Kiss Me, Touch Me, Make Me Blush: Conveying sex through gameplay in Luxuria Superbia

(This piece was originally written in the April of 2015)

In the last couple of decades, the framing and representation of sexual themes in the video games has been thoroughly analysed by mainstream publications and academics alike, often finding those themes approached quite clumsily by the video game industry. Particularly relevant to the analysis of how these sexual themes are treated in the video game medium are the two relatively recent papers: “The Strange Case of the Misappearance of Sex in Videogames” (Krzywinska, 2012) by Tanya Krzywinska and the subsequent “No Sex Please, We are Finite State Machines: On the melancholy sexlessness of the video game” (Gallagher, 2012), by Rob Gallagher. These two papers analysed games such as Mass Effect (Hudson, 2007) and No More Heroes (Suda, 2008) in search of recurring tendencies with which video games approach sexuality. What Krzywinska and Gallagher find is an industry with almost all-compassing tendencies for which, when not avoided, sexuality is constantly treated with a juvenile or pornographic attitude.

While those analyses mostly looked at games in the “mainstream” spectrum, the wave of independent productions that hit the gaming world since the latter half of the last decade has allowed plenty of game auteurs to try to subvert those tropes. Helped by the profoundly different production methods and demographic targeting behind indie productions (Martin and Deuze, 2009) designers like Tale of Tales and Anna Anthropy started releasing thoughtful and interesting games, expressing a vision of sexuality that seems almost radically opposite to the one prominent in video games. While these singular cases are certainly not enough to overthrow the overall tendencies that academics like Krzywinska reported in their studies; the products that try to subvert those tendencies are definitively worth taking a look at. This is exactly what this paper will try to do, by looking at the emblematic case of Tale of Tales’ Luxuria Superbia (a game released in 2013, completely focused on portraying the sexual act through abstract environments) by using Krzywinska’s and Gallagher’s articles as summarizations of the tropes that the game tries to subvert.

Luxuria Superbia will be approached through Consalvo and Dutton frameworks of “game log” and “interaction map” (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006). The results will be then compared and contrasted with Krzywinska and Gallagher research to find what exactly are the tropes that the game subverts and understand how such a different way of representing sexuality can be functional in the video game medium.

Analysing games like Luxuria Superbia is not only useful as an example of how the new influx of game developers brought by the “indie scene” has led to the creation of sub-scenes that actively try to defy the tropes that the video game industry has perpetuated through its history. Dissecting and praising video games that manage to represent sexuality without falling in the pitfalls outlined by Krzywinska and Gallagher is also essential to show how the ludic medium is effectively capable of tackling such subject and to give future designers a thorough analysis on how that could be done.

METHODS

The focus of this paper is to show how Luxuria Superbia manages to approach the topic of sexuality without falling into the problems highlighted by Krynwiska and Gallagher and how it does in fact purposefully subvert those tendencies. To do so I approached the game through Consalvo and Dutton’s analytical frameworks of “Game Log” and “Interaction Map” (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006).

Using an “interaction map” implies closely looking at the game’s interactive system and “mapping” the rules and the interactions possible to the player. This is extremely useful to look at the themes underlying in the interactive system and the recurring meanings conveyed procedurally (Bogost, 2008). The interaction map is then paired with a playthrough of the game that approaches it through the “Game Log” method.

Doing a “Game Log” means playing the game while asking oneself a set of specific questions, as for example:

“Does the game fit a certain genre? Does it defy its stated genre? How and why?” (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006)

This approach is used to evaluate the emergent aspects of a game and to look at how all its elements come together to communicate meaning (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006). A game log is also an extremely handy method for readings that focus on a particular aspect of the game, as it allows us to engage the game by questioning specific themes or elements of it. In my case, while playing Luxuria Superbia I asked myself questions regarding Krzywinska and Gallagher’s findings, as:

• “How is sexuality aesthetically represented in the game?”
• “What’s the objective of the game? How does it relate to the sexual themes?”
• “How does the game communicate sexuality through its interactive system?”

and so on.

After having looked at the game through a game log and an interaction map, I then proceed to compare my findings with the tendency highlighted by Krzywinska and Gallagher, to pinpoint exactly how Luxuria Superbia subverts them.

THE GAME

Luxuria Superbia, designed and developed by the Belgian game studio Tale of Tales, was originally distributed on tablet devices in 2013 and subsequently converted for a digital download release on PC (through the Steam and Humble Store platforms).

The Tale of Tales website describes the game as:

“[…] a colorful, musical journey made to fill you with joy” (Samyn and Harvey, 2013)

The ludic architecture of the game, while sharing some elements with tunnel shooters like Tempest (Theurer, 1981) does not really fit tightly in any widespread game genre. While some mechanics, like the automatic advancement of the player through a tunnel and the necessity to aim at objects on the surface of said tunnel, make the game slightly similar to the aforementioned genre of tunnel shooters, the lack of any mechanics actually involving “shooting” at things and the absence of a player avatar, make the twelve levels of Luxuria Superbia an extremely unique experience.

The core mechanic of the game revolves around the player having to “touch” blossoms that appear as they proceed through the various tunnels that make the game. The act of “touching” them (actually touching them in the iPad version, moving a pointer onto them in the PC version) will cause them to bloom into colourful shapes. This will both increase the player’s score and fill the sides of the screen with a bit of colour (the colour decreases with time as long as the player is not touching any blossoms). When the screen is fully coloured the game will end.

The final objectives are to touch a high number of flowers, scoring, therefore, points, and to make the game end as late as possible. To accomplish this the player has to balance their interaction, touching blossoms when the screen is not coloured to then wait for the colour to “decrease” in that zone of the screen. As each game progresses touching blossoms will both earn more points to the player and fill the screen with more colour, this will cause a gradual increase in the “rhythm” of the player’s interactions.

Differently, from most games that approach sexuality, Luxuria Superbia does not deal with the subject through realistic visual representations of the act. The graphics are colourful and abstract, suggesting the sexual act but leaving the mechanics to actually represent it.

Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey, the minds behind the Tale of Tales studio, say about the development of the game:

“The initial idea came to us during a roundtable session led by Brenda Romero on the subject of sex in videogames at the Game Developers Conference. While most of the discussion focused on issues of depiction, we started thinking about it differently: instead of showing naked bodies in the act, we wanted to model the interaction with a game mechanic on the experience of pleasure. […] This idea was something we developed and expanded upon during a long research and prototyping project codenamed Cncntrc […] So we decided to make multiple games based on this research. Luxuria Superbia is the first one. As a first game, we wanted it to be simple and easy to enjoy.” (Samyn and Harvey, 2013)

Already from this short fragment of interview, we can see the intention behind the game: exploring new ways to deal with the representation of sex using the ludic medium (Krzywinska, 2012).

THE SUBVERSION

Naturally, looking at how Luxuria Superbia subverts the “avoidance” of sexual themes common in video games (Krzywinska, 2012) would not take us far, since the whole game is entirely based around the sexual act and obviously does not ignore it. Therefore, in this paper we will focus on talking about the games that do deal with sex analysed in Krzywinska’s paper, comparing them to the way in which Luxuria Superbia deals with sex.

In “The Strange Case of the Misappearance of Sex in Videogames” Krzywinska divides the way in which games approach sexuality in two “spheres”: The “representational sphere”, meaning the aesthetic and narrative ways with which video games convey the concept of sex, and the “the sphere of mechanics”, relating more closely to how sexuality is represented in the rule system of the game.

Looking at the “representational sphere”, the first commonality found by Krzywinska among sexual representations in games is the heavy use of sexualized body forms to accentuate sexuality. Those visual tropes are easily associable with a type of aesthetics often found in pornographic media: huge muscles for male characters, big breasts for female characters (Krzywinska, 2012). Already here we can see Samyn’s and Harvey’s desire to subvert the common tropes of sex in media. Luxuria Superbia in fact completely lacks this hyper-sexualized representation of bodies “based on patriarchal ideas of what the “feminine” should be” (Hamilton, 1997), and substitutes it with colourful metaphorical graphics that try to connect the sexual with the mystic (Samyn and Harvey, 2013). Visually the game stretches the further as possible from “graphical” representations of sex, mixing instead simple visuals based on flowers and plants, and elements taken directly from the architecture of cathedrals and temples (Samyn and Harvey, 2013).

Interestingly, unlike games like Mass Effect, Luxuria Superbia does not borrow from cinematic language to represent the sexual act (Krzywinska, 2012), but instead builds its own language by fully utilizing the ludic medium and the interactive dimension. This brings us to the second “sphere” that “The Strange Case of the Misappearance of Sex in Videogames” looks at the sphere of mechanics (Krzywinska, 2012).

Krzywinska identifies two types of mechanical representation of sex in video games: Sex used as a reward and sex represented through management style gameplay (Krzywinska, 2012). Once again, Luxuria Superbia does not really fit in any of those two categories.

As it may seem obvious the ludic structure of Luxuria Superbia does not use sexuality as a mere reward, trying instead to make it the core of the game. To achieve so the gameplay is thoroughly designed to reject the calm and controlled approach (Krzywinska, 2012) of games like Playboy: The Mansion (Brathwaite and Spaulding, 2005) and 7 Sins (Depotte, 2005), focusing instead in delivering a passionate and joyful experience. This approach is extremely interesting in its rejection of most structural conventions of objective-driven games. While the game has a score that defines “how good” the player did in each level, there is no real reward for getting good scores. The game tries instead to deliver an experience in which the main driving force is the enjoyment of the experience itself, rather than any meta-ludic need to “complete” the game (Samyn and Harvey, 2013).

The act of sex is represented not only through the visuals and through some quirky innuendos but, as mentioned, through the mechanic themselves. While the progression through the tunnel is the more obviously sexually suggestive mechanic, the most interesting and important part of the game is its core gameplay: the need for the player to balance their picking of flowers with the letting of the coloured area decrease. In short, the core mechanic of the game forces the player to balance the pleasure of the two sexual partners. This, beside subverting the male-centric representation of sexual content in media (Hamilton, 1997), also seems a reaction to the “power fantasy” one-sided approach thoroughly described by Gallagher in his “No Sex Please, We are Finite State Machines: On the melancholy sexlessness of the video game” (Gallagher, 2012). Sex is not framed as

“a simulation system where our customer’s needs are fulfilled 100%” (Brathwaite, 2007), but as an act in which the satisfaction of both parts is needed to obtain true “success”.

THE GRASSHOPPER

When looking at Krzywinska’s description of games that, while focusing on sexual themes, use sex exclusively as a reward (Krzywinska, 2012), it is interesting to notice how this is an approach that

could be easily connected to Bernard Suits’ discussion on sex and game inside his “The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia” (Suits, 1978).

In his book Suits states that games are defined by the choice of pursuing an objective using wilfully limited and unpractical methods defined by rules, concluding then that in a game “playing the game” is more important than the goal itself. In defining the concept of “games” he also touches on the distinction between games and sex, affirming that the latter cannot be a game as the orgasm is an objective inevitably more important than the “playing” itself (Suits, 1978).

Interestingly enough Luxuria Superbia defies this vision of sexuality, framing orgasm as a neutral

“end mechanic” which does not represent neither a lose condition nor a win condition. Admittedly, Luxuria Superbia does not even entirely fit in Suits’ definition of game and the application of such definition to digital games is still a discussed topic.

Despite the relative controversiality of using Suits theories as an all-compassing approach to video games, it does ties quite well into some of Krzywinska’s observations. In the specific, when looking at games that merely use sex as a reward, Krzywinska notes that fruition-wise they end up falling more in a realm of “static” pornography (Krzywinska, 2012). This can be easily connected with the fact that, by putting such emphasis on the “reward”, those games create experiences in which the objective is much more important than “the playing”, going directly against Suits definition of games and creating products that are overall not very ludically effective.

THE LIBIDINAL ECONOMY

The interesting elements that can be noticed in Luxuria Superbia when approaching it through Krizwinska studies do not end in the connection with Suits’ theories. In fact, the approach to interactive representation of the sexual act used by Luxuria Superbia, seems to take the concepts analysed by “The Strange Case of the Misappearance of Sex in Videogames” chapter on “libidinal economies” and apply them in a game characterized by straightforwardly sexual themes.

“Actions in games are ciphers or metonyms, not full acts as would be the case in the real world, but instead actions made more potent by imagination. Prompted by physical actions and the events on screen, the player conjures from memory and imagination what it feels like to be doing that action. The libidinal economy of game is then, in part, dependent on a creative act by the player.” (Krzywinska, 2012)

This description seems to be incredibly fitting for Luxuria Superbia’s abstract approach to the sexual. As we have noted, the game does not base itself on direct reproduction of the act, but rather on visual and kinaesthetical hints, that aim more at reproducing a visceral sense of sexuality than at directly showing the sexual act.

The pace with which Luxuria Superbia’s gameplay progresses, driving the player to alternate “scoring points” and “releasing”, fits perfectly Blackburn’s definition of lust referenced by Krzywinska of ‘anticipation of pleasure’ and ‘pursuit of rapture’ (2014, Blackburn). But the parallel does not stop here, as Luxuria Superbia seems to implement all the elements that Krzywinska pinpoints as implicitly sexual in non-sexual games (Krzywinska, 2012). The game goes from the textual exclamation highlighting the player’s best “moves” (here even more sexual, as phrases like “So Good” or “You are mine I am yours” appear as the player’s score rises) up to borrowing from Bejeweled (Kapalka, 2001) suggestive “orgasmic” explosions, that follow each blooming flower.

Krizwinska continues her analysis of sexuality in non-sexual games by defining what she calls “libidinal economy”

“But rules are not the only game in town; games are more than these, and when addressing the erotics of play, we have to take into account not simply rules as procedural elements of the game but more generally as part of a ‘libidinal’ economy […]a great deal of the pleasures of playing digital games is had by the sensations and rewards associated with becoming a more skilful, prudently responsive player […]‘doing’ in a game becomes libidinally coloured.” (Krzywinska, 2012)

She then uses Assassin’s Creed (Désilets, 2007) as an example, pointing out how the player slowly starts relating with Altair’s (the protagonist of the game) grace and agility as they become better at playing the game, and how this interplay of player controlled kinesthetic, made of silent stabbings and ballet-like fighting, ends up becoming somewhat sexually charged.

Luxuria Superbia also uses its version of libidinal economy. While the game does not rely on realistic motion capture, like Assassin’s Creed, the penetrating movement of the tunnels the player explores and the turning motions they execute (either with their fingers or with the game pad) definitely have a heavy sexual connotation. In addition, just like in Assassin’s Creed, as the player starts becoming more confident with the game system, the scoring mechanism and the controls, those circular motions become more and more graceful, and the hypnotic rhythm of “touch and release” becomes a quite beautiful and libidinally charged experience.

In this regards the ludic operation that Samyn and Harvey have executed is quite impressive, creating an explicitly sexual game by patching together a number of implicitly sexual aspects of nonsexual games. The result is a game that manages to express sexual themes without an over-reliance on narrative or visuals, but focusing instead on a purely interactive approach to the concept.

THE PLAYER

As Mia Consalvo’s “Hot Dates and Fairy Tale Romances: Studying Sexuality in Video Games” suggests, an essential thing to establish, when analyzing the portrayal of sex in a video game, is the kind of perspective that the game is presented through. Pinpointing this is especially important because it allows us to determine what kind of player identification the game will induce in different types of players, thus knowing how those players will interface themselves with the game (Consalvo, 2003).

While most of the games analysed by Consalvo in her paper are centered around the player controlling definite human figures and looking at them through some kind of third-person perspective, Luxuria Superbia is different in this regard, given its purely abstract nature. In Luxuria Superbia the player does not interact through a human-like avatar, in fact, there is no true avatar to represent an in-game version of the player. The perspective of the game, in fact, implies a perfect coincidence of the “in-game player” and the “physical player”, with the player-game interactions happening directly, either through a touch interface (iPad version) or the two analog sticks (PC version).

This difference between the games analysed by Consalvo (in particular Final Fantasy IX (Ito, 2000)) and Luxuria Superbia means that the “love triangle” structure pinpointed by Consalvo in the formers is not applicable in our analysis of the latter. Rather than giving to the player characters with which to identify, Luxuria Superbia uses the innate capabilities of the video game medium to build a one on one relationship between the machine and the player. This meta-textuality of the player’s identity is emphasized even more by the straightforwardness of the touch interface (used, as mentioned, in the original tablet release of the game), which truly removes any layer of separation between the player and the machine.

Admittedly, if this “direct” approach would have been handled poorly it might have ended up truly problematic in terms of gender identity, forcing, for example, a homosexual player to directly perform heterosexual sex. Luxuria Superbia though manages to successfully circumvent that pitfall by using the abstract nature of its aesthetic to its advantage, making the game in fact quite androgynous in its approach to sex.

While at a first glance the tunnel imagery could suggest very specific situations, we have already established that the true communicative core of the game are in fact its mechanics. So it’s interesting to notice how, when looking closely at the mechanic, it is impossible to find any statement about the gender of either the player or the machine. Sure, there is a natural implication that the player is the “active” part in the act, while the machine is in a “passive” role, but that really does not seem enough to clearly define the gender of both participants.

This makes it clear how the game does not want to be a “graphic” representation of a single sexual act, but rather a conceptualization and celebration of the concept of sex in its wider spectrum, allowing everyone to relate its own experience to the game.

CONCLUSIONS

After having looked at Luxuria Superbia through the lens that Krzywinska and Gallagher’s papers it is possible to conclude that the game’s subversion of sexual tropes typical to video games is not just an act of “rebellion”, but a genuine attempt at finding ways in which sexuality can be healthily represented in the video game medium.

Samyn and Harvey in this game entirely reject communicating through the “representational” sphere, rather deciding to communicate the theme of sexuality entirely through a suggestive ludic/procedural structure. This seems to be the key to how well their game works. While visual representation can be effective, shedding the game from the burdens of being a “sex simulation” allowed them to focus on authoring a personal and unique representation of sexuality, focusing on the themes of balance and “divine” beauty (which in itself a subversion from the “male power fantasy” approach that many games take to sexuality).

The design of Luxuria Superbia extrapolated the innately “sexy” elements of non-sexual video games (also identified by Krzywinska in the “Libidinal Economy” section of her paper (Krzywinska, 2012)) and repurposed them to convey a directly sexual meaning. Switching the communicative focus entirely on the core gameplay through the implementation of these concepts of libidinal economy, allowed Saymin and Harvey to completely remove any type of objective-oriented gameplay, fulfilling their vision of a game about sexuality entirely based on the pleasure of playing (Samyn and Harvey, 2013).

The first thing we can take away from Luxuria Superbia, is that if games often end up representing sexual themes in a problematic way it is not because of some flaw with the nature of the medium itself. A game like Luxuria Superbia, in fact, uses the interactive dimension of the video game medium at its fullest to convey sexual meanings in a reasoned and well-framed context.

While this approach seems to be the exception rather than the rule, it is certainly interesting to see how small parts of the indie scene seems to be using the artistic freedom that their business model allows, to create responses to the problematic approach toward sex of the mainstream video game market.

While there is definitely still a long road ahead before video games as a whole will begin to start treating sexual themes a bit more earnestly, looking at games like Luxuria Superbia definitely helps us raise our hopes for the future.

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