a deeper aspect of your identity around how you identify sexually? and other aspects of abortion and gender and asexuality, you know, whole other topics that are going to be having it. It sounds like they're going to have about eight different games. And the other big thing is that he's got what he says a pretty reputable role playing game publisher, the Pilgrim Press, who published the hashtag feminism LARP series about feminism. You know, that they're going to be standing behind this, of these erotic art indie games as a way to say, you know, this is now entered into legitimate way of having games around for the first place, but also to bring about different discussion. This was a grant that came from the Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity to be able to try to instill these different types of games, to be able to bring about a larger awareness about some of these different topics. Now, the actual mechanics of this game, to me, it seems like such a far reaching thing to imagine what context would people be in to play a game like this. And I feel like that is something that is a bit of a reflective of the taboo of the culture of this moment in time. I can imagine projecting out 50 or 100 years from now, or people just maybe they are playing these types of games all the time and that they'll be looking back on this time as like, you know, how strange it was that we had such a taboo way of even talking about sexuality. And so there's this deeper point of looking at the taboos of the society and trying to push against those taboos to be able to have media and art and games that are trying to play with those taboos. Maybe it's the people who are already on board of sex positivity that are playing these games, but they're creating a broader culture to be able to have experiences that they can then talk about. And then maybe there's this kind of rippling out effect where obviously you're not going to take a game like this that is this edgy and take it to people who are completely against sex as being a positive thing. And I think there's this deeper issue that I think Sharang was talking about is that there are so many issues around violence and sexual violence for people's sexuality and gender expression that because sexuality is such a taboo part of our culture that they're not either educated about or talked about, then that results in different acts of violence on people in the world. And so how can there be a broader culture that's being created through games like this to be able to bring about a larger change? It was quite interesting, I think, to think about the theory for change for what does this mean for this to exist? What does it mean for people to do these different types of games that are exploring these different things? And I think it's part of a reflection of the culture. If it seems completely outrageous that this would even be a possibility, then I think that's just a reflection of the taboo barriers of our society. And I think part of what the broader XR for Change is trying to do is try to address those taboos and try to break them down in different ways. So I'm super curious to see how this plays out. It was a fun conversation for me to have just because it was, you know, like, how is this a game again? And how is there a broader context that's going to be set? And it sounds like there's a lot of really interesting people. The creator of Consenticle, Naomi Clark, is going to be setting a broader context of writing an introduction chapter to be able to set a broader context for these games. Then Maury Elizabeth Brown, the creator of the New World Majuscula, is going to be writing a chapter on safety and consent. So just the different aspects of what are the best practices, the protocol for addressing these different aspects of sexuality within these game-like environments. I think it's going to start with an indie game, but there's a number of different experiences also within virtual reality itself where they're starting to explore different aspects of sexuality, but they're obviously not allowed on the Oculus Store. But they're allowed on Steam, and they're allowed to potentially have WebVR experiences. And so there's some other experiences that I've covered as well that start to explore different aspects of sex and sexuality and sex positivity that I hope to dive into here in the future as well. But yeah, I'm excited to see where this all goes and to kind of break down the different aspects of games for change and how it could be applied to many other different aspects of our society as well. So that's all that I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener supported podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
