The creator behind the best sex games talks art, intimacy, and gay culture

Every day of Pride Month, Mashable will be sharing illuminating conversations with members of the LGBTQ community who are making history right now.

It might sound reductive or even eking on offensive, but in his own words, Robert Yang makes “obscenely gay” art games.

By design, the homosexuality drips off the screen in his most well-known games, played by millions despite being indie, NSFW, and often banned by platforms like Twitch. Whether it’s a game about “pleasuring a gay car” or a simulation of historic police entrapments targeting gay men in public bathrooms (but replacing penises with flesh-colored guns in an attempt to circumvent the Twitch ban), Yang’s work balances the seriousness of its subject matter with a joyousness of play and humor, never sacrificing depth in the process. 

It’s a disservice to diminish Yang to a single niche. The New York University Game Center professor also makes more meditative and strictly academic games, like the Borges-inspired Intimate, Infinite or an Emily Dickinson experiment titled Much Madness.

What makes Yang’s work such a testament to the medium as an art form, though, is how he captures the beautiful, honest awkwardness of our naked selves. While mainstream games champion hyper-idealized heternormative power fantasies, Yang reveals how limiting that is by exploring the experiences of those the power fantasies leave out.

Through games that are extra as hell, he shows the pride in being loudly visible in spaces that don’t make room for you. 

The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

Mashable: Tell me your origin story with games — how did your relationship to games first begin then turn into a vocation? What made you want to start creating games about intimacy and gay experiences?

Robert Yang: I grew up modding my favorite video games like Starcraft or Half-Life. I also grew up gay and closeted. When I started coming out in college, I wondered why those two parts of my life were separate. There were so many books, films, and YouTube compilations of German soap operas to help me make sense of my sexuality (my favorite gay soap storyline was in Verbotene Liebe) yet there were very few video games about young gay people trying to figure out their shit. 

Then I realized I could make those mods and games and stories myself; this was paired with the sobering realization that this work would make me basically unemployable in the AAA game industry because it was “too weird.” Even today, I am now pigeon-holed as “that guy who makes the weird gay sex games.” Even if it’s a fabulous thing, who wants to be reduced to just one thing? But I think I’m coming to peace with that. If I’m stuck in the pigeon hole, that means no one else will get crammed into it. I’ll hold the door open for everyone after me.

Mashable: From your perspective, what about video games makes them uniquely equipped for explorations of intimacy and LGBTQ experiences? Why is there such a strong community of queer creators in games, despite the industry’s obvious homophobia?

RY: Haha um I think I don’t agree with the premise here … right now, video games are NOT uniquely equipped for intimacy or LGBTQ experiences. Game culture is still a hostile environment for LGBTQ experience in so many ways. Every major internet platform is policing sex and queerness; Steam and Itch.io are definitely rare storefront platforms that tolerate sexuality, but what’s the point if Tumblr, YouTube, and Twitch oppress us to ensure we have no audience or community? Why should any game journalist or streamer cover us, when the main thing that gets them viewers is Fortnite and regurgitated AAA PR announcements? There’s no oxygen left in the room.

And that’s even if you manage to make and finish a game! Making a game about intimacy is still really difficult and experimental. Game developers have decades of research and resources for how to put a gun in a game, how to make the gun feel accurate and fun to shoot, etc. But comparatively we have very little history or context for making games about gay cuddling. How would you even do that, what are the patterns and design conventions here? 

Queer creators are on the forefront of researching these design problems, because the industry certainly won’t invest in it. That bright future of cuddling games is possible only if we support and fund brilliant queer folks like Heather Flowers, Ryan Rose Aceae, Mitch Alexander, Hien Pham — otherwise, like a lot of creatives in 2019, eventually we all just burn out.

Mashable: Do you see your games (and others like it) as a form of activism? What role can games play in furthering LGBTQ rights, representations, etc?

RY: I’m really against the idea of the “empathy simulator” — the tech industry’s desperate attempt to sell VR headsets as a way to experience other peoples’ lives. My games are not, and never will be, “gay simulators” or ways for straight people to know what being gay is like, because a video game alone cannot possibly convey that experience. If this stuff is to have any activist function at all, it’s more about a basic level of representation, awareness, and political conversation. A game can help you identify blind spots or broaden your horizons, but it’s still up to you to fill in that gap and do something.

But honestly, we’re still a long way away from that kind of literacy about games. We still have many game industry veterans who think their video games have no politics or ideological assumptions.

Mashable: I love how you embed real-world stats on anti-LGBTQ violence and race into the coding of your games, like in Tearoom. Why is that important to you?

RY: I like playing with the idea of simulation. In terms of game balance, what’s the difference between a 43 percent probability, or a 43.253 percent probability sourced from an anti-discrimination study? The difference is conceptual. 0.253 percent doesn’t change the behavior of the simulation in a significant way, but it does change what it all means. A statistic has politics that reach outside of the game code, like a ghost in the machine. More games should seek to haunt us.

Mashable: What are some of your grounding principles for translating intimacy and sex into the rules and systems of a game (like, for example, consent?)

RY: I start with some sort of core idea, and then think about how consent emerges from that. If consent should be negotiated, how do we simulate a negotiation in a game — should the player try different options at different times to see what the game’s submissive agrees to do with you (like in my game Hurt Me Plenty), or maybe technological consent takes the form of a EULA [End User License Agreement — like those pesky iTunes Terms of Service] that you click through without reading (like in Cobra Club). In my upcoming game Macho Cam, consent is a deck of cards that you construct, symbolizing the things you are willing to do for money. 

Consent is the foundation of intimacy, consent is what makes sex sexy. Foreplay, seduction, someone begging you for more, marginalized people understanding how society will punish them for their intimacy but bravely defying society anyway — and consent is also the foundation of games and play, because every game requires willing players.

Mashable: Of course they’re much more than just this, but many of your games are characterized by a wonderfully freeing, unapologetic, in-your-face Gayness with a capital G. It’s not dissimilar to what some folks love about Pride parades. Why is that so central to your work?

RY: LGBTQ people are often told that we’ll be tolerated if we hide our gender and sexuality and bodies behind closed doors. OK, so we did that in sex shops, theaters, clubs, and bars, with these nice big doors. But nope. The police still raided and shut these places down. I guess Stonewall didn’t have the right kind of door, and LGBTQ people weren’t the right kind of public! 

This history teaches us not to trust society’s false promise of respectable privacy, because they will always change what they mean by public or private. That’s why respectability politics is a trap, and that’s why public sexuality will always be necessary at Pride. Leather queens making out in the street is also what convinces a “normal” monogamous tax-paying gay couple that it’s safe enough to hold hands on the sidewalk.

Mashable: You’ve had issues with Twitch banning your games, too. Then Tumblr went anti-sex, affecting part of Cobra Club. What do you make of these bans and other negative reactions to the sexuality in your games?

RY: If we hide our sexuality, that means straight people define what our sexuality means. 

Take Twitch: When they ban games, it’s a punishment usually reserved for creepy child porn or rape simulator games. So when they also ban my games about consensually spanking a man or consensually showering with another dude, that equivalent treatment sends a message: Twitch is saying that gay men are basically rapists. I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty damn homophobic to me. 

Instead of banning my games, what if Twitch moderated my games with the adult content controls that are ALREADY BUILT INTO THEIR WEBSITE? We’ll never know, because Twitch refuses to explain why they banned my gay games, or what they’d want from me in the future. 

So my message for the LGBTQ community is this: Don’t let tech companies like Twitch wave rainbow flags while pushing homophobic, sexphobic policies. These companies want more control over the internet and our lives, but none of the responsibility or ethical questioning. It’s 2019, so many of us live and work on the internet now. This matters. Don’t let them get away with it.

Mashable: Sex in mainstream games is, well, lacking. Queer representation is nearly non-existent. What do you see as the industry’s most common mistakes or issues when it comes to representation of sex, intimacy, and/or queerness? Are you hopeful for the future?

RY: In mainstream commercial video games, sex is when you fade to black. Sex is a point in time, but just a brief point. My games do something basic: They dedicate actual space and time to sex, and depict sex with duration. You spend time doing sex. Even a teenage sex comedy movie understands that masturbation takes time, and that’s where it finds humor. We don’t even have the equivalent of teenage sex comedies in video games. Or look at Fifty Shades of Grey which was some kinda basic erotica, and so many people loved it. The world is so thirsty for thirst, so desirous of desire, and gamers are willing to settle for the 5 minutes of sexual situations allotted in a 50-hour Bioware RPG? Look at that untapped market, look at that blue ocean. What if, gasp, we just made games that let the sex marinate and breathe?

So much of the commercial game industry is ruled by fear. Everyone copies each other to appease scary investors who demand huge unrealistic returns. It’s also no accident that the audience for romantic or erotic work is mostly women, and the straight men in charge of the game industry ultimately want to keep video games for the boys. Again, fear is powerful. To preserve their world, they must destroy every other world.

Sexuality, intimacy, and queerness, can only thrive when we have “a room of our own” AND when we’re not locked in that room, you know? For now, I guess I’ll fight to preserve that possibility of another world, and wait for a hero.

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