Well, I’m officially moved in here in Ireland. I haven’t had my first beer yet, but the season is young. And yes, things are very green.
At the same time I’ve been moving, I’ve been working on a piece for Gamasutra about a sex-themed design challenge that took place back in November, and looking at the question of presenting interactive sex. Interviewing for the piece has brought me back a number of times to an issue that we’ve discussed here on Heroine Sheik before, namely in-game sex as funny. That is, if the controls are too straight forward (up, down, thrust, up, down, thrust), or if the visuals are too explicit, in-game sex gets laughable. But why?
Maybe we’re laughing at the game. We can take sex on our screens when it’s masked, hinted at, symbolized. But when it’s plain old sex, we see clearly how absurd it is - rendered bodies with rendered parts going through preprogrammed motions. And simple controls pose the same problem: in reducing sex to a basic game, we begin to understand the game is ridiculous.
Really though, the absurdity that makes us laugh isn’t the absurdity of the game, it’s the absurdity of ourselves. We see our own bodies, our own actions, which we assume are so complex, reflected to us on a screen, and we’re allowed to see just how ridiculous we are. Up, down, thrust, up, down, thrust - that may seem silly, but essentially it’s not too far off the mark. As a culture that looks at sex from a million different angles, that thinks about it twenty-four hours a day, how absurd does that make us, that mere simplicity?
In laughing, of course, we displace our personal discomfort onto the bodies on the screen. We find them funny so we don’t have to understand that the joke is on us.
January 11th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Humor at its best is a way to uncover a masked truth in a way that will allow to both take conscience of that truth and evacuate the pression of the realisation via laughter.
I think most people who laugh when confronted with such a mecanic depiction of sexuality do so because it makes them realise that, without emotional investment, without self-inforcement of social codes, you might as well describe sex a the act of rubbing two pieces of meat together till they start oozing.
It’s not so much that it makes us absurd as it strips down our whole existence of everything that makes it significant, reavealing the whole absurdity at its core. Given that we generally need sense to act, or at least, and more importantly, to get volition of action, it can prove very depressing to see things in this light.
Thus laughter.
January 11th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
Just goes to show, the uncanny valley doesn’t just exist in looks alone.
January 11th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
Interesting way of putting things, even though I never really new what to do with the whole uncanny valley theory, so I’m a bit at loss here.
Mmmmmmmhhh… :?
January 12th, 2006 at 8:52 am
See, q, you say something I don’t understand, and I look it up like a good blogger. What an interesting concept (and, I assume, researched phenomenon) though - things close and far we can empathize with, but somewhere in between make us uncomfortable because they reflect the performance which is ourselves. In this case, far is symbolic sex, close is pornography and in between… well, somewhat realistic in-game sex. Just restating your point, q, and slowly understanding :-).
January 13th, 2006 at 10:54 am
The uncanny valley problem exists with dramatic virtual characters as well. Micheal Mateas put it to me (paraphrasing) as a gap between the resolution of the body and the resolution of the virtual mind. I said, “well, why don’t we just whip up a virtual mind then?” He laughed, “its not that simple.”
This post flashes to my mind images of that Jenna Jameson sex game, which looked not only absurd, but not really hot at all. Constrast to Indigo Prophcey, which featured a similarly hyperrealistic rendering of a sex scene that was, at best, softcore (there was even a lack of nipple on the woman, which was kinda pathetic in my book). IndigoProphecy’s sex scene was at least beleavable as a plot point, and though I wasn’t exactly emotionally invested, it made a representative impression, probably because of the way the rendering was handled.
Bottom line: you gotta have virtual characters who feel something for each other in order for virtual sex to have weight.
January 14th, 2006 at 7:56 am
Hmmm, but what exactly does weight mean? Is weight narrative meaning? Is weight the power to arouse?
January 15th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
In “Stranger in a Strange Land,” the hero, Valentine Michael Smith (who was raised on Mars), doesn’t understand humor. He finally has an epiphany while watching monkeys beat the crap out of each other at the zoo. He collapses on the floor laughing, and his friend, not understanding — because it’s not really *funny* funny; more cruel and slice-of-life — asks why he’s laughing.
“I’m laughing because it’s impossible to cry all the time,” he replies. [I’m paraphrasing here].
What is funny — and interestingly, what is erotic or sexy — all depends on which side of the camera you’re on. If you’re getting cream pie on your face, it probably ain’t funny to you, but it may be to the folks on the other side of the camera. On the other hand, if you’re getting hair pie on your face (please excuse… I couldn’t help the pun), it may seem incredibly erotic to you… but very funny to somebody on the other side of the lens.
Sex is almost never funny to the folks doing it. Do dogs think it’s funny when they hump your leg? No. But we sometimes do. Do people with weird (by Brady Bunch standard) kinks think that what they do is funny? No. But it’s not just a sex thing. The “invisible lens” changes everything, and observing something vs. doing it is the difference, especially when it comes to humor and sex, two of the most charged areas of our lives.
Now… if you can have a good sense of humor about your own sex life, and realize that, no… your gonads are not the center of the universe, well that can lead to a sex life of much more fun, frivolity and creativity. But that doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that you still look (to other people) like a shaved gibbon having a seizure when you orgasm. Just remember… so do they ; )
January 16th, 2006 at 5:42 am
Sex is almost never funny to the folks doing it.
I would disagree; I think sometimes the people having the sex are the only ones with a sense of humor/perspective. Porn stars, for example, don’t take sex as seriously as the people who get off watching them. I suppose though that’s the difference between the performance of sex, or just sex - whereas normally it’s hard to draw the line.