Sexuality in Role-Playing Games

Many splendored things: Sexuality, playfulness and play

“…And, as the recent work on the so-called dark side of play in game studies (e.g. Brown, 2015; Mortensen et al., 2015) illustrates, play can well involve disrespect and disregard towards established rules, such as the comfort zones of one’s partner.…”

“…Despite pre-established agreements between partners, the forms and possibilities of sexual acts are never fully set or knowable from the outset, not fully theirs to foresee or control. Sexual play therefore does not equal a game resulting in winners and losers: its rules may be notably lax or even ephemeral (Brown, 2015: 13; Stenros, 2015: 70, 94). While knowing decisions are elementary in setting up scenes of play, there is rawness, immediacy and fickleness to sexual fantasy, desire and the ways in which acts of play unfold.…”

“…To state the obvious, sexual play is not a realm of freedom external to culture, society, economy or politics. The pleasures involved in testing out, or stepping in and out of different positions in role-play can be intense precisely because the scripts and norms they entail are so viscerally lived and felt (see Brown, 2015: 5–6; Harviainen, 2011; Weiss, 2011: 17–19; also Harrison and Holm, 2013). It is therefore more apt to see sexual play as integrated in, drawing on and cutting through the fabric of everyday life and its temporalities, and as providing it with a specific affective intensity and flavour.…”

“…Scholars have also addressed sexual play in online exchanges and gaming environments (e.g. Brown, 2015; Sundén and Sveningsson, 2012; Waskul and Vannini, 2008) as well as the framing of casual sex as play in gay male online cultures (Race, 2015). Rather than examining playfulness and play as attributes characteristic of childhood sexuality, as properties of sexual subcultures where appetites divert from the normative routines of vanilla sex, or as characteristic of sexual exchanges on online platforms, I propose conceptualising them as dynamics central to sexuality more generally.…”

Freedom and the value of games

“…While such exploration can be misogynistic and racist (Rohwer 2014), some participants experience the opportunity for make-believe as freeing them from out-of-game identities that they wish to escape or that they wish felt less constricting. For instance, sociologists contend that anonymity and pseudonymity in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft enable some players to explore non-normative sexuality through erotic role-play by contributing to the insulation of the game from ‘real life’ (Brown 2015, 67). Games need not provide anonymity or pseudonymity for such experiences to arise.…”