Can sex be a form of fighting? In my Joystiq piece, “Going Head to Head in Bed,” and my recent presentation on conflict in sex games, I mentioned a game called LoveChess, which, in its latest iteration, pits two teams of naked Egyptians against one another to battle it out on the chess board. The catch is that, when two pawns meet, they don’t fight for the win, they have sex. Interesting, but what does it mean to “win” sex?
With a demo copy now in my possession, I’m happy to say I’ll have a report for you soon. In the meantime, game representatives say there’s no connection between sex and fighting: it’s just chess with the added bonus of some pixelated action. Still, these nude warriors (all men on one side, women on the other, to ensure that ne’er two people of the same gender shall meet) have spears, swords, and erect penises, and they look ready for real battle.
Bonnie Ruberg is a sex, technology, and video games journalist who contributes regularly to publications like The Economist, Forbes, and The Village Voice. By day she's also a comparative literature PhD student at UC Berkeley, where she studies French, English, gender, sexuality, surrealism and perversion. You can reach her at [her first name and last name, all one big word] AT gmail DOT com.
May 25th, 2007 at 9:14 am
Reminds me of how Bonobos solve things.
May 25th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Well, if you go by my wife, she always wins at sex. Which is fine, because that must mean I enjoy losing. Either way, I win.
Or – something. Anyway, maybe I’ll have to bring up the idea of strip chess when she gets home….
May 28th, 2007 at 8:56 am
The dating game has the word ‘game’ in it. Sex itself is not a competition. Trying to get sex is where the challenge usually occurs, at least on the male side. That’s why the Japanese set up dating sims and hentai games where the job is to figure out how to get into the girl’s pants. And then there was the Leisure Suit Larry games which had more or less the same objective.
Sex is the reward. Getting the sex is where the competition and challenge occurs, usually.
May 29th, 2007 at 5:51 am
I’d imagine that like all the “chess with animations tossed in” games it would get old really quickly. Remember Battle Chess? Remember how after the first couple of times you saw the animations you wanted to skip them so you could just make your move without all the distractions?
May 29th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Reminds me of how Bonobos solve things.
I love bonobos :).
Sex is the reward.
I totally agree that’s how we normally see sex (and dating). My question is, how can we look at sex itself as a game?
Remember Battle Chess?
That’s definitely the unspoken ancestor here. I’m not much of a chess person myself, but I’ve heard lots of mixed reactions from other gamers about Battle Chess. Some people hated those animations after a while, but I also know people who couldn’t get enough of them :).
May 31st, 2007 at 7:38 am
Well, if you go to the abstract level of ‘game = challenge of some sort’ sort of thing, then there’s the question of how much one can pleasure one’s partner through things like foreplay and so on. There are a number of sex simulators (none of which I can remember at the moment) where bringing the virtual girl to orgasm takes a certain amount of skill.
A true sex game of that sort would probably give one a set of partners and then you have to figure out where their erogenous zones are and what it takes to get them off, and work on maximizing the result.
May 31st, 2007 at 7:58 am
Some good ideas :). Someday I hope to getting around to figuring out an actual set of mechanics for a game like that.