Listen to this episode here.
Our series on game mechanics centered around sex and romance continues with returning champions Alex Roberts and Sharang Biswas, and today they are talking about dicks. “The phallus.” Or more generally, physical objects. I did some episodes on physicality earlier this year and how the physicality of a game undeniably affects how it feels to play it. But Alex and Sharang go a step further, talking about how in a game you can use an object as almost a vessel for player emotions. Take a listen.
Further Reading
Tales of the Fisherman’s Wife by Julia Bond Ellingboe
The Beast by Aleksandra Sontowska
Just a Little Lovin’ by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
Let These Mermaids Touch Your Dick Maybe by Riverhouse Games
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Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
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Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. each week we take a tabletop mechanic and feel each other up on the cab ride back to our place.
My name is Sam Dewald, and this is episode three of our Dice Exploder mini series on sex, love, and romance in RPGs with returning champions, Alex Roberts and Sharang Biswas. And today they are talking about Dick's, the PHUs, or more generally objects.
I did some episodes on physicality earlier this year and how the physicality of a game undeniably affects how it feels to play it. But Alex and Sharang go a step further talking about how in a game you can use an object almost as a vessel for player emotions to project on.
Among the many games they discuss are the seminal larp, just a little loving, which as players ask each other for sex scenes by offering pink feathers. Star Cross to Alex's own game that features a Jenga tower that represents the will they won't they tension between two characters. And of course, let these mermaids touch your dick maybe, the classic game where you take turns slapping a dildo with one of those sticky hand toys from like go of a vending machine or whatever. It's physicality, phallus icality? I'll see myself out.
A couple plugs for our hosts
You can find everything Alex at. Hello alex roberts.card.co. That's card with two Rs. You can also support her on Patreon. And you buy star crossed love letters and expansion to the original star CROs now on Itch and the Bully Pulpit Games website.
And you can find Sharon on Blue Sky And you can also order his new novella The iron Below Remembers, a gay Psci fantasy book about horny superheroes, archeologists, and Mecca out now.
Thanks to everyone who supports this show on Patreon, and here is Alex Roberts and Sharang Biswas with the phallus.
Alex: Hello. Welcome back everyone. You're listening to, uh, episode three of our very special miniseries on Dice Exploder, about sex and romance in Ttrp, gs,
Sharang: Today our topic is about using physical objects. And for that uh, we're gonna start you out with not just a quote this time, but a poem.
Alex: Mm-hmm. This is other ways to have sex by Kimmy Walters. Think about touching a clean piece of velvet. Think about the small actions required to control a pencil. Think about the story you overheard where a woman was catching her daughter's vomit with one hand and driving a car with the other. Pee in a glass jar. Pee and two glass jars. Throw a suitcase full of money into the ocean with your eyes closed.
He, he.
Sharang: So that's a teaser
for our episode.
Alex: you need to know really. Uh,
Sharang: Yeah, about sex and games and objects. I mean, be fair, at least some of those I have actually heard of people doing during sex,
Right. Um, yeah.
Alex: not far off.
Sharang: I'll not admit whether or not I have,
um, was involved
in it, but I have witnessed, uh. of a pencil. Yeah.
Awesome. So we're gonna talk about objects. Uh, We're gonna talk about game mechanics that use objects. And our spotlight mechanic today is a mechanic that is becoming more common in many especially Scandinavian LARPs. And it's, it's the idea of using a phallus. Right. Using a, a dildo usually. And having players interact with the dildo, with hands and sometimes mouths to simulate and symbolize sexual activity.
And this spotlight mechanic, we're gonna, we're gonna talk a lot of it about it in, in the larp, just the loving and the lrp house of Craving, which you might have heard about before in this podcast from different episodes, some of them featuring me.
Um, we Think that this spot, that mechanic talks about the three big points we wanna talk about today. And we can talk about the user experience, affordances of a physical object. We can talk about the triangulation of desire and sexuality onto people and objects. And we're talk about the symbolic power that objects can have, right?
Alex: Hmm.
Sharang: But to introduce us we thought it would be interesting to talk about this idea of objects in role playing games in general, right? Because when we think of role playing games, the common person, uh, the one who isn't super into indie games thinks
of a, the layman uh, thinks about, a very, an object, but we think about role playing games, right? This idea of dice
seems to be inextricably tied to role playing games, right? And so there is something about role playing games that is intrinsically tied to objects. And there is a power that these objects give us, right? Obviously dice allow us to do things.
But also Ian Bellamy has this lovely article in analog game studies called What Counts, Configuring the Human In Platform Studies. And he talks about this idea that humans and their ability to assign meaning and manipulate and do lots of things with objects makes us a unique games platform. Just like a PlayStation or a Game Boy can be a game platform. A human can be a great game platform because of the way we can engage with each other and with objects, right?
And even when it's not about sexuality, games can use physical objects in interesting and powerful ways, right?
Alex: Yeah, and I feel like the, the go-to example is Fall of Magic, right? It is meaningful that Fall of Magic takes place on this massive, beautiful scroll that depicts a map of the world that you're traveling through and has these sort of heavy, meaningful feeling coins and has physicality to it.
And a descendant of fall of magic, BFF, which is a great game about being tweens who are best friends, is the charm bracelet. That's like kind of the central thing in that game is when certain meaningful things happen between your character and another character, you pick out a charm and add it to your charm bracelet and that like represents the things that you've done.
And so again, like just starting to see this idea that there is in fact a difference between a paper map and scroll, that it evokes different things and different response. You, I feel like have definitely said before and I hope she'll say again that that Janet Murray quote, that dice are delicious.
Sharang: Right, so this is a quote that I learned from my department chair, Naomi Clark, who we've talked about before, who is a brilliant game designer and scholar. This idea that dice aren't just there to introduce uncertainty, right? There are lots of ways of introducing uncertainty in games, but something about dice Jenna Moran said in a conference once was like, dice are delicious. There's something about the feel of objects that are delicious.
And this is a, intangible sort of thing, right? Because we have layered upon dice all like strata of cultural meaning. And when we handle and roll and play with dice, we also delve into these strata to reach this core of meaning that subconsciously affects us, right?
So objects, whether it's dice, whether it's a silk screen map from Fall of Magic, whether it's the things we're gonna talk about today, can really enhance the feel of game. And we can see this in a lot of modern ttrp Gs that are using things like cards a lot, right?
We see like the second edition of Jason Morningstar's famous Game Fiasco. Jason famously decided to move away from tables of prompts to decks of cards with prompts, right? Because not only is it like it adds some simplicity and stuff, manipulating cards is simple, it has a different sort of feeling.
And that can bring us to our first point, which is, what is the actual UX benefit? What is the actual physical affordance of objects that can make role playing easier? And I think you had a really interesting example, for this.
Alex: Yeah. So the, the way in Tales of the Fisherman's Wife by Julia Bond, Elling Bo that scenes play out is you play a little game of war, right? But instead of with an entire deck, you get a hand of I think five cards. And so that's,
Sharang: sorry, I'm gonna pause. You say war being a folk game played with traditional playing cards,
right? Yeah.
Alex: are each laying down a card and whoever's card is higher, that person gets both cards. Whoever has the most cards at the end wins.
And so there's a bunch of things going on there, right? The fact that the two of us are laying down cards and then flipping them over and seeing what happens is this like tiny little morsel of uncertainty, right?
This little, this funnel side effect of the mechanic is generating something. But also like, it's, it's quite explicit in the text that like, yeah, this uses cards instead of dice 'cause dice are pokey and you don't really want them in your bed as where like. Cards are fine. You can easily end up laying down on a pile of cards and it won't hurt you at all.
And like there's just a lot going on there, like the practicality of, hey, this is a game where you might wanna like pause or arguably continue and have sex. And so let's keep that in mind and, and make it with something that doesn't require really a table even and doesn't require a bunch of sharp, pointy pieces, right? This game is not played with Lego for a reason.
Sharang: So next time I wanna play this game at a con I'll be like, they always ask, what special furniture do you need? And I'll be like, queen size bed.
Right? Um,
Alex: With the pillow top.
Sharang: no, but I love this, right? the game thinks about where it can be played. Because if it, if, if Tale Fisherman Wife is a game that posits that players might have romantic ness or sexual tension as players, not just as characters, it makes sense for it to be played in a place where it'll allow that tension to then be released. Right. Like on a bed. Right.
And the second thing is this idea of uncertainty is really interesting, right? Because Ian Bellamy in the article I mentioned earlier, talks about this idea that rolling a six-sided die and drawing from a deck of six cards is mathematically equivalent, but experientially very different, right? There's something very different about waiting for the die to roll and land or like I am picking a card. And like functionally me drawing from the top of a deck. The middle of a deck or the bottom of a deck is the
same in terms of probability, right?
The,
until I revealed the card, the probability waveform has not yet collapsed, right? Schrodinger. And now of course some physicists listening to this podcast is gonna be like, that's not exactly what Schrodinger is saying. And I'll
be like, oops. Um, Email Sam. Email
Sam everyone.
Alex: with your uh, yeah, with your physics questions.
Sharang: But this idea that, flipping a card has a thrill to it that is unique to flipping a card,
right?
Alex: And that the unflipped card is a specific piece of information that you don't have yet. Like you when we were prepping, you pointed out that the Solo Game, the Beast by Aleksandra Sontowska, like it's a game about having sex with a monster and it takes place over an entire month. Like you draw one card a day, you write a journal entry about ongoing relationship with this weird creature that you're having sex with, and what happens is you draw a card, you write your thing, then you put that card at the back of the deck.
And so that means that there you are always left on a cliffhanger. You are left after each play session in a place of uncertainty. There's a card, you know it's there, but you mustn't flip it until tomorrow.
And so that does a lot for what the story is actually about and what the sexual part of the story is about, which is, I don't really know where this is going. Like resonates with the, like appeal and sort of fear of the uncertainty of what's happening here.
Sharang: Right, and it's very different when you had a table of prompts where you can see all the prompts at once, right?
Alex: exactly.
Sharang: Honestly, even if I read through all the cards beforehand, once in a deck, it feels like the rest are hidden,
right? While a table I can always take in all of it at once.
Right? And taking in all of this at once I think, has a, has a, a, a very different feel to it than taking these discreet things one by one. Right. And so, so this idea of, physical affordance cards and dice are more traditional game pieces, right? But the idea of physical affordances can be extended to other objects.
So in Just A Little Loving a famous LARP about queer people at the start to the AIDS epidemic, again, we've talked about this in other episodes of this podcast, so check 'em out. I think multiple people have talked about it, not just me. There's a really interesting mechanic where if You want to initiate a sex scene with another player slash character, you hand them a pink feather.
Now the handing of the pink feather is not diegetic. Your character is not handing them a pink feather. Your player is handing them a pink feather, and then if they accept the pink feather as a player, they'd accept the fact that great, our characters are gonna have sex. Sex or have a sex scene, however you define or sexy scene.
Right.
Alex: Yes.
Sharang: And Alex, you had really interesting thought about this idea of player versus character in this situation, right?
Alex: Yeah, because this like allows you to just temporarily talk player to player. Should our characters have sex, would that be interesting to us as players? Because that's actually a completely different question than do our characters want to have sex with each other? Like maybe the more fun thing for us to do is to like have our characters really into each other and not act on that.
Maybe the more interesting thing to do is like. One of our characters is really into the other, and the other one's not. And like, you know, or both of them are just like, well, guess I'm not going home with anybody else tonight. Like that it opens up, creates this little keyhole right through which you can both just look at each other as players without actually interrupting the vibe,
Sharang: Yep.
Alex: This, delicate kind of flirty handing of a pink feather is just, I don't know, really lets you keep one foot in both in your, in yourself as a player and in your character.
Sharang: And when I played this game, even though you're out of character exchanging feathers, you can present and accept the feather.
Semi in character, right? I could present in a flirty way. I could just hand it to you. I could present it in an angry way. I could accept, I could slap your hand away to refuse the feather.
I could shake my head, right? We know that we are the players refusing, but we can put the character affect, right? So again, doing this feather interaction allows us to do this.
And especially because um, what Alex said, one of the major themes of just loving is death because it's about the AIDS crisis, right?
So my character could be like, I don't really want to have sex with this character, but I'm going to, because otherwise tomorrow I might die without ever having had sex, right? So, lots of reasons people wanna have sex and stuff, right? And this game I think, illuminates that. And having this, uh, meta technique, which is what it is a lot of, a lot of Nordic LARPs call these meta techniques.
Uh, there's my technique, really powerful. And then there are other things about it, right? The, the fact that it's pink, right? This is in the
eighties where ideas of masculinity and gender were very different from what it is now. Uh, So the color of this can have a lot of importance. The fact that it's a feather, the tactility of it. Like what does a feather mean? What does a softness mean? What does the idea that we can associate feathers with sensual touch means. So that has meaning to it.
The fact that there is an offer and an acceptance inherent in this, which mirrors this idea that, I mean, sexuality tends to be between I mean, yeah, you can masturbate, right? Yes. But in our game, we talk about sexuality between two entities, at least, at least two entities. So this idea of offer and accept becomes
part of the mechanic itself. and it's, it's harder to offer and accept a nons silent thing. I mean, that can be done. I can squeeze your
hand, you can squeeze back, that kind of thing. But offering and accepting a physical object is very clear. I am taking this from you. You are giving it to me. And then again. The way I take it and give it, communicate something
Alex: Yes.
Sharang: And so again, the UX of this becomes really powerful. But then it isn't just about this affordance of the object, right?
Because as we would just say, the pink feather, the pink feather is a way to transplant emotions between people onto an object or mediate an emotional conversation through an object conversation. Right? Alex, and you had some really interesting thoughts about this.
Alex: Yes, I love to talk about triangulation. Um, generally think about it in terms of family systems theory and family systems therapy where uh, triangulation is just one of those things that can happen and is usually happening at some point in a system, especially if it's dysfunctional, which is just means that two people are offloading or are displacing something that needs to be happening between them or is really happening between them onto a third person.
Um. so that shows up in particular kinds of like recurring conflicts in a system. But it's also, I'm up earlier Eve Sedgwick um, scholar of literature and um, between men English literature and male homosocial desire
Sharang: Yeah. It's one of the, like hallmarks of queer theory, right? If you, and, and like a lot of queer game scholars
Uh, like Bo Rubrik, for example, draw heavily on tedric's ideas.
Alex: absolutely. And she is actually writing about like a pretty specific period of like English literature, but the fact is like right back to sort of um, the Knights Lancelot and then the other
guy Arthur, I
Sharang: Arthur. Yeah. Yeah,
Yeah,
Alex: sounds right. Um, there love Triangle with Guinevere is actually just a way for them to displace their desire for each other, right?
So that's Sedgwick's point is that these love triangles in. media or like in literature, are actually about homosocial tension and the desire that cannot kind of pass directly between them, and so it needs to like get displaced and put upon this third person.
Sharang: Right. And I love, I love extending that sort of analysis onto it of a third person with kind of a third object, right?
Like using the object,
because in LRP, right, or in a role playing game, I'll probably not be having sex with the other player.
So we, you, we displace this desire, this tension, this idea, this feeling, whatever it is
onto this object in a sense, right? And this, I think is our phallus mechanic that we talk about as our swap mechanic, right? Like the phallus of course is you know, has afford actual physical affordances, right? It's carryable, it looks like a dick. You can do a lot, you can stroke it and put, insert it into your mouth and things like that, right? So it has the UX stuff that we talked about, but it also is something onto which I can displace desire because in, in PS like Just Little Loving where the, the larp says, Hey, players do not have sex with each other during the larp. But I fellate this phallus, right? And so I'm displacing the sexual act
onto this object to represent an act I'm doing onto a person. And, and just loving it was actually even more poignant because again, it's are the AIDS crisis.
Whether or not you put a condom onto the phallus is very,
very significant
and affected a lot of things in the game,
right? But I like this because we've talked about like actual, like sex,
but you can also displace the emotional power onto these objects, right? I think you do that really well in, in your game star crossed whose expansion again, just got for an ENnie and hey, maybe if you're listening to in the Future, maybe it's one in n.
Alex: Um, this, this is actually so important and this is something that um, so glaringly obvious during play testing for star crossed, which is that the
Sharang: Yeah.
Alex: crossed is a game about two people who really, really want to, but really, really shouldn't.
And you play out the story of their forbidden love uh, Uh, a series of scenes where every time the characters are getting closer to each other and escalating the intimacy between them, you pull a brick from a Jenga tower and place the brick on top. And so if the tower falls, your characters act on their feelings.
And whether or not that's a good thing uh, on the players and where the story is going. Um, is the thing that is going to happen at some point, probably most games, there's very rare exceptions. Um, the thing that is not happening, right? The tower is not falling and that's where you're living. And I specifically want players to desperately want it to fall and not want it to fall.
And I really think that like. Star Cross is a game about being ridiculously so, so, so into each other, so attracted to each other um, will like, you know, defy culture and have consequences and wreck your life and whatever to pursue that.
And, one of the reasons why I think like strangers at a con can play each other and friends who have no kind of like sexual connection to each other can play it quite comfortably, I really do think that that tower is just kind of sitting there absorbing eros. Right, like it's just, it's this like labinal lightning rod.
All of that is just going in there. And
Sharang: The tower lingum. It is a phallus.
Alex: true. So true though. And it's just like, it can kind of take that tension, which allows you to then go on experiencing it. So it's this very like productive triangulation that you get into with the tower.
Sharang: And I, I really love that, right? Uh, Because I teach with this game a lot, right? I talk about this idea of like, the stress of the tower falling, becomes. In, like, I use that inextricably a lot today, but inextricably becomes the stress of the romance. These two become one and the same. So you are displacing your romantic feeling on the tower, and I don't know if you could say the tower is the, the anxiety of the tower falling is displaced onto the story in some sense.
Right.
Um.
Alex: building each other up.
Sharang: Right. And so the object becomes here, not just a convenient thing we can appropriate, like the dice of the cards or whatever, or something we can hand, but it, the tower here becomes the like locus sort
our emotional, psychological stuff.
Alex: All
Sharang: I'm sorry.
I couldn't think of a better word I couldn't, yeah, that's the most technical word I could think of. Yeah.
Alex: Um.
Sharang: Yeah.
Alex: So let's talk about this fusion, which I think is like the reasons why the PHUs mechanic is our spotlight um, because it had obviously serves as triangulation purposes. It has a specific set of physical affordances that are lend themselves pretty well to sex scenes.
But um, tell us about the mix of the physical and the symbolic.
Sharang: Right.
Alex: right, when, when both of those things start to matter.
Sharang: Right, because games are not just collections of verbs, right?
They are collections of verbs to which we ascribe meaning, and then there are other things. Don't app me with like your hot takes on games. There are lots of games, are lots of things. I, trust me, Alex and I have both taught about this. Um. Uh, but Games are collection of verbs and things to which we ascribe meaning, right?
And so the ability for if an object lends itself to symbolic interpretation by virtue of it being itself, that helps the game to no end, right?
phallus clearly represents sexuality and so much so that any long object in current culture we think of as phallic,
right? We think of as representing sexuality or representing male potency, or representing male dumbness in certain ways, right? And so we talked about this idea of the, the feather being pink before like that is symbolic.
In the game House of Craving, which again has been talked about this in this lot before, so I won't go into in detail, but it's about haunted houses and sexuality, the phallus is clear and colorless. It's like a ghost phallus, right?
And that's interesting because house of Craving an interesting idea where the ghosts in the game can pull you into a room and invite you to do a masturbation scene, right, with a f Every sex scene in house of craving, for the most part, use a phallus, right? That's the mechanic of the game. I'm say for the most part because, you know, it's a of things can
differ sometimes. Um, but the ghost will then offer you maybe a phallus with phallus there, whatever. And you can do a masturbation thing using this PHUs, right? Obviously, again, you don't actually insert the PHUs into your junk. You might pretend to, or you
might lick it or something, right? And so here the phallus, well, first off, there's a lot of things going on, right? First a UX thing, you can do stuff to this phallus. Second triangulation, right? Because the ghost is not having sex with you. But are they right? They're like watching you engage with this transparent ghost phallus, right?
But again, the phallus becomes the symbolism of sexuality where your character, I does not need to be engaging with the real cock for the phallus to represent sexuality. Right? It is very hard for someone to look at a dildo and not think of sex, right? So of, of some sort, right?
So, the associations we have with the phallus, regardless of whether it represents certain genitals or not become part of the game, right? We associate sex phallus right?
So there's this idea the two driving forces of literature being fantasy and mimesis, right?
Fantasy being the creation of what is not real, and mimesis being the emulation of what is real, right? So this, this mechanic becomes like both, right? We are
creating what is not real, this lrp by emulating what is
real. Like I would, one might argue that a lrp epitomizes both these drives really well, right? We
often use. The mimesis, the acting out of realistic things in order to create the fantasy. Right?
And so
these objects, the associations we put on it become. Powerful. In, in your example of The Fishermen's Wife, the mechanic is if you win the card at hand, you gain control or You get what you want in that scene, right?
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: And so
cards
represent competitive play in, in our Western culture, right? And so using cards there, the symbolism of competitive play, the symbol adds to the symbolism of this power dynamic in this sex scene, right? Dice represent, like rolling the dice represent a little bit of uncertainty,
right? Um, so
Alex: literally letting go
Sharang: right,
Alex: gonna happen next.
Sharang: So a game that uses dice for its sex thing has this element of, I don't know what's gonna happen
next,
right?
Alex: a gamble. Yeah.
Sharang: right the Jenga tower is this idea of are we unraveling a structure? We have these walls built between us that stop us from acting on our emotional desire. So, removing blocks from this wall. Are we symbolically breaking apart this wall and letting these emotions like seep through, right?
I'm thinking of, it makes me think of, for some reason, Midsummer Night's Dream, right? And the
chink in the wall, right? We're letting
these emotions like seep through, right?
So these, the objects can have symbolic elements in of themselves, and I think you have a really exquisite example of how the object does so much heavy lifting for the tone and feel of a game.
Alex: Yes, I am very pleased to talk about, Let These Mermaids Touch Your Dick Maybe by River House Games, A game which does use a phallus. There's a phallus set in the center of a ring of players, you all sit around it. But far more importantly you are all semi competitively throwing the we, the little sticky hands that you get in very, very, very cheap toy boxes.
Listeners, I don't even know. I, I'm feel so certain that you've seen one, which is great 'cause it's really hard Yeah, there are these like tiny slime hand with a long, stringy part
Sharang: coming out of it that like wobbly wibbly, right?
Alex: Exactly. So you can hold the end of the string, but kind of throw it, and then the hands it, the hands is very sticky and it sticks to the wall or whatever. And it certainly sticks to the phallus very briefly.
And if you read like these mermaids, touch your dick, maybe it has in its tone and in its intent, like how it's constructed is like s. Sexy, fun. Very silly and very like lighthearted. And it's certainly making a statement about sex, which is that sex can be something that's just like kind of fun and silly and not a big deal. It, you know, whatever other things it might also be.
saying that via sticky hand is just so much more powerful than words could ever be. It is like impossible to take something seriously. If there is a sticky hand involved, right? Like there's no way, like it introduces comedy in such a powerful way and kind of guarantees that the thing will be ridiculous. And that's just so brilliant.
Sharang: Yeah. No matter how serious we want them to be, if one of our main game mechanics is flinging, sticky hands. It's gonna feel silly.
And that's, and that is the tone the designers of this game want, right? They want it to be a, a bit sillier. Very different from just
loving, which is about death and aids. Let The Mermaid Touch Your Dick Maybe is about silliness. And what is this idea of like mythical creatures and secs and things like that, right?
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: But again, again, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say the word again, inextricable. It
is inextricably tied to the object realities of the game, right? So I think that's really powerful. So yeah, our, our, our three points of the user experience and the affordance of the object, how we can triangulate feelings onto objects in ways that allow us to communicate without direct communication, and how we can assign symbolism and, and use cultural association to preexisting symbolism of object to enhance narrative and emotion games.
All of these can be encapsulated by the mechanic of the phallus uh, in which is common in Nordic larp. So yeah. So today we talked about how games can use objects. I'm gonna, give a bonus homework because I'm sure Sam's gonna give you some homework about, like, think about what other objects can be used to represent sex scenes or romantic scenes or romantic tension, because as we said, star crossed the tower doesn't represent sex, represents your emotions bubbling over.
Right.
Alex: And
Sharang: Um,
Alex: do people always say when I am explaining it to them? They're like, oh, if the tower falls, you have sex. I don't need to write that down for people to assume.
Sharang: to assume. Yeah.
Alex: should, but you're right that it doesn't need to. And that eros can take all of these different forms and you can
Sharang: Right.
Alex: a phallus. You can put it into one of those little sticky hands that you got at the dentist.
Sharang: Or you can wait to something else that you imagine.
Alex: Please and, and tell us about it. This is the one thing I know we're always like, don't tweet at me about this, but please contact me if you
Sharang: Yeah. Blue skyes. blue skyes. Yeah. Yeah.
Alex: If you have an exciting new way and new physical mechanic with which to represent sexual desire and desire,
Sharang: so let's end this episode with this quote. I like, it's from Hannah RNs 1958 book, the Human Condition where RN is talking about like how objects can hold memory and emotion things.
The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continual existence first upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember. And second on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. End quote.
So think about that. Especially when you think about romance, intimacy, and games.
Alex: Beautiful. Let's wrap it up then for today.
Sharang: Yeah.
Alex: been Alex Roberts. You can find all my stuff at. helloalexroberts.carrd.co. Or on Patreon however those URLs work. Please don't know. Check out my games. They're pretty fun.
Sharang: including any nominated and perhaps winning.
Alex: and possibly winning
Sharang: and I'm Sharang Biswas. You can find me on Blue Sky. You can find my itch, which is astro lingus itch.io, and I'm still writing off the high of publishing my first book called The Iron Below Remembers. which is about relationships,
Also we would like to thank Sam who edits all
these episodes, right.
S
Alex: Sam's doing the work. We're just talking.
Sharang: And Sam is actually technically skilled and has an
ear for what should be edited or
not. Um
Alex: Wait, we have to, holy shit. Dice Exploder was also nominated for an ne
Sharang: Oh, right.
Yes. So, so, yeah. So David might also have won the ENnie by the time you listen to this, so
Alex: Check out Sam's award winning award
Sharang: at least to nominated.
Alex: winning This one that you're listening
Sharang: yeah. Because Sam is very cool and very hot.
Um, yay. Uh, Thank you again and have a, we should, we should have had like a catchphrase in the start, you know?
Alex: Have a have a
Sharang: Yeah. have a good fuck or something. I don't know.
Alex: Have a good fuck.
Sam: Our logo is designed by Sporgory. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray. And our ad music is by Travis And thanks to you for listening. See you next time.