spinofflive
gal_gun_010-850×478

Pop CultureMarch 31, 2017

‘Treating people with respect isn’t a buzzkill’: how big studios should handle sex and consent in games

Guest writer
gal_gun_010-850×478

In their Spinoff debut, Tof Eklund examines the way sex and consent are treated in video games, and highlights a few things big studios could learn from indie developers. 

I’m not a wowzer, I swear. As an American ex-pat, you might even expect me to hold a “First Amendment” view of government censorship. The US has reaped the bounty of Constitutional protection for hate speech and legislative bans on sex education, there can be no doubt of that. Still, I have to say: when the OFLC banned Gal*Gun: Double Peace, it was no loss. There are games out there that deal with sex, consent, relationships, and consequences is meaningful, not-creepy ways, but Gal*Gun is not one of them.

There’s no nudity in Gal*Gun, and no sex scenes as such. Instead, it’s a game that’s all about sexual titillation that passes off sexual assault as a joke. The plot is some kind of BS about an angel helping a young man find true love, but the game is a first-person shooter where you pick off anime schoolgirls with a “pheromone gun,” causing them to confess their love to you, moan, and collapse. It’s not enough that this is Orgazmo: the game, they also have to fall in love with their assailant.

Sadly, this isn’t new. Sex in games has long been sublimated into violence, from the naked women in alien pods that you couldn’t rescue but could blow up in Duke Nukem 3D to Bayonetta using pole-dancing moves to shoot sexy angels in the head with her gun-shoes. Impossible physical proportions, “jiggle physics,” and chainmail bikinis are more common and more acceptable than a simple bedroom scene or a bare nipple. If I see one more dungeon crawler with succubi that flash their pastie-armored tits and cry out orgasmically as they die, I’m going to plotz.

Thank the gods of gaming, whatever they are, for the indie scene. Women and queers (and queer women aye) are making games that everyone can learn a thing or two from. Recent titles by Christine Love, Sugarscript, and Kinmoku take issues of consent, relationships, and the consequences of intimacy seriously, and they’re more interesting and, when they want to be, sexier for it. Funny how treating other people with respect isn’t a buzzkill.

Kinmoku’s One Night Stand has precisely one thing in common with Gal*Gun: there’s no sex in it. A short, intimate game about waking up in a stranger’s bed with a brutal hangover and no recollection of the night before, it’s all about the aftermath of a one night stand. Poignant and surprising, One Night Stand doesn’t condemn barhopping or hookups, but neither does it offer the player any sense of sexual satisfaction or “conquest”. Instead, the player is invited into the disorientation, discomfort, and, above all, awkwardness of the situation.

That awkwardness is actually a really compelling motivation, as the player has the chance to learn more about their bedmate and see her as a complete human being, or to be a real jerk – and get called on it. Either way, the woman is her own person, and nothing you can do will either make her fall madly in love with you or be completely chill about casual sex.

While One Night Stand is a subtle take on the consequences of casual sex, Cute Demon Crashers is a light-hearted validation of female sexuality. The game’s protagonist, Claire, isn’t naive, but she is hung up on her own virginity. Her angst draws the attention of some friendly sex demons, who then get stuck in her house for a day waiting for their dimensional portal to re-open. They’re really quite harmless, with nary a contract signed in blood to be seen: the game’s definition of “demon” appears to be “supernatural sex therapist.” Claire has all day to get to know them and decide if she wants to have her first time with one of them that night. There’s the strong, gentle one, the cultured BDSM incubus, the eager young one who hasn’t had his first time yet, and a cute succubus who couldn’t care less what it “means” if Claire chooses her.

The sex, when it happens, if it happens, is explicit but not dramatic. The BDSM option is intentionally featherweight, blindfolds and chocolate, and the others follow suit, offering comfortable, pleasant trysts, nothing complicated or mind-blowing. Heaven help the poor soul whose first time is their best! The most interesting and original element of the game is that you can end intimate scenes at any point. Not skip, end: Clarie lets her partner know that that’s all she’s comfortable with for now, and her partner assures her that that’s okay without making a big deal out of it, just like any decent human being would. When has Hollywood ever done that? The closest thing I can think of is when Scott Pilgrim respects Ramona Flowers’ boundaries in Scott Pilgrim vs the World, and critics blasted Ramona as “unlikeable” and “manipulative” for that. Hello virgin-whore dichotomy, bane of womankind!

Ladykiller in a Bind is a much larger and more ambitious project than either One Night Stand or Cute Demon Crashers. Christine Love has been creating queer, character-driven games about sex, relationships, trust, gender roles and power differential games for years, and her latest work is specifically and sometimes explicitly about queer kink. Popular conceptions of BDSM were completely screwed up even before Fifty Shades of Grey: remember “the gimp” from Pulp Fiction? Damn you, Quentin Tarantino.

Well, Love has come to town with a much needed corrective. The hero of Ladykiller in a Bind is “The Beast,” a butch lesbian who has been maneuvered by her scheming brother “The Prince” into taking his place on a senior cruise. A pawn in a multifaceted game of deception and manipulation, The Beast finds respite in the honest communication and trust that (real) BDSM relationships require. Social games seep into everything else in the story, including vanilla flirtations, dating, and sex, but informed and discussed D/s play creates a magic circle that power struggles cannot enter, and trust radiates from that safe space. It’s surprisingly wholesome.

Big-budget “AAA” games have made some progress toward plausible representation of sex, consent, and relationships in recent years. For that, I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to Anita Sarkeesian for persisting in the face of the frothing misogynist rage of “Gamergate” (not to be confused with GamersGate, a long-standing Swedish online game store that I thought would have rebranded by now, I means geez, it’s like running a bicycle shop and newsstand named “Bikemart News” or being the bald owner of a yarn store named “The Angora Brotherhood”). When The Witcher came out in 2007, it was full of women Geralt of Riva could have boring one-night stands with, without strings or characterization, and the player was rewarded with a nudie card for each one. In 2015, The Witcher 3 had risen to the level of soap opera romance, as Gerald gets a convenient bout of amnesia and is nursed back to health by a new love interest, and then has to choose between her and his old flame when she shows up and his memory returns.

More Reading

Then Mass Effect: Andromeda hit stores in March, and the game a Bioware manager tweeted was “totally softcore space porn” was a clear improvement of the puritanic lewdness of Mass Effect 3, whose tame sex scenes took place fully clothed, but whose female characters’ costumes were painted on and regularly featured in butt close-ups. In Andromeda, the characters shipknits and space armor are reasonable, and the sex scenes are fully nude and very nearly softcore. Uh, that would be except for the one gay romance option, where they kiss and then the screen fades to black, presumably because Mass Effect’s animators are deeply insecure about their sexuality and really just need a hug.

I suppose you could say that games have (ahem) come a long way, even if NieR: Automata does allow players to look up it’s hero’s skirt and see her panties… and give the player an achievement for doing so. I expect we’ll continue to see the big companies continue to drag their feet as they attempt to address criticism without changing their cultures or diversifying their workforce, but who cares about them? There are some awesome indies making games that matter, and some of those games are really hot, if that’s your thing. Sugarscript is hard at work on Cute Demon Crashers “Side B,” which features a young gay man and all-new incubui, and I look forward to seeing what Kinmoku, Christine Love and other indies from LongStory and Failbetter, to Porpentine and Anna Anthropy do next.

This post, like all our gaming posts, was brought to you with the help of our mates at Bigpipe Broadband

Keep going!
p1090432.movpaul_iv_001.00_28_19_20.still002_1024

Pop CultureMarch 31, 2017

The New Zealander behind one of the world’s best distortion pedals

Guest writer
p1090432.movpaul_iv_001.00_28_19_20.still002_1024

From his home in Mt Eden, Paul Crowther makes one of the best distortion pedals in the world. Henry Oliver asks him how he does it.

The first distortion pedal I ever wanted was a Boss DS-1. But only because I knew that Kurt Cobain used one and I was learning guitar by playing his songs. Years later, the next one I wanted was a Hot Cake, a mysterious New Zealand made pedal that everyone in every local band seemed to have. And it seemed like everytime a cool indie band toured, they made a pilgrimage to get one. What was this thing? Who made it? And how did every distortion-phile in the world know about this thing?

After owning one for years, and then not owning one for a few more years, I was reminded of the Hot Cake on a visit to the Volume exhibition at the Auckland Museum. I listened to the YouTube-esque demo guitar licks and twisted the knobs, remembering what it sounded like and wishing there was a Prunes and Custard pedal (Crowther’s other great invention) next to it. Then, a week or so later, I travelled to suburban Mt Eden to get the answers to the questions I had asked myself all those years ago.

Video by José Barbosa

The Spinoff: How does the Hot Cake work?

Paul Crowther: If you have an amplifier and turn it beyond its limit, it will overload and that’s distortion. We can create that effect at lower volume. The Hot Cake is a preamplifier that overloads at a certain point, depending on what you set it to. But it works a bit differently to a lot of other ones. As it overloads, it produces a fatter, warmer sound than a lot of others do.

How does it sound different to other distortion pedals?

I came up with the idea first in 1976 and the other distortion pedal around was the fuzzbox. If you wanna hear the classic fuzz box sound, just listen to ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones. Then people looked at getting an overdrive rather than straight out fuzz, just to give a bit more expression to a guitar sound, so you can push the sound.

A lot of instruments do that besides electronic instruments – a flute can be blown hard to produce harmonics. It was called distortion but you could also call it wave-shaping. And when you overdrive, you produce more overtones, over and above what’s already in the signal and that can sounds a bit edgy and fuzzy.

The Hot Cake works in a different way in that, as you drive it harder, the overtones are attenuated so you get a warmer distortion sound.

What lead to the invention? Was it a dissatisfaction with that was currently available?

I was was the Split Enz in England at the time. Noel Crobie, who was with Split Enz doing largely percussion and a lot theatrical type things like standing on stage doing anything – that was quite good, quite effective – he would occasionally crash around on guitar, playing complete rubbishy stuff on the guitar and I built one into his guitar so the guitar would distort by itself without using a separate box. And he thought it sounded a bit too professional for what he did and I thought, that’s good. After I came back to New Zealand, I started making a few for friends and some for local music shops and it just grew from there.

How’s it changed over the years?

The fundamental workings of it, the principle on which it works, haven’t changed at all. But I’ve added and changed the tone circuit a little bit and anything to make it more reliable. But apart from that it really hasn’t changed in 40 years.

AN OLDER HOT CAKE (PROBABLY ’80S)

Do you make them all at home?

We do. We have the circuit boards made, then my wife Jo loads the parts on, then I add the controls and wire them all up and test them. They all get tested twice.

How many are you making a year?

Not as many as I was a few years ago. Between the Hot Cake, the Double Hot Cake and the Prunes and Custard pedal, about 800 maybe.

What is it about the Hot Cake that has given it both popularity and longevity?

I think, from a guitarist’s point of view, they plug it in and switch it on and they haven’t lost the guitar tone. The tonality is still pretty much intact but as they drive it harder, the sound gets bigger and fatter, but still with quite good clarity. And they handle chords quite well. In any instrument, the low notes are a lot more electronically powerful than the high notes and they will tend to override, but in the Hot Cake they don’t as much.

FRESH HOT CAKES

When you’re working with electronics in this way, do you know what the sonic outcome will be or is it a process of experimentation?

Sometimes you know in advance, but when you’re going outside the bounds of how circuits are supposed to work, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You can take a pretty good guess. You kind of know what to do to get a certain type of effect but you don’t know exactly how it’s going to behave or respond. Or how it’s going to behave dynamically. It’s one thing to put something on the test bench and put a steady test signal through it, like a tone. It’s something very different if you’ve got a dynamic signal like a guitar and someone playing it.

How did it get the name Hot Cake? Were you selling that many?

After I came back to New Zealand from being in England with the Enz, I was forming another band with some friends and we were trying to think of a name. I was saying we needed a name that would sell, a name that was catchy, and Doug Rogers, who was running Harlequin Studios at the time, said, ‘Call the band the Hot Cakes’. And I said, ‘No, that’s what I’ll call my pedal. That’s it! Hot Cake!’

When I made the new pedal, I just said ‘Prunes and Custard’. In fact, the first ones I made were called a Google Box. Since then, we’ve got Google, but I liked the word Googly. So there’s a couple around, just with printing tape, which say Google Box. And then I gave it a subname, all in one word like one of those German names, HarmonicGenerator-Intermodulator. I thought it sounded quite cool. But it’s basically what any distortion does.

The Spinoff’s music content is brought to you by our friends at Spark. Visit Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa (also supported by Spark), which includes a Hot Cake you can play with, at Auckland Museum from now until 22 May 2017 and get closer to the music you love.

Pop Culture