boob raider.

clicking around from wired's "7 Reasons your Boss Should Send You To Sex Conferences" led to this blog (warning, adult content, yadda yadda), on gaming and sex. the most recent post was about a kind of yawny strip-blackjack game (with the necessary three female avatars shown in some sense of undress), but earlier came an intriguing description of an "adult" RPG, in which "Raidy, a high-spirited female sword-fighter," travels around with the usual motivations.

>>When she comes upon a town plagued by monsters who steal away the beautiful maidens and turn them into their slaves, Raidy is determined to set things right, risking life, limb, and virginity to do battle with the denizens of the tower.<<

virginity, huh? something tells me that precious-and-irreplaceable jewel doesn't last long.

>>With the "sex if you win, sex if you lose" game system, Raidy is able to turn the twisted fetishes of the boss monsters against them if she defeats them in combat, or succumb to their wiles if she loses.<<

i'm not sure what "turn the fetishes" means, but interesting that sex is both a prize and a punishment. and, obviously, i haven't played the game, but it seems likely that what shifts here isn't the sex itself, but the subject position of the hyper-sexualized female character: successful, she's a randy Raidy; in failure she's a victim of assault. does kind of a number on the madonna/whore binary . . . madonnas get martyred while the slut-bags move on to level 2.

i don't mean to focus on the sex-if-you-lose part of this; though it sounds definable as a representation of rape, as a representation it sounds more like a rape fantasy. though misgivings abound when a female character is shown as "deserving" unwanted sexual contact as a result of any action, this sort of negotiated scenario wouldn't seem harmful or out of place in a live action role play situation. and "succumb" itself is a pretty plastic word--good for describing a pleasurable, maybe play-acted vacation from agency; also good for putting a romance-novel varnish on actual assault. i guess it's the negotiation of the "negotiated scenario" that's key, and i'm thinking about how that works with gameplay.


omg! i didn't look at the gamebox:



i was picturing a sort of Xena-meets-Final-Fantasy mash up, not a lump of be-boobed anime sprites. snarf.