It’s October, and there’s something in the air. Literally. Maybe it’s dead leaves; I’m not sure. All I know is I go outside and things are just, well, electric. Here in New England the leaves are changing something awful, and everything is crisp and orange and fall. Heck, even Halloween’s coming - the greatest holiday ever. What could be more sexy?

Personally, I have the major hots for Halloween. It makes me go all crazy-like just being in a store with orange and black decorations. It messes with something in my blood. And, honestly, I want to know why.

A few days back, IGDA’s Sex SIG blog put up a post about sexuality and Halloween, how it inspires socially acceptable role playing and therefore open sexual exploration. That element is certainly present, but it’s also more complicated than the just the right to play dress up.

In part, it has to do with the fact that Halloween, like all of our scary “ritual times” (like midnight, for example) occurs on the cusp of explainable time - in this case, the cusp between one month and the next. Because of this, we experience an inversion: things that are normally taboo or illogical in our society become norms on Halloween, because we have fallen through the cracks - or, more precisely, because the chaos that is always lurking beneath the surface of reason is allowed to seep in through the spaces where our logic isn’t quite water-tight.

It’s this feeling, this boundless possibility, that makes Halloween so energizing. Both sexually and socially, it is a time of freedom, of taking off the mask of the self by putting on the mask of another.

Of course, that’s an over-simplication too. There are lots of other issues involved here, not the least of which is the extent to which the holiday is steeped in death. And you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to know where that connection is going.

Just some thoughts. Feel free to share your own. Or just let us in on some sexy Halloween stories…

The first rule of video games is you don’t talk about video games.

I recently played Indigo Prophecy for a review for The Onion’s AV Club. Sometimes I jumped, sometimes I laughed, but every so often I just cringed. Why? Forget the suspense, this game is littered with tacky video game self-references. Tyler smugly informs his witness, “It’s like a video game. Have you ever played a video game?” Yes, I tell my screen, but I might never again. Then there’s the article on Lucas’ computer about in-game violence inspiring real-life crime. This hard on the heels of a bloody, demonic bathroom murder. Taste, people. Please.

Maybe this isn’t exactly what Tyler Durden had in mind when he told us to keep our mouths closed, but the wisdom is pretty much the same. Blatant self-referencing in games isn’t fun. It’s hokey. Especially in a more-or-less serious title. Instead of hooking you in by identifying with your interests, it forces you out of the experience. It reminds you you’re a gamer, and not an unwitting murdered. It leaves you shaking your head. It makes you feel, well, yucky.

The question, I suppose, is “Why?”

Part of the appeal of video games, and one of the main ways in which they stand out from other mediums of entertainment, is the extent to which, through interactivity, they allow you to become someone else. Perhaps self-reference makes us uncomfortable because it messes with that experience, forcing us simultaneously to think of ourselves as our characters and our real, game-playing selves. In short, it confuses our boundaries.

Or, maybe the reason we enjoy gaming in general is because, for whatever reason, we don’t want to be ourselves for a while - whether because we’re not satisfied with who we are, or because there’s something gratifying in stepping outside the self. Either way, self-reference pushes us back, momentarily, into our real personhoods, which might just be the last place we want to be.

Beyond all the intellectual whatnot, the whole thing is just kind of campy.

Meaning what exactly? It’s complicated; ask Susan Sontag.* Let’s suffice to say that camp is characterized by self-aware self-reference, by conscious burlesque, played with a level of dead-pan sincerity. Something so bad it’s good. It’s about performing. Performing self, performing gender. Playing a role. Which is something, when you think about it, that video gamers should be able to identify easily, since, as players, that’s really all we do. That seems to imply that not just self-reference in games, but games themselves innately fall in the realm of camp.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Camp is rarely considered high art, but it has a world to say about culture. Mostly, it’s just interesting to think of a concept that’s so closely linked with travesty, with queering the norm, that has such close ties to video games, which are often taken so seriously, and which are surrounded by a mostly straight culture.

Even good camp requires cleverness and thought. Indigo Prophecy’s slapdash references don’t fit that mold, but they do let us see how seriously we’ve come to take our games. Maybe, for a little bit, we should lighten up. There’s a lot we can learn from parodies of ourselves, and from acknowledging the parody of life we perform each and every time we pick up a controller.

*Who’s lovely essay “Notes on Camp” has thought the issue through with far more precision than I have.

Having come within moments of posting a nice little piece on self-reference in video games, I came across this New York Times article, as linked through GameGal, and I just can’t hold my tongue.

“A Game Console for the Rest of Us” tells us readers about how Microsoft is taking a new direction with the 360, and, instead of catering to “hardcore” gamers, is “aiming for your mothers and wives.” Yup, they’re after the mainstream itself, but, as one analyst predicts, “It’s a tough sell.”

This, at first, may seem like a good thing. Hey, Microsoft is interested in advertising directed at women; they care about women as consumers. How can that be bad?

First of all, women gamers are NOT “the rest of us.” This approach is only messes with conceptions of equality. It makes the obnoxious assumption that all “hardcore”, aka “real”, gamers are male. Some women don’t need special flowery ads, or girl “mainstream” titles. Real girl gamers exist, and at least one of them is pissed.

Next point: the idea itself implies that women are peripheral. It’s not that Microsoft is seeking out young women and campaigning toward their interests. They’re talking about “mothers” and “wives” - women defined only in relationship to gaming men. Which essentially says, We’re not interested in women as gamers, we’re interested in them as extensions of our real consumers. But since they are sort of naggy, it’s important to win them over, since they control the purse strings. Come on.

(I’m nobody’s mother, and nobody’s wife. And you know what, if I were a girl who played Madden, after reading those quotes from Microsoft, I’d be fuming.)

The fact of the matter is, Microsoft is majorly missing the boat. They’re pretending to care. And there’s one big reason why they fail: they don’t actually give a damn. Look a little closer at what they’re saying here. Women gamers, not important. What’s important to them is money. Get your mom to like the 360 and she’ll fork over the cash.

It’s just one more part of Microsoft’s plan to smash down the walls of the gaming community and make video games a totally mainstream (and therefore totally more profitable) thing. Why do you think they got into this business in the first place? Sure, they make a good product, but the people who develop are different from those who sell. We’re talking big business here. And, as someone interested in the uniqueness of the gaming culture, I can’t say I’m too pleased.

Gender equality, my ass. They’d be marketing to your grandparents if they thought it would bring in the dough. Wives and mothers. Really! Someone should be slapped.

First off, a question to all: does pornographic machinima exist? Even if no one’s done it yet, I imagine it’s only a matter of time - especially considering how many sex-based MMO’s have recently come out…

The idea itself raises a lot of questions. Would pornographic machinima have the same implications as normal pornography? Machinima is already such a strange, complicated medium. It lets us mold a world inside our screens, only to freeze it again; it re-subtracts the layer of interactivity, pancake-ing the visuals of gameplay, and somehow therefore creating art. But what would it mean to do that with a sex-based game?

For one, it would remove actual people, actual bodies, from the creation of pornography - which has, of course, both its good and bad points. It also would do strange things to the subject/object relationship. Porn is porn because it involves a subject, the viewer, and an object, the viewed film/woman/couple/whatever. There is no second subject, no dialogue, as in healthy, real-life sex (Not that porn is necessarily unhealthy, but that real-life sex that involves objectification, unless wholly conscious on the part of all involved, probably isn’t a good thing.). In video games, however, this dynamic is altered by the existence of interactivity, which by definition creates a dialogue.

Yet machinima, in halting the element of interactivity, brings us back again to pornography. Even if we aren’t watching two “real” people have sex, the element of voyeurism, of sneaking a peak of something forbidden, is the same - except that, with machinima, the dirty attraction isn’t to watching someone else’s sex per se, but to watching someone else’s gameplay.

In this way, not just machinima porn but all video game-based machinima is innately voyeuristic in that it takes pleasure in watching the interactivity of others. It’s also largely pornographic, in that it necessitates a ceased subjectivity, and a reappearance of the object.

I noticed this today after following a link from Game Politics to Jack Thompson’s new book. It’s very strange; check it out.

It appears, for one reason or another, that most of the Amazon books and fan lists associated with Out of Harm’s Way have to do with gay male sex. They include titles like A Guide to Spiritual and Sensual Handballing and Gay Men and Anal Eroticism, and lists like “Rock around the Ass” and “Sexy for Men”. I’m totally serious.

As much as I’m against slandering someone’s name with the oh-so-horrible implications of “gayness” (even if it is Jack Thompson), this is pretty amusing. Besides, I get the feeling Thompson probably isn’t too keen on homosexuals, so I’m thinking it serves him right.

I’m not sure how someone did this. Did they just click the hell out of Amazon? Or was it an inside job? Whoever’s responsible, you have my respect. It’s one thing to come straight out and fight Thompson, but it’s somehow more effective, in the minds of those ridiculous Americans who would actually be interested in his book, to just associate him with evil itself: gay people. Even if, for a few brief moments, you have to sink to their level.

All I can hope is that scores of flustered mothers now cancel their book orders and, with that extra cash, run out to buy video games, really sexy ones, just to stick it to that “gay”.

Then again, maybe gay men who buy anal sex guides also just love Jack Thompson. Something tells me, probably not.

Check this out: the following is a tiny selection from the list of “bad words” that VIPER, the guestbook program I use for this site, is preset to watch out for. Hmm, let’s see if we can find a trend here.

———————————————
! WARNING !
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English Badwords
The following lines contain rude words and expressions !

analdrilling, arsebandit, arsehole, arsejockey, arselicker, arsenuts, arsewipe, assgrabber, asshole, assfucking, assfuck, assrammer, assreamer, asswipe, badass, bastard, beating the meat, beef curtains, beef flaps, biatch, bitch, bizzach, blow job, boobies, boob, boy love, breasts, buggery, bullshit, busty, butt pirate, buttfucker, carpet muncher, carpetlicker, clitsucker, clit, cock sucker, suck my cock, cock, cockpouch, cracka, crap, cum, cunt…

Trust me, it goes on from there. Heck, this is just the ABC’s.

First off, it’s downright hilarious. Personally, I think “arsejockey”, “beef curtains”, and “butt pirate” are my three favorites. Not that these words would ever come out of my mouth, mind you. They’re just fucking funny.

On a more constructive note, there’s lots of interesting cultural issues we can talk about in regards to this list - which, in all fairness, is really just a random sample of all such lists and the mentality behind them. On the simplest level, they’re designed to keep things “appropriate”, aka non-sexual (Sorry VIPER, wrong website.). On closer examination, they raise a lot important points. One, the vast majority of our English “bad words” and curse words are actually sexual in origin. Two, our sexual words are amazingly abundant. And three, what we fear most, what we consider most important to censor, isn’t racism or hatred (While the word “nazi” does appear farther down the list, so do twelve different variations on the word “vagina”) but common discourse on sexuality.

Clearly, we’ve codified sex and sexually confrontational language as bad, whether by changing its meaning to that of an insult, or merely by associating it with low culture and “inappropriate” thoughts/behavior/comments. The sex taboo, or at least the taboo of speaking openly about sex, has permeated even our casual speech. Just think about what it means to be “fucked” (thank you, Angela Carter). Yet, at the same time we turn our moral backs on such language, we show it, linguistically, the highest respect simply by generating so many words. As much as we (well, at least some people) would like to believe we’re above sex banter, we continue to generate more and more terms. Something truly unimportant to us would warrant only a minimal number of words. Like zucchini. How many ways do you know to say zucchini?

In the end, we have something of a love/hate, dare I say sadomasochistic relationship with our selves and our proclivity for “bad words”. We love them, but we hate that we love them. We’ve turned them into hateful things, and given us an excuse to hate ourselves.

What does any of this have to do with gaming? I could note how often language like this is thoughtlessly (as in literally without thought to its meaning) used in video game web forums. For now, however, I’m just going to play the “gamers are part of larger American culture” card, and bask in the side-splitting glory of “arsejockey”.