Digital Love

Romance and Sexuality in Games

Heidi McDonald

• Publisher: A K Peters/CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351644730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Informatica generale

Scholars and professionals from all over the world, across experience levels and the gender and sexuality spectrum, share experiences and analysis of romance and sexuality in video games.

Whether discussing casual sex in the Star Wars universe; analyzing various Otome games; examining "the gaze" in various games; player romance behavior in games; or exploring the ethical ramifications of sexuality in virtual reality and other emerging technologies, this book discusses what players want in video game romance, and how developers can best deliver it.

Key Features:

• Examines the past, present, and future of romance in single-player, role-playing games

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• Discusses common presentations of romance in single-player, role-playing games— both in the category and game mechanics that drive romance

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• Discusses research on how players define a satisfying game romance and what specific steps narrative designers can take to design satisfying games

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• Explains the notion of the empathic game and explores its importance in relation to romance in game design

II

Romance and Sexuality in Game Design

CHAPTER 5

Visualizing Data for Pleasure

Heather Kelley on Game Design, Sexuality, and User Interfaces

Teddy Pozo

CONTENTS

Visualizing Data for Pleasure

Bibliography

INDEPENDENT GAME DESIGNER, HACKER, and artist Heather Kelley* is known for her innovations in interface design and for exploring representations of women’s sexuality through video games. Kelley cofounded Kokoromi,^† an experimental game design collective, and she is also a fixture in the alternative game design world, regularly serving as a jury member for gaming festivals and as a presenter at gaming and technology conferences worldwide. I spoke to Kelley in July 2012 during the run of Joue le Jeu.^‡ Kelley cocurated this Paris exhibit of interactive play, which focused on tactile, social, and mixed reality games.

VISUALIZING DATA FOR PLEASURE

This interview links Kelley’s early career, in which she innovated in the representation of female sexuality through games, with her more recent career, which focuses on alternative interfaces and embodiment. Throughout her work, Kelley focuses on alternative ways to represent data and new senses—tactile and proprioceptic rather than audio and visual—through which data can be explored and manipulated. Kelley is particularly ingenious at repurposing existing interfaces to do new things.

Kelley’s 2005 game concept, Lapis, for Nintendo DS, was an abstract visualization of female masturbation. Users would use the DS’s various interface capabilities—its touchscreen, buttons, and even its microphone—to prod, tickle, and whisper to a cartoon bunny, trying to take the bunny on a “magical pet adventure” to its “happy place.” Though it was never produced outside of a demo form, Lapis won the 2006 MIGS Game Design Challenge.

In 2010, Kelley designed an iPhone app, titled Body Heat, as a remote control interface for OhMiBod’s line of audio-controlled vibrators.* While these vibrators were designed to pulse in time with users’ favorite music, Kelley used the OhMiBod’s audio capabilities to design one of the most complex vibrator interfaces available.^†

Most high-end vibrators feature a series of pre-programmed settings accessible by scrolling through settings with a button. Kelley’s OhMiBod interface, now known as the OhMiBod Remote, visualizes these touch sensations on an X-Y axis. Though novelty developers use the term “haptic data” to discuss toy control information transmitted electronically, this data is often invisibly synched to existing pornographic video content. Rather than visually representing female anatomy, Kelley’s OhMiBod app represents the data itself as colorful, glowing fingerprints on the blackened screen.

In a 2013 presentation at Lift13 in Geneva, Switzerland, Kelley argues that interface design is the central problem facing the women’s sex toy market today.^‡ The mechanical action of the vibrator, for example, has not changed since the nineteenth century. Thus, the range of sensations available to the user is dependent almost entirely on the user interface. As high-end sex toy design becomes less focused on representing body parts and more oriented toward abstract and functional design, this interface-design problem becomes a problem of visualizing haptic data in space.

I began by asking Kelley about her OhMiBod app design, and continued with a discussion of her design process for Lapis. Finally, Kelley discussed her design philosophy, both for erotic games and for other alternative game designs.

TEDDY POZO:	What inspired you to create a mobile app interface for a vibrator?
HEATHER KELLEY:	At least 2 or 3 years prior to when my app came out, [OhMiBod] released their hardware that is pitched as working with your audio device, which by the time they released was primarily marketed and branded toward iPhone users. I cannot even remember when I heard about the OhMiBod, but I was interested in it because I had been doing work in interactive technology related to women’s sexuality and it sort of caught my eye.
	I am a digital artist who has worked in a number of different media including audio and sound and music, and I’m very interested in sound because I’m philosophically interested in getting away from vision and from screens too. There was this vibrator that was based on audio input and was marketed toward iPhone users, and had a good design.
	That’s the other thing [that inspired me]: the growing trend of sex technology that was more influenced by and actually paying attention to women’s bodies, women’s needs, and women’s “aesthetics,” if you could call it that.
	There [were] so many things about [OhMiBod] that intrigued me. I bought one, and the first thing I thought was, “well, ok, I can play my music with this, I can plug it into any iPhone—or iPod—but now that the iPhone is here, it would be so much more easy and intuitive, and it would give you so much more flexibility to just use this touchscreen as the input device to drive the audio!”
	By that point I understood technically how it works: it takes the output from the regular audio jack [of the iPhone] and there’s a chip inside that transforms the audio signal into a vibration signal. With a touchscreen attached, you could really control a more nuanced range of sensations from the vibrator than you could with [the] seven preprogrammed settings, which is fairly standard [for vibrators]. It just does these certain things and cycles through them with one button, like, “push the button and go to the next pattern!”
	I just looked around and realized, right now, as far as I know, no one has released anything like I imagine, and I have the technology, and I have the people. To me this was an art experiment. [I thought] I’ll see how far this can go, and I’ll make it a real thing, I’m not gonna shortchange it.
	I went ahead and did it and published it, but then immediately got in touch with OhMiBod, because I knew that it would be very interesting to them, and of course it fits within their aesthetic, but it was created completely independently. They were extremely interested and so within a few weeks we had already struck a deal, and now they’re the publishers of it. Very little time passed between me self-publishing and calling it Body Heat, and them buying it and it becoming the OhMiBod App. OhMiBod Remote is what it’s officially called.
TEDDY POZO:	You were talking about how it was easier or more subtle to produce different types of patterns using the interface of the iPhone. What were the concerns that went into figuring out a design for the app and figuring out how you wanted it to be controlled?
HEATHER KELLEY:	There were a number of different concerns that we discovered along the way. One of them is that not all of the vibes are functioning in exactly the same way. They don’t all have exactly the same guts. Different vibes in their line of vibes have different responses to the iPhone. If you only have one of those, then you just dial it up or dial it down according to what you like, but if you are trying to make an app that can equally serve [all] of them, it’s a little more complicated. The answer is still just dial up or dial down the volume knob, but it’s hard to explain that when you are doing something that within the app you can also dial up and dial down the volume. It’s just that doing so on the actual hardware volume will determine the overall lowest and highest sensation that you get, and then the app will be able to vary between those dynamically. It was really hard to get that perfect—it’s kind of like in a game when you’re trying to develop simultaneously for multiple [types of] system hardware. The solution to that is just to try to find a happy medium, and then let people know. So we have a little pop up at the beginning that says you can use your volume controls to control the overall intensity of the vibe.
	Another concern was that to make it the most efficient vibration, the app had to create a specific sound wave, and that sound wave isn’t really pleasant to listen to. We didn’t want people plugging in their headphones and listening to the app. We wanted it really to be through the vibe, and so in the end we decided that if they don’t have something plugged into the jack it won’t ...