At A MAZE./Berlin, former Superlevel author Dennis and I had the opportunity to speak with Robert Yang. Yang earned himself the reputation as an expert in penis games and gave a talk on the first day of the festival, where he spoke about everything he knows about digital sex and peculiar private anecdotes. And for those who couldn’t be there, he may introduce himself:

---

Robert YangHi, my name is Robert Yang, I’m a video game developer and video game academic and I teach at NYU, I’m based in Brooklyn and I make a lot of gay sex video games.

Dennis Kogel Just for reference, can you describe one of your gay sex video games – like, can you describe “Stick Shift”?

RobertStick Shift is a game where you give your car – your gay car – a hand job. It’s important that this car is gay, cause it is, and in this game you kind of manipulate the stick shift gearstick in the car and as you manipulate it more and more you bring the car to climax.

Dennis That is super lovely. Why are you making gay sex video games? Why is that important to you?

RobertIt’s important to me partly because I’m gay, so I feel like a lot of games don’t really speak to my experience, so I want to be obvious, visible as a gay, like, you know, ‘these are gay games, this is a gay car, these are gay men performing for themselves and not for you’, right. So I felt it was kind of important as a political thing, because I feel like growing up I didn’t really have gay role models in the game industry. Like, God forbid I’m a role model for anyone, but I do wanna be visible and to show that there are gay people making gay alternative work.

Dennis What are the difficulties of bringing gay sex into a game experience? What’s hard about it?(Haha, pun intended.)

RobertWhat’s hard, what’s erect about it is that… the media ecosystem does not support gay sex in video games that well. My games are actually… some of them have trouble being on YouTube – they get flagged or taken down, videos of those games – or Twitch, two of my games are banned from Twitch entirely. If you try to broadcast those games on Twitch, Twitch might ban you, as well. And Twitch is one of the biggest game culture platforms in the world and it kinda sucks to be banned from that entire platform, just because it has a few dicks or something.

Dennis What has the reaction been like to your games?

RobertWhen they do get on YouTube, it’s mostly straight cis men who play these games and when they play these gay sex games, some of them experience panic and their eyes bulge out and then they can’t even play it. But then, after they kind of get over it a little bit, they start thinking ‘how can I exploit this and be kind of gross about it?’. So some of the people who play my games, they actually use it to kind of make fun of gay sex in this really gross way, they react as if it’s bad and funny, because it’s gay, not because it’s depicting an absurd twist on how people are gay. They mutate it and distort it into this kind of gross thing, where they’ll be like ‘uuuuh, gay games, uuuh, this is disgusting’ and then it makes me feel really bad, because I feel like… by making that game, I’ve given them a platform to be gross and homophobic. So sometimes I do kinda feel really bad about what I’m doing. I feel like it’s not working sometimes.

Dennis What do you hope to see in sex in games? What do you hope to see more of?

RobertI hope to see more diverse representations of sex. I hope to see kind of more… frankly, explicit depictions of sex, as well. If you show a boob, Steam might ban you and that means the biggest storefront in video games, pretty much, has banned you from distribution. So I’m hoping to see us pushing more boundaries and pressuring game industry and infrastructure more to enable more sex games, ’cause it’s actually really hard to make money off sex games for some reason. Sex sells, but it’s hard to get paid for sex, which is actually a huge issue across all kind of sex adjacent industries. Sex workers get banned from credit card companies and PayPal and stuff, just because of their line of work. I wouldn’t say that I face the same level of scrutiny as sex workers, but I would say I’m hopefully one of their allies and I totally understand their problem and I think that’s a global, a societal problem: destigmatizing sex.

Nina Kiel When reading your blog posts, one will notice that you put a lot of thought in your games, but most people – even though they like your games – don’t really notice. Does that bother you, that people don’t see the content behind what you can see immediately? The political statements?

RobertYeah, I guess it’s something I’ve learnt to accept, especially with the YouTube stuff – to accept that I’m only responsible for, like, half of the meaning and that the player’s responsible for the other half, so I guess that’s something I’ve just had to accept. Sometimes it’s really great when people bring new interpretations to the work. I think I put out statements, because… I think intent matters, actually. And I hope that some people do read it and that it affects the interpretation. Like, with my original games, the ‘radiator’ games – those are about a gay divorce and stuff – I wasn’t really statisfied with how people were talking about it, so that’s actually when I started writing about my games, ’cause I was like ‘that’s what you’re saying about, like… what about this and this and this’, so it’s kinda my way of affecting the conversation, but I accept that that influence is limited… I guess.

Nina Kiel In your talk you mentioned ‘Dragon Age: Inquisition’ as an example for a game that tries too hard to show ‘good sex’. Would you say it’s better to not include the sex or… is it necessary to improve it, because you can’t really show explicit sex in AAA games. So would it be better to just not include it than to show this kind of sex?

RobertI think it’s weird how… it’s like a fantasy world of magic and the sex is not magical. I think when I say the game’s sex is ‘good’ and clean and stuff I mean it doesn’t bleed out into the rest of the game. It doesn’t affect the rest of the game. It’s very neat and cut off in its own package and system. When you have sex in the ‘Dragon Age: Inquisition’ game, it doesn’t affect pretty much anything else, when ideally it should be like ‘oh, you just had sex with this character, this character feels really good and has more health now’ or something. Of course, people then game it and stuff, so that may be why they avoided that, but I don’t think that’s a good excuse. I think you should just figure out how to make it affect the rest of the game and feel like it actually matters, I would say. Just ’cause it’s a very mechanics-y strategy game in some respects, it should affect mechanics and strategy. Otherwise it’s not even important to the game, really, right?

Nina Kiel Do you feel that we’re slowly getting there? I mean, ‘Dragon Age: Inquisition’ for example at least includes queer couples and shows so many different relationships, so at least that’s something we achieved right now. Do you think that’s a good sign and maybe we can expect to have better sex in the near future?

RobertI would agree that it’s better, but that doesn’t mean it’s good yet. Like, the one trans character in ‘Dragon Age: Inquisition’ basically exists as to prove a character moment in another character. That wasn’t a good example of a trans character. So it’s like… it felt really strange to me that people were loving it, when really, it was very tokenesque and I felt like they were just there to prove a point about something, to be part of someone else’s story. And I kinda want to call it out. Hopefully I’m not like a huge jerk about it, but…. I think… hopefully it comes across as honest criticism. Yes, the game industry is getting better, but I hope that’s just the first of many steps.

Nina Kiel That’s a very broad question, but what do you think needs to change so that we can accept games like yours on Steam or on Twitch? What’s the reason for them to get banned? I mean, we have the tendency to accept violence, but not sex, and it’s a general problem of our society. How can we change that?

RobertA lot of it has to do with how these huge institutions view risk. They think ‘oh, why would I take on this high risk thing when there’s not much money in it for me, or not much profit, or gain to be had for me’, right, and it would make sense for them to ban it. It’s still wrong, but I understand the logic. If you talk to Steam or Valve or maybe even Apple or something, they’ll say that they have to ban it, because of how credit card companies and how capitalism thinks about risk and tries to isolate that out. So, because sex stuff is high risk that means they should not serve it, which is bad and problematic for a lot of reasons. So, I think for stuff to happen in games and change meaningfully in games, we might have to dismantle capitalism or something.