Listen to this episode here.
Love, sex, and romance: huge human topics, wildly under-discussed in roleplaying games. At least in my opinion. So today on Dice Exploder we’re kicking off a new miniseries on the subject hosted by NOT ME. Instead, for the next four episodes, Alex Roberts (Star Crossed, For the Queen) and Sharang Biswas (editor of Honey and Hot Wax) are taking over the show to bring you all things love and sex.
And today they’re kicking off with an episode on sex moves from Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts, classic PBTA moves that trigger when two characters have sex. Let’s get into it!
Further Reading
Apocalypse World by Meguey & Vincent Baker
Monsterhearts 2 by Avery Alder
My Girl’s Sparrow by Troels Ken Pedersen
How Do Aliens Do “It”? by Kieron Gillen
Pop! by Alex Roberts, found in Honey and Hot Wax, edited by Sharang Biswas and L. Kahn
Socials
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Dice Exploder on Patreon
Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop mechanic and ask it out to dinner. My name is Sam Dun Ald, and this is the first episode of a brand new mini series all about love, sex, and romance in RPGs. And I am not going to be hosting these episodes. I'll be here up top to introduce them, but I have handed the show over to Alex Roberts and Sharang Biswas.
If you don't know these two, you are in for a treat. Alex Roberts is the designer behind the Diana Jones Award-winning star crossed, star crossed love letters and expansion to the original game that is out now, and perhaps my personal favorite RPG of all time For the Queen, you can subscribe to her Patreon to get all kinds of game thoughts from her.
Sharang Biswas is an ENnie E and IGDN award-winning game designer, as well as a games professor. He co-edited Honey at Hot Wax and anthology of games, all about sex that contains among other games, pop! A game where you play as a community of balloon fetishists, talking online, designed by Alex Roberts. You should also check out Sharang's latest novel. The Iron Below Remembers a book about gay archeologists, giant robots, and horny superheroes.
Both Sharang and Alex have also been on dice exploiter before, so if you're interested in hearing more of them we're getting to hear them speak with me. You can find those episodes in the archive.
But today, on this first episode in this series, Alex and Sharang start with the game mechanic that probably came to mind first for many listeners of this show, when I said the word sex and mechanic in the same sentence: the sex moves in Apocalypse World, Monster Hearts and Other Powered by the Apocalypse Games. Widely divisive, but in my opinion, deceptively brilliant, these moves are, I think, the perfect place to dive into this series.
So come on down. Let's do some sex. Let's do some romance. Let's do some game design. Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon, and with all that, here are Alex Strong with Apocalypse Worlds sex moves.
Alex: Hi everyone. I'm Alex Roberts.
Sharang: And I'm Sharang Biswas. And as Sam mentioned we are hosting a special miniseries of Dex Explode, talking about romance, sexuality, intimacy, and all those related moist concepts. Um.
Alex: Moist concepts.
Sharang: They're all moist and, and related and squiggly together. And today our Spotlight Mechanic is the sex move from various powered by the Apocalypse Games with a specific focus on two games apocalypse World First Edition, and Monster Heart second Edition.
Alex: Okay. Before that we can just talk generally about like, why would we want to talk about sex and romance in Ttrp gs?
Sharang: The start of our series, it might be good to prime us and everyone else with this idea. So first, let's do personal because it's personal and not academic, right? Alex, what do you get or think about having sex in your ttrpgs?
Alex: I really like, I, yeah.
Sharang: of sex appear in your
Alex: Oh,
Sharang: RPGs.
Alex: Wow. So, I mean, similar but not the same question I'll admit. Yeah. I, I really like when role-playing games are about relationships. Like, I think if the whole kind of structure of the thing is you're playing a bunch of characters, I want those characters to have interesting relationships and sex can complicate things or can be an interesting indicator of things.
And so for me, I just think it makes sense, like, why would you not, if you're gonna have people interacting, one of the ways that human beings interact is in a horny fashion.
Sharang: yeah, I, I firmly believe that, while human combat has been an important part of our history as humans,
Alex: hmm.
Sharang: an important part of the everyday lived experiences of most people, I would hope at least. So it's, it's interesting that our games focus on combat, maybe because it's not the everyday experience we want to do this
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: fantasy, but I
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: to have things that we do know a lot about romance, intimacy in our games. The things that appear in our lives it's interesting for them to show up in our games. We have that with other kinds of media, right? Every
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: the music
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: about romance.
Alex: The entirety of pop music and most of classical really, if we're being honest, yeah.
Sharang: romance, even if you couch it in, like language of divide and divinity and connection and stuff.
Christine Tomlinson in this article that I assigned to my class this semester an article called Priority Pixels, the Social and Cultural Implications of Romance and Video Games. Now, again, note. She's talking about video games. But she talks about this idea of when romance options show up in games they allow players to move away from their character being positioned just somewhere within the plot to being positioned somewhere within a human emotional spectrum, right?
Alex: Mm.
Sharang: players start caring about the broader world and emotional realities of characters and not just what you are doing in service of like saving the world or
Alex: Yeah. The objective. Yeah.
Sharang: right. And I think, and that's really cool and I think that's more potent in analog games, let's say by analog
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: including all kinds of non-digital games, board
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: games, roleplaying games, law, whatever. And that's more potent in roleplaying kind of games than analog games because there's so many moments of not focusing on the plot that automatically occur. Right.
Alex: Yeah. Yeah. And whether that's like as downtime or, I know for some people moments of role playing are actually the exception to what happens at their table. Like most of the time they're doing the crunchy stuff. But but yeah, once you start talking about. Anything about sex and romance, you're talking about how people feel, and so you're talking about the subjective and inter subjective worlds, like it just kind of brings that to the forefront.
Sharang: And there's a little bit of a difference. I also feel in how video game romance works because Tomlinson identifies a really interesting point that a really big part of video game romance is the social out of game aspect of discussing your romance with other people,
Alex: Oh, interesting.
Sharang: look up how to
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: ex character in Dragon Age or how to
Alex: Uhhuh.
Sharang: right.
So there is this bu like when I was getting Dragon age four, I immediately called ysu. YSU Davis
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: that Alex and I are both friends with. And I'm like, ysu, I think I'm gonna romance this person, dragon age. And, and, and Jen's like, oh, really? Well, I like the game hadn't even come out, right?
The game had
Alex: Yeah. Yeah,
Sharang: it. And. Tomlinson identifies that this is not just a me and ysu thing, right?
Alex: yeah. Yeah.
Sharang: shows that everyone does this in video game. Like who you did romance. How you did romance 'em,
Alex: Mm-hmm. And that says a lot in general about video games are something that is always kind of completed in the player's imagination. Like whether that means you, your perception is resolving a set of pixels into a person, or like your experience of this thing is always elaborated upon, like either in anticipation like you're describing or afterwards, right?
Like we're always finishing the sentence ourselves.
Sharang: And that's the thing in, because we don't have a complete picture, very few RPGs give you, here are the romance options you can have in games.
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: right? Some adventure
Alex: Yeah, yeah.
Sharang: like the strict Haven Adventure book for Dungeons and Dragons has these NPCs and it strongly hints that these
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: options, right?
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: most, most rpgs don't have
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: we engage in romance. In video game, RPGs versus analog RPGs, I think has differences, right? Tomlinson also talks about this idea of experience taking and empathy and how you can
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: with characters more when you can look into their broad emotional world.
Alex: Hmm.
Sharang: again, it's very different in video game because in video games
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: a pre-written character whose actions and dialogue, even if you choose them, are still prescripted in a
Alex: Yeah, yeah. You, you might be selecting from a menu, but it is not kind of generated whole cloth from within you in a way that a lot of role playing game characters are.
Sharang: Right. And so the author of the RPG is trying to make a point, right? Like, I'm
Alex: Hmm
Sharang: an argument about what it means to love someone after trauma, or I'm
Alex: mm-hmm. Mm.
Sharang: isn't doing that well, RPG is, it is more you than in a video game, right? You, it, the, the self. There's more of the self in a character
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: right? Even
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: a self that you deny or a self that you're exploring or whatever, there is
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: in there than any video game. So, so there are differences and hey, maybe that's what this series is gonna is
Alex: Oh
Sharang: right? There is a lot of scholarship. Not a lot. There is more scholarship about video games than romance. There's
Alex: yeah.
Sharang: of scholarship about analog roleplaying as romance. Not to say that we are being super scholarly. Alex and I, I don't think either
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: scholars.
Alex: No,
Sharang: right.
Alex: we're just, we just we're adjacent to that. I, you are way closer to that than I am.
Sharang: I, I don't like saying I'm a scholar, I'm a games academic.
I will take
Alex: Okay. Okay. Alright.
Sharang: a
games scholar, right. I'm a
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: more than a professor of scholarship.
so just grain of salt. While we're saying there isn't a lot of scholarship and we wanna increase the knowledge, we are not offering scholarship. We're offering thoughts.
Alex: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I am, but a humble practitioner and I love to, to say things and then maybe people will do scholarly work on that.
Sharang: Yeah. I call myself an artist who reads. right, like I make game, but I,
Alex: Uhhuh. I might, I might read about it. Yeah.
Sharang: Awesome. So I think that's interesting ideas.
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: There's a really well-known video game narrative designer Michelle Clue, who I've had the fortune of meeting a few times in at GDC and things like that. And she has this really cool book called Passion and Play, A Guide to Designing
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: in Games. I will tell you I forgot what the word is disclaimer. That I have contributed a chapter in it. I do not
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: royalties from it, so anti, anti disclaimer, but disclaimer is I have written for it. But Charlu talks about all these different reasons that games might include sex. She talks about, helps to explore characters, helps to
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: helps to explore the plot all these different kind of things, which are, you know, I think it's very valuable to name them, but for people who play roleplay games, they might be instinctively know these without naming them. Clue also talks about this idea of titillation,
Alex: Yeah, maybe that's something that is inherently worth being in your art.
Sharang: right? Like a lot of people think that, oh, if it's titillating, it shouldn't be there. And I think Alex and I both agree. I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but Alex and I have been friends for a while. I think Alex and I both agree that there's nothing wrong with having titillating content
Alex: yeah.
Sharang: if you know that it has titillating content in it.
Right?
Alex: Yes.
Sharang: be surprised. You don't want to give it to your like, 7-year-old if, and surprises them with law.
Alex: Yeah, but like, in the same way that many horror games are interesting, but you don't necessarily feel scared. There's a lot of value in having a horror themed RPG that genuinely feels really scary. So, see also games about excitement and sexuality and attraction.
Sharang: yes. But, but this is an interesting point because my experience, I have not encountered tabletop RPGs
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: we're getting or trying to get. Titillated by the content. However, I have played in LARPs where clearly one of the functions of this LRP is to titillate participants,
Alex: Right. Well, not to 'cause the thing is. we should come back to this when we talk about like mechanizing stuff because this is the proof that Star crossed a game that I made is extremely larp informed because I very much do want people to get excited, but that is also a game that you happen to be sitting down at a table for.
But the, the structure of it seen by scene structure, super rigid moves is so, so larp informed.
Sharang: It is interesting 'cause I have played Star Cross with my ex-husband's boyfriend who I was not gonna be sleeping with.
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: with. With people who I would be sitting with. I played track off with my ex-husband when we were married.
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: so I played in and does the context change titilation? We can think about that later.
but I played in a House of Craving two years ago, which is a Danish larp. and it's, I've talked about it on this podcast, in fact. So listen to that episode with Sam if you really want the details, but it is very clear that one of the aims of the game is to produce horny affect, right? It is to titilate.
The rules of larp say you are not supposed to have sex with each other during the game but clearly part of it is to create sexual tension and horness,
Alex: also, I mean, what's hotter than being told that you're not allowed to have sex? Sorry, just come on now.
Sharang: It, it does, it does contribute
Alex: is part of the titillation. Yeah.
Sharang: in fact, that's part of our discussion later today, right?
Alex: Oh, mm-hmm.
Sharang: and not talking. so there is an interesting difference when we talk about is the function titillation, less so in TT RPGs, maybe in more so in modern TT RPGs that blend LRP
Alex: Hmm.
Sharang: blend in, I would argue the embodied quality of lrp.
Alex: Yes. Yeah.
Sharang: game Star Cross really does have embodied qualities to it, right?
Alex: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think when we talk about the different functions of sexual content like you said, there is this tendency, I think LARPs are much, it's much easier to titillate and it's just in the general kind of design interest of that scene compared to Ttrp Gs. Partially because T RPGs, I think, are more likely to be trying to produce a story as
where, like if you've been in arp, you know that there is no single narrative, right? Like everyone's kind of has their own story, but it is about so much more focused on being this character. This is about being this character.
Sharang: actually a really distinction between LARP and teach refugee,
Alex: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Sharang: the unified theory of role-playing by Alex Roberts. Um, No, no, I, I think that's actually quite interesting and so that opens up the design space for all our listeners out there and make an RPG. That's not a bad story, that's about vibe, but
Alex: Prove us wrong. Everything we say on this show prove us wrong.
Sharang: we might argue that the no dice, no masters or belonging, outside belonging games like dream, dream apart. The OG ones. are more about vibes than plot, right? You could argue. But do we, whenever I play it, we try and make it about plot. Is that because we are predisposed to, or because we have the traditional role playing game, which tend to be a bad plot.
Now I wanna
Alex: Hmm
Sharang: a phone sex RPG, which is titillating and not about plot. We should make this Alex.
Alex: that, that sounds great.
Sharang: Wonderful. So I think we should get into our spotlight mechanic. Can you describe what sex moves are in Apocalypse World Games?
Alex: Yes, absolutely. So in Apocalypse World in general, which is obviously this hugely influential 2010 RPG by Vincent and Meg Baker is all based around moves. So you kind of all just describe what your character's doing and when what your character is doing happens to fulfill a certain set of criteria, it counts as a move. You roll some kind of mechanical things happen.
So it's not like you say, hi, I'm playing this character, I do something under fire. You just describe, okay. And then I you know, I'm running through this hallway and dodging whatever, and then the s the person running the game says, oh, that sounds like you're doing something under fire roll cool.
And in apocalypse world, never even minding the fact that one of the core stats is hot, which I completely forgot about until I started reading this, there's playbooks that are the different sort of character archetypes that you might play. And they represent just the archetypes of like action adventure stuff more broadly even than apocalypse like themed things. And each of those playbooks has specifically a sex move, which in the text is called the special move, which I mean, we could, I've just talked about that.
But so for example, like if you play the Hocus, which is like a creepy cult religious leader. When that character has sex, you each get like, hold one, so you have one sort of. Item of currency and either of you can spend that hold at any time to help or interfere with the other at a distance or despite any barriers that would normally prevent it.
And then other characters have sex moves that do completely different things. So like my favorite one is the Battle Babe. The whole point of that character is just to be this cool, sexy, hot. You know, nothing can touch me, badass hot person and their sex move is if you and another character have sex, nullify the other character's sex move. Whatever it is, it just doesn't happen.
So these moves produce interesting things in fiction, but mostly what they're doing is telling you what these characters are all about and how they experience or want to experience sex.
So for the hocus, it's like. This act creates a bond between us and we kind of have influence over each other's lives, whether that's in a helpful way or like a hindering way. There's this sense of kind of being tied. As where obviously the Battle Babe is completely opposite kind of character and is like, no, I don't stay for breakfast. Right? So you instantly know a lot about this archetype and how to play it just based on what happens when they have sex.
Sharang: Yeah, and I think other PBTA games, that are closely descended from Apocalypse World because there are many now that are less closely descended.
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: also include this kind of thing. So monster Hearts and Monster Hearts two by Avery Alder. The sex moves are called sex moves. Now they're not called special moves anymore. 'cause Monster hearts is about messed up teen monsters in high school doing messed up things.
And again, so here I'm looking at the playbook of the mortal. When you have sex with someone that awakens something sinister within them, the next time you take your eyes off them, they become their darkest self. And darkest self is a game thing, but you can tell what that means by just listening.
Or the queen character. Actor, which is imagine an alien, queen infecting people or a cult leader infecting people. Her sex move is when you have sex with someone, they gain the condition, one of them, while the condition remains, they count as part of your gang.
And as Alex said, clearly Apocalypse World tradition games, or at least these two apocalypse world games. The function of having sex movement, this game closely aligned to clue's idea, Michelle clue's ideas of illuminating character and furthering the plot.
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: As Alex said, you learn more about who this character, my character that I'm playing, is whether or not you do the sex move. Right. Even by just reading the sex move tells you about who that character is, right.
Alex: Exactly. And even before you playing this character, even before you're playing this game, you're reading the book and you're learning a lot about the tone, you're learning a lot about the world and what this game consists of, again, just by reading these moves, these special moves that, like you say, might not ever even come up in play, right? They're all triggered by actions. There's just, if the character has sex, then this happens.
Sharang: never have sex
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: Right. I, when I teach with this game last semester, so my students were like professor, we, well, they don't call me, they call me Sharun because it's art school. They're like, SHA, we really tried to have sex in character in the first session of the game. And we just didn't, it never came up. And I'm like, that's interesting. That is kind of like, oh, are you playing horny teens who are really trying to have sex but end up not having it? And my students are like, oh yeah, good point. Right? So, so like Alex said, just
Alex: Yeah. Yeah.
Sharang: on the character sheet,
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: you use it, is very significant. And if you do do a sex move or a special move, you see in these examples that we told you, they're very plot relevant, right? They're
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: furthering the plot. It's, this
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: like, have sex just for funsies, which again, we're not saying is bad, which think
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: don't do that. Very specific things happen. In Alex's example um, you get to help someone mechanically at a distance that's very plot relevant. Or in the example of the mortal, it sends the other player into their darkest self, which is quite significant. Even if you don't know what that means, you can imagine what that
Alex: Yeah, I think you can put it together.
Sharang: right. And this is interesting because. Note what these sex moves are and this Alex and I were, uh, discussing this episode. We talked about this idea of, of PBTA games and sex moves is all about talking about and describing sex as a game mechanic, right?
Alex: Yeah, and that these are specifically about describing the consequences of sex. Like both of these games are really asserting sex has social consequences. The fact that the battle babes move is to nullify that consequence says that it not having a consequence is this weird thing that only this very limited number of people can like experience.
And like obviously in Monster Hearts, like the whole game is about social consequences, about relationships getting more screwed up. That's how you make the game interesting. And both of these games are saying like, that's one way to make things more interesting is if two people have sex
Sharang: I like this because. The games don't have like a blow by blow
Alex: Mm.
Sharang: by blow. Uh, They don't necessarily have a blow by blow sex mechanic. they don't have a numerical sex mechanic.
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: By talking, by just mentioning, like, like I can
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: with you and be like, Alex, my character has sex with your character.
Move on.
Alex: Yep. Mm-hmm.
Sharang: You are now part of my cult, right? Because you had
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: right. By just mentioning it, I think these games allow us to focus more on the consequences than the acts, which again, is not a bad thing, it's just what these games are doing.
Alex: Yeah, I mean, it, it kind of draws a line over that it really encourages you to sort of cut to the fireplace. And I mean, we can talk about genre and tropes and how sex is usually handled in the genre media that these are inspired by, but I think it also says something like, interesting about cultures of play, right?
Because it's saying, if you wanna just. go to town, like describing that in as much detail as you want, that's fine, go for it. But it's really saying like the more interesting thing is what happens after, or the thing that's really relevant is what happens after.
Sharang: which I think, again, I don't think
Alex: Hmm
Sharang: are saying what I'm about to say, but there is often a puritanical argument for uh, depictions of sex in, uh, linear media. I. Movies and, and, and books and things, which is like, well, if the sex isn't plot relevant, if the consequences
Alex: Yeah,
Sharang: relevant, it shouldn't be there. Right?
Alex: yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sharang: games aren't saying that's the case. These games are, however, focusing on the plot relevancy,
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: right? Alex and I both said it is totally fine to have sex just because it's horny and tating and, and amazing,
Alex: Yeah
Sharang: or not amazing, right?
Alex: yeah. Yeah. It was fascinating. In in its terrible way. Yeah.
Sharang: I think this brings up a point that you mentioned to me in our discussion about games that, have sex moves or games that don't have sex moves.
What, what?
Alex: yeah. Well, a point that I really, really wanna make is that every RPG is making a statement about sex. And if it has absolutely no mention of sex anywhere in it, then that's a statement. And depending on context, the statement is, this game is about spaceships or whatever, and. The, and the author genuinely just thinks that sex is not relevant or it's making a statement that sex is not something you should talk about.
Perhaps that's a, an assertion we've learned from the broader culture or that I shouldn't have to talk, you shouldn't have to talk in order to have sex. Right. This is an assertion that we see in a lot of popular media where like, as soon as there's a sex scene, suddenly there's just music there's no dialogue. Like this is the classic way that film deals with sex. Right. But.
Sharang: had a real world dude. Tell me once, I'm not criticizing him, but A, a friend of mine told me once that he likes sex because it is a, for, to him, a form of communication without talking
Alex: That's very interesting, right, because there's, there's like this piece of truth to that, right? That you're conveying a lot through what happens bodily. We, we'll get into that actually mechanically in a second, but also this is like the dream of a both sex obsessed and fundamentally puritanical culture is like, I want to have the good stuff, but I don't want to talk about it. 'cause that's, that makes me feel bad. Or I'm unequipped to do so. So, um.
Sharang: a slight footnote
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: we talk about functions of sex and game, I think one of the societal functions of sex and games and romance and intimacy in games it opens up the conversation and it makes it, I think by showing romance, sexuality in media, more and more
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: and more explicitly it makes us feel less awkward about talking about these
Alex: Yes. Yes. And has the potential to create a framework for talking about sex. Like I, we'll talk more about that. But yeah, I think the. And I had a footnote in your footnote. See, we're scholars, we're academics. Um, So I think both of these games are saying like, this is a statement that they're making. Is that, sex has social consequences.
And the thing is, someone else could make a completely different statement, right? And just say like, make a game where the statement is sex can just be a fun thing, that it doesn't have to be a big deal. And like I would play that game. That sounds interesting.
Like that's one of the nice things about RPGs and making statements about sex or making you know, what's your thesis about sex that you're expressing mechanically, whether or not you mean to is that like, it's not like there will eventually be one that is true and accurate, it's just like, you know, the statement that your game could be making is like sex is confusing. We'll get into one with that. I don't know, there are many true or accurate or like resonant things that you could say about sex
Sharang: yeah. but I really like this. point you have of every game by virtue of being played by humans discusses sex, whether or not it explicitly means to, right? If it omits it, it is saying
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: Or if it doesn't omi it, like if you've read Shauna Germaine's supplement to Numenera called Sex in the Ninth World, there's a
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: what does sex mean in this future world?
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: by, by including it, it's saying something. By not including it, it's saying something else. Maybe
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: including it, the saying something else is more openly interpreted by players.
Alex: Yeah, that's the thing. Your, your non statement, your unspoken statement, it could be interpreted in a lot of different ways. And I think about games actually like Star Cross, not to talk my own stuff too much, but star Cross. But also like lots of other games. Like I think Kagamatsu is like a classic romance game in indiea RPGs.
And sex is very it mentioned so briefly, it is at the very bottom of the list of moves that you can do, which says a lot, right, that sex is some sort of like culmination of things, but also
Sharang: important because it's a historical game. Right?
Alex: It's true. Yeah, exactly that.
Sharang: there. Yeah.
Alex: Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, we can talk about what does a game say about sex in the time period or culture or whatever that it depicts.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking about night witches and like uh, the way that it handles sex and talks about it is completely different. It's, sex is not something that you will do after a long series of sort of courtship rituals. It's like you might have five minutes in the supply shed where no one's looking.
Yeah.
Sharang: like, I don't know gay Manhattan residents is gonna think about sex very differently from a game about
nuns.
Alex: yeah. Yes, exactly. And both of those, like the sex lives of nuns and the sex lives of sort of, gay Manhattan dudes I think are both gonna be really interesting. But you're right, they'll say something really different probably.
So I think this brings us to the last sort of like area that we wanted to talk about, which is different ways that games can talk about sex, because like, you know, most of what Kamatsu is saying is the things that happen before sex are hotter than, you know, than sex is.
And I mean, Starco is really saying like, no, no, it's the thing that happens before that's interesting. And we just talked about.
Sharang: World is saying, right. Things that happen after sex are interesting. Right. Um.
Alex: Mm-hmm. are there any exceptions now? Are there any games where people are actually talking about the middle part?
Sharang: Thank you for that leading question, Alex Roberts, which we did not prepare at all together when discussing and outlining our, our podcast.
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: We make outlines. Um, So I've written uh, on Euro Gamer about a, a lovely, tT RPG called My Girl Sparrow. It again blurs the line between TT RPG and LARP a little bit. And in my Girl Sparrow, it's set in like a futuristic world where people find having physical sex with each other to be gross. They just have cybers sex. And so the game is set during a weekend where the, the group of us are deviant perverts. We've rented a, a cabin in the woods and we're aiming to like, have a lot of bodily sex there.
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: And the game's doing a lot of thing, but one of the things the game does is when you're having a sex scene with someone, and there are many of them you look into the other player's eyes, you clasp their forearm and in a very specific way, there's like call and response. You describe physical actions you are doing to each other.
So I might be like. I will run my tongue down your ear and then nibble your ear lobe, right?
And then
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: in this game, you're very specifically describing sex acts.
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: another interesting note in this game is this game forbids you from ever describing your feelings.
Alex: Ah, yes.
Sharang: to say, I am sad. You
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: A tear springs up in my eyes.
Alex: Yeah,
Sharang: thing is, me as the other player, I have no idea what that means. Are you sad? Are
Alex: yeah,
Sharang: with joy? Do you have Did I poke you? Right. And
Alex: Uhhuh.
Sharang: by making you describe sex but not describe feelings, is interested in this idea that we have a rich vocabulary and desire to talk
Alex: Hmm mm-hmm.
Sharang: Like, what is going on, can we, and it is making arguments about, you know, solipsism or man is an island,
Alex: Mm.
Sharang: of like, can I ever know the internality of someone else even when I'm having sex with him? Do I know anything? You know, I think
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: forcing you to describe Blow by Blow does interesting things.
Alex: Yes. And I think one of those things is that the things that you do physically during sex often represent or express other things, right?
So like, you know, the running your hand gently down someone's arm is not just something that you do because physically that feels good. It's like that also is meant to represent or express a, a tenderness or a care or whatever. Because the other thing that's going on, like you said, they can't actually describe what is being expressed. Right. And so like what to me feels like I'm expressing passion can be interpreted by the other person as like expressing nervousness. I don't know. Right?
Like that's, and keeping you really trapped in a very specific version of that and telling you not to do the thing that role players want to do, which is like let you in on my internal world creates I think a really interesting thing that is both very intimate, right? You're, you're locked eyes, you're describing very intimate acts, but also creates this like profound separateness.
Sharang: Yeah. And I like this point you're making of um, representing other things because some games go really far into that. Like they, they're, they're very absurdist uh, about depictions of
Alex: Yeah. Yeah.
Sharang: and, but that is still useful because we have uh, social ideas connected to sex. Right?
Alex: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We are, we, we can talk about spin the Beatle
Sharang: Yeah, that's what, that was me
Alex: because this is I know, I know. 'cause the thing is, this is another game by Vincent and Meguey Baker that is all about the actual sex act, but it's abstracted in of fun and ridiculous way.
So you play spin the bottle. But instead of, okay, the bottle landed on you, now we kiss. The bottle lands on you and I ask would you kiss my neck? But in this game is about bug sex and so many of the questions are like, would you insert your all repositor into my caribou opening or whatever, or would you consume me now that we are done or whatever?
And so that is this complete opposite kind of abstraction where you're talking about it, and I think truly the game is made by, you know, people who are interested in sex education because the idea is that this is a silly or, or a ridiculous thing to say, but this is actually like a way to talk about sex that some people very much need and are eager to learn.
Just that process of saying, Hey, would you do this? Because then the other person has a list of responses that range from like with pleasure to okay, if you show me how, and also include like heavens, no, I, I would never do such a thing, so.
Sharang: imagine like a Beatle being like, heavens no.
Alex: Right. So, and the, the, the questions that you ask, the would yous are prescribed. you kind of read them in order, but the responses are just a list of options and you, the player get to respond. So it is, That game obviously says something very specific about consent and is about sex acts, but is kind of taking place before a sexual encounter in certain ways.
But you are encouraged to sort of briefly play out whatever the ob, the off position or whatever it is you've just asked for. I
Sharang: There's a, a, a recent game by Kieron Gillen, the famed comic book writer who
Alex: mm-hmm.
Sharang: RPG. It's a small free game so you can download it. It's called How Do Aliens Do It? And it's a simple, fun game about alien teenager, preteens, or, you know, equivalent of preteens. Trying to figure out how sex happens in their society, biology culture. Right.
And
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: funny, like the example of play that they have has this line where one teen is like, wait, I think I figured out how sex happens. Okay. So I think we're all agreed. What happens is that you have to perform a seance to gather fertility, ghosts of your ancestors in a closed space, and they cover all the surfaces with ectoplasmic ooze and then et cetera, et cetera, right?
So this game is again it's absurdist in two ways, right? It's absurdist in that these are aliens, they can be having sex in all kinds of ways, um, but also
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: teens imagining how it might happen and coming up with wild ideas, right?
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: think this game does a number of things. One, it makes you think about why do we not talk about this and, and mechanics and stuff, right? But two it also makes us think about sex can be lots of things for lots of different people,
Alex: Yeah.
Yeah.
Sharang: and courtship and intimacy can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people in different ways, and they're all valid, right?
Alex: And it, it really says sex is weird, positive connotation. Like if you really look at it, anything, even the most, like quote unquote normal or like socially prescribed version of sex is bizarre. Like, what a weird thing to do.
Sharang: yes. And so here, I like these games because they're all about. no. Let us talk about sex. Describe sex. There's a great game by Yun-Su, who I
Alex: Oh, okay.
Sharang: Yun-Su Davis, a brilliant game designer called Pass the Sugar, Please. disclaimer. Yun-Su's game is in an anthology that I co-edited called Honey and Hot Wax, which is an anthology of RPGs, all about sex published by Pelgrane Press.
But in Yun-Su's game, you are people who were. Last night you were at a masked orgy, where you did all kinds of BDSM things, right? You all kinds of kinky things. Today, you have been gathered together for a friend's tea party. You all arrive and you don't know that you were all at the party because you were all masked, but you begin to suspect, Hmm, were you there? I think you were there.
But because your friend is not a kinkster, the birthday boy who is hosting the party, you can't outright say, were you at the orgy last night? Because you don't want to like, make people uncomfortable. Also, the, the orgy has rules about talking about it. So instead you ask questions about the Ogy by describing the food in front of you, and there's very specific food in front of you that the
Alex: Mm.
Sharang: like.
Burnt caramel tarts and like specific kinds of sandwiches and specific kinds of
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: and you are actually asking the question, what did you enjoy about the sex we had last night?
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: be asked the question, tell me how you take your tea. And they might be saying, I loved it when I was in the Bukake case scene,
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: on my face.
But you might actually say, oh my God, please put more cream in my tea. Just add more cream. You know what? Bring all the way, all the waiters can put cream in the tea, right? So this is a game
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: makes you, again, not talk about sex while talking about sex. And again, it does a multiple things, including bringing our awareness about like positive communication in SNM is really
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: get whatever. But, but it does a lot of interesting things about this whole idea of, of today is about talking about sex. What happened when you
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: no, no, don't talk about sex, right?
Alex: Yes. So 'cause Michel Foucault clearly did not say enough on that subject. Um, because again, we're, we're like, oh RPGs give you a way to talk about sex, which can be very taboo. People are in fact talking about sex constantly. They're just talking about it as a product or as an achievement or as a you know, mechanized thing.
Like. We're talking about different, or perhaps more direct, ironically, right? Like the, the please pass the sugar provides a much more direct framework for talking about sex acts than I think we actually get most places.
Sharang: then, and you Have a game, Alex, where we discuss, but you discuss in a very different way these kinds of things, right?
Alex: Yes. I just got to run this yesterday. This is also in the Honey and Hot Wax collection. My game about balloon fetishists or lunar s called Pop. And this is a game that takes place online, but you play it in person. we cover the walls with paper and you're kind of just writing forum posts to each other. So the players are silent, but they are constantly talking about sex because the only thing that unites these people, and the reason why they're all in the same forum is because they all like having sex with balloons.
And this is my own statement about sex, right? Which is that it's not just something that happens between people who are currently engaged in a sex act. It's also something that. Exists in you, right? You have asexuality, we could say. And also that it's something that creates communities and brings people together in different ways. And that it's also something that is fraught with like shame and awkwardness. A lot of the characters have that built in when they're talking about how they're attracted to balloons, but also that that only produces an even greater desire to talk about it with, with people who get it right.
And my experience is that like no one who's played this game has been like, oh yes, I too am sexually attracted to balloons. But my experience is that people definitely resonate with this idea that there's things inside them that they want to talk about, but they need to know that the other person will receive it, understand it, not reject them or judge them.
And so it's, you know, one of the ways I think people do that is in an anonymized way and do that online, particularly in the early internet. Like I think that's one of the things people really wanted to get up to in the sort of early days of widely available internet is talk about sex. Not because it's forbidden to talk about sex elsewhere, but it's definitely not encouraged or allowed to talk about these are the specific and non-normative things that I'm into and I want to explore it further.
Sharang: So I think this is an interesting idea that, so today our topic was about by focusing a little bit on Apocalypse World inspired games and their mo sex moves we wanted to talk about this idea of game. Game mechanics that are basically describe or don't describe, or describe the before or describe the after of sex.
Alex: Yeah.
Sharang: about describing. And something I notice now based on descriptions is that games that, have you describe or not describe this kinds of sex? Often the argument to the, the, the procedural rhetoric to quote
Alex: Mm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Sharang: of this games also is about communicating, right? Like the game is talk or don't talk about sex. And the ultimate meaning that we could draw from it is about how we talk or don't talk
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: right? And future episodes we can talk about different kinds of mechanics, not just about talking.
Alex: Mm-hmm.
Sharang: so we'll see if our conclusions are different. Are those mechanics conveying different kinds of ideas,
Alex: Yeah,
Sharang: about sex and sexuality?
Alex: I'm looking forward to that as well. 'cause you're right, there's lots of interesting overlap with the games that we've talked about that are just about talking. Yeah.
Sharang: Thank you so much for listening. We hope you stick around for the rest of the series.
Please support dice exploder if you can in any way you can because they deserve your support. They're really epic and they bring up really well needed conversations. Also, they support independent game designers very, very strongly.
Alex: So true.
So yeah, once again, I'm Alex Roberts. I'm a game designer. I have a Patreon. If you wanna see things that I think about games patreon.com/ hello, Alex Roberts and I'm also on Itch. I think I'm on Blue Sky. I don't know. Look it up.
I will also say if you go to hello alex roberts.card.co I think there's a link there to the honey and hot wax anthology where you can play pop. And the nice thing about that is if you're interested in pop, that's great, but you're gonna find like a dozen other amazing and really interesting and thought provoking sex related games in it,
Sharang: just Google Honey and Hot wax that will take you to a spa anywhere in the world that you want. It will give you a spa, Google Honey and Hot Wax LARPs or Honey and Hot Wax, Pel Thank you Alex. I'm Sharang Biswas, I am also a game designer and writer and professor and blah, blah, blah.
Find me on Blue Sky at showering dewa. Find me on h io at Astro lingus dot itch. Do io
and the big thing I wanna plug is I have my first book just came out. It's called The Iron Below Remembers, published by Neon Hemlock Press, and it , has been described as very horny by a couple of my blurbs. But I do feel in some reviews it said it does something interesting with sex. So it's not a book about sex. It's a sci-fi book
Alex: Hmm.
Sharang: all kinds of things, but it does something interesting about depictions of sexuality if you're interested. But yeah, that's again published by a small indie queer focused press. So do check that out.
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.