Plus, in order to fully realize a queer character’s queerness, we’re gonna have to talk about sex, baby. Addressing these norms head-on is a way to expand the world that the game is building, and also to challenge our cultural norms around sex. They’re based off the norms that we know, even though the settings are fantastical and their social structures are completely different.
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When left to write their own rules, ERP communities tend to mirror their real-life counterparts: kink-positive but with a double standard against women, heteronormative and full of casual sexual harassment (even in-game, a male avatar can pursue a female one relentlessly). The backlash is gendered and misogynistic in two parts: first, writer Jennifer Hepler, who wrote some of the romantic plots of the game, was harassed until she ultimately left BioWare, a depressingly familiar narrative for women in gaming two, in the same way that the Romance section in a bookstore is considered full of bad literature for frivolous women, serious narrative devotion to romance and erotica in a game is “something that somehow drains roleplay gaming of its grittier essence and threatens to drown epic storylines in cooties.”īacklash aside, games that distance themselves from their romantic and erotic subcultures also tacitly reinforce the problems within our own sexual culture. BioWare’s Dragon Age 2 received a lot of criticism from straight male gamers for its romantic plotlines and openly gay characters (in one especially harrowing part of the game, a male character flirts with the player even if the player has chosen to roleplay as a man). This isn’t to say that developers aren’t trying to bring sex and sexuality into games. When an RPG provides at most the barest romantic tropes for its characters, people will always fill in the rest themselves, adding in queerness and kink where the game developers are silent.
I know people who find reading erotica to be hotter than watching porn. After all, everyone knows how to, you know, do it.” RPGs, for the most part, consider sex and romance separate and unnecessary to the plots rulebooks rarely deal with issues of “consent, sexual diversity or orientation, or the sexual culture of the world one is playing in.” Meanwhile, romance and sexuality are the entire point of ERPs, whether it’s to further explore a character’s development, to provide a space for a player to explore their own sexuality or, for some, to get turned on. It’s there, everyone does it, but it need not be discussed openly. “Sex and sexuality in RPGs are understood as both ubiquitous and unspeakable. The ERP community has a murky relationship with the wider RPG community. In a recent article for Bitch Magazine, Katherine Cross wrote about the underground culture of erotic roleplaying (ERP) in games like World of Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my years as an awkward, questioning teenager with unsupervised internet access, it’s that there’s a sexual sub-subculture to every subculture.
While it’s not necessary for a game to define the relationship and sexual norms of its world, you can bet the players think about them. For every simulation game like The Sims, which has been helping us live out our queer suburban fantasies since 2000, there are dozens of other mainstream games that… well, focus on things besides sex and romance. Sexism, racism and homophobia in the larger gaming community aside, it’s just plain hard to find games that feature queer characters or roleplaying games (RPG) that allow players to queer up their own characters. It can be hard out there for a queermo gamer. The 200 Best Lesbian, Bisexual & Queer Movies Of All Time.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.
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