This is why you’re Lonely. (Netflix Games Review: Too Hot To Handle)

“Mix and mingle with sexy singles competing for your affection in this game based on the hit series. Will you go for love or give into temptation?”

Too Hot To Handle is a Netflix series where everyone who bullied you in high school has been captured by a selective breeding program /slash/ adult interpretation of the Stanford marshmallow experiment. If ten hotties can resist sexual contact with one another for a summer in a closed house they win $200k. I have no idea if there’s any problematic historical precedent for gathering people into a camp based on their genetic qualities then enforcing behavioural sterility because, along with the producers, I refuse to check.

How that could be a mobile game depends how far you are willing to stray from Christ.

TLDR; three hours on this game loosened my grip on love, life, and ludology.

hour (1). flesh.

I enter the game and am invited to set up my avatar. The name “Brooklyn” is proposed. Perhaps like the bridge it will take 3 years to properly clean this experience off me. After toggling hair and makeup options I am offered more inclusive characteristics — for instance, I am allowed to select to have vitiligo. I don’t personally have vitiligo. In trying this out I somehow lose my way on how to NOT have vitiligo. My character can now toggle off her neck tattoo but not her vitiligo. While cosplaying as someone with vitiligo I note I can have a skin condition but not a hijab or a waist over 25 inches. Some flavours of inclusion are more in vogue than others.

“are you sure this is how you want to save your look” it asks me. I decide to bank this question for whenever I next want to ruin someone’s day.

And with that we’re off.. induction complete, the game informs me “we hope you’re ready for a summer full of parties, kisses, and extremely hot nights”. I am sitting cross legged in sweatpants and there is an Emergency Jaffa Cake balanced on my knee. Who tf are they talking to.

—

Inside the house. I can choose my own adventure, in the same sense that a hostage in the trunk of a car is technically ‘on a roadtrip’. Conversations with NPCs let me know which of three dialogue options are sexy, flirty, safe. What I particularly enjoy is that the descriptive text has been co-authored by a romance novelist and an angry toaster. The result gives the impression that the developers had read a book about what a human might be like, but never actually encountered one. Highlights include:

“Eddie’s face pulls up into a cheeky grimace” / “You laugh and flash her your pearly whites” / “Alex turns to you putting their pearly whites on display” / “You give them a grateful smile”

I feel it’s worth pointing out that every time the text pops up “He points to the house a big grin on his face”, the image of the character remains expressionless. Spielberg’s shark gave the camera more to work with. It’s unclear what about these is too complex to animate. Maybe Andy Serkis wasn’t available.

A few interactions in and I realise my interpretation of the premise was mistaken. The objective of this game is not, as I thought, a dating fantasy wish-fulfilment. Were that the intent, the game would run into the same existential problem the show confronts (or, er, doesn’t) — that intimacy and exhibitionism are maybe not mutually exclusive but at the very least friction inducing. The show purports to help individuals forge real, one to one connections. Broadcast to the world. Privacy. At scale! The resolution of that cognitive dissonance is not particularly profound, it’s simply that the show isn’t really *for* the contestants so much as it’s providing the audience with a simulated dating environment to watch beta tests play out. We watch the success and failure of the contestants in part to gather insight into our own market value. Floating beyond the 4th wall as invisible as Adam Smith’s hand. Not to participate. To participate is to take that piggy to the market and risk being found lacking. Much easier to do when I have the cartoon washboard abs of a re-animated corpse (yes ‘animated’ is a pun. pretty clever huh. also why I’m better suited to play 2D not participate 3D).

I’m interrupted in this train of thought by the app telling me “The excitement is palpable, filling every corner with good vibes”. Ah yes, the vibes are palping. With 11 hours until sex ban I am given the option to change from one bikini to another. In for a penny eh. On changing I hear “You smile at yourself in the mirror.” My character is presented smiling at me. Am I the mirror? I’m not sure if I need a bath or an exorcism.

I ‘flirt’ with a variety of pictures of humans. The most realistic part so far is when applying sunscreen to a fellow figment they “let out a moan and say I’m really good at this”. To which my lil gal, who to her credit was born today says: “oh.. you know”. Game recognise game, that is exactly how awkward I would be. Eventually one of the drawings of abs volunteers “I think I like you faeces” (oh yep. I renamed her from Brooklyn to faeces to see if it would let me. it did.)

hour (2). aliens.

The sex ban is live. A game in which I was staring celibately at my phone has now put a sex ban on me. Effectively a ban on libraries for the illiterate. The notable advancement in flirting technology is the statistical breakdown. At the end of a lovely day in 2D sexless purgatory, you receive data on your behaviour. I was polite with Dakota, like 21% of players. But 30% boldly flirted with Dakota. And 49% wished Dakota luck on the show. I can now review the actions I took against other players to infer if they were good. But no — not ‘good’. There is no value judgment. Just the same as the other players. The game leaves me to infer that conformity would be good without explicitly stating it.

It’s not clear if this… goes anywhere. Or it’s just an anxiety fever dream to know in statistics where you stray from the norm. One thing I do know is I want to protect faeces from this. (I forget her name is faeces every time). The evasiveness of the PURPOSE of this game is maddening. I am inventing conspiracies to quiet myself. Perhaps we eliminated our natural resources, destroyed our sense of self years ago and out of a moral duty, aliens put together a tool to guide us back into breeding. Do you feel like a creature in a t̶e̶r̶r̶a̶r̶i̶u̶m̶ reality show, just a couple of pandas eyeing each other wondering why they need to be in the same cage when life is just about bamboo — isn’t it? I speak to another housemate about her dating experience. We both fail the Turing test.

The signal of progress in the game is that when you speak to someone, your response is ranked against potential witticisms and adds points to a bar of how much someone likes you. At last, all interaction can be categorized and tokenized.

Lamia, by Keats comes to mind:

… Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine —
Unweave a rainbow…

But Keats died a virgin so there you go.

That’s how love works. You earn enough points by saying the right cheat codes and ultimately those tokens can be exchanged for a partner. Alone on a beach I have surpassed said threshold. I can now go for a kiss with a partner. The kiss happens. (notably — always in title cards not visually depicted, as if we are being informed of events by a war correspondent). For such a sexual premise the game is oddly coy when it comes to sex and relies on 1930s Hollywood code*

(*Side note there’s no need for you to know this but it would be really cool if you did: the “foot pop” girls do — lifting one foot during the embrace — in old school romance movies in the ‘big final kiss’ is a wink to the censorship laws of 1930s Hollywood which prevented any woman having two feet off the floor (i.e. she’s lying down. on a bed. wink.). Filmmakers could play on this limitation by suggesting ‘what happens next’ after the kiss .. oh no.. one foot has come off the floor.. that’s edging towards TWO feet!)

hour (3). rebellion.

Where did we leave off? My avatar just kissed another (or at least I am informed they did through title cards). What happens next is surprising, given the premise of this game is rewarding abstinence. The stated rules are to abstain in order to connect, and to win my share of $200,000. The sexless shall inherit the earth. Yet. Faeces (lol) has just been rewarded for my “achievement” with points and a “charisma” bonus which I doubt is to be used tightening the buckles on my chastity belt.

This is new. The game rewards disobedience.

This is, to use the funkiest phrase, ludonarrative dissonance. The game claims want me to do one thing. But the signals I receive encourage me to do another. Imagine a GTA type which tells you the “rules of society” but gives you cash rewards for beating up old ladies. In a sense it’s obvious. The game can no more give me an actual sense of love and partnership any more than it can give me the 200k. But it can grant the thrill of disobedience. At least it has introduced some enrichment to a relatively pedestrian enclosure — (being now largely convinced that Too hot to handle is a game made by aliens and we are in their zoo). I too would find it fun to set up a monastery and then train your monks to hail satan.

I don’t know what too hot to handle is. It could be an alien-created conservation program to train humans to breed. It could be a anti-government training to identify dissidents who are most likely to forge alliances and rebel. Both are potential use cases.

But first and foremost, it is a game. A game one can play. Or can you?

“Instrumental” play was defined by Wolfgang Iser. A theorist who divided “play” into the categories of “free” and “instrumental” based on how the activity of playing corresponded to goals. Play becomes instrumental the moment it has an intended outcome, some element of rules and thus a “wrong” and “right” way to play. You cannot be bad at running around with other children simply because it feels fun in the moment. You can lose a running race. Simples.

Too Hot To Handle is not a game by either definition of play.

It’s more a crucible of ludonarrative dissonance promoting civil disobedience. There are rules but no objective. The rewards and penalties are doled out seemingly in contradiction to the point. Never has it been articulated what it would be to “win”.

I don’t know what happened but I know that I lost.

I rate it 1/4 horsemen of the apocalypse (war)