Maybe video games and kinky sex are different

Warning: Undertale spoilers

In “Play and Be Real about It,” Mattie Brice accuses mainstream video games of being too “instrumental,” and ignoring broader contexts. She gives us an analogy to kink play, where the game designer is the dom and the player is the sub, and suggests that games should be more like consensual kink play, where the terms are fully discussed beforehand. Brice argues that this allows kink to engage with real-life context in a way that mainstream games do not.

It should be easy to see that this comparison between kink and video games is unfair. Games that engage with context in the way Brice wants them to do exist; she made at least two of them. Sure, they’re not popular, but neither is kink. Brice is comparing a niche type of one activity to the mainstream version of another. If she compared mainstream video games to vanilla sex, which isn’t especially good at accomplishing any of the things Brice is talking about, I don’t think she would find that the games are behind. The mainstream versions of other forms of media also tend to try to deliver pleasure to their viewers without engaging with real context very much, so I’m not sure whether Brice’s problem is really with video games or with mainstream culture in general.

Additionally, the ability of games to surprise players can be a strength if used well. A narrative twist like the one at the end of Undertale, where the player is informed that LV actually stands for “level of violence” and EXP for “execution points” can recontextualize the game and lead a player to relate their previous actions to the new context in a way that wouldn’t happen if they knew what was going on the whole time. The context in Undertale or BioShock wouldn’t be as powerful or engaging if it was presented up front. Using surprise isn’t creative laziness; it’s one tool among many that allow the game designer to make the context interesting. Surprise twists could be incorporated into kink play, but they probably shouldn’t be, since they only work if they aren’t consented to ahead of time.

Brice also states that mainstream games wouldn’t sell if players knew everything about them beforehand. This is demonstrably false. If knowing how a game works made people not want to play that game, no one would ever replay a game.

One thing that I think Brice gets right is where she says that games don’t allow for aftercare. However, this is one area that doesn’t fall into the category of “what games can learn from kink,” so much as it displays a fundamental limitation of video games. One kind of kink play might affect different submissives differently, so it is the dominant’s job to figure out what their sub needs from their aftercare and help provide that. If a game tries to provide some version of aftercare, it will run into the problem that the designer can’t be responsive to individual players’ needs, since they designed the game ahead of time. For that reason, it seems unlikely that video games will ever be able to provide something like aftercare in a useful way.