Christine Love wants to make sex in games more realistic, and that means making it funnier.

"Fundamentally, sex is pretty funny," Love said in a recent interview with Ars. "I don't want to play it as a joke. I think there's a big problem in video games where sex can only be funny, or it can only be 'Haha! I wouldn't ever really be horny. We can only talk about titties as a joke!'"

That’s a big part of what makes Love’s Ladykiller in a Bind stand out (another part is its actual full title: My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress As Him And Now I Have To Deal With A Geeky Stalker And A Domme Beauty Who Want Me In A Bind). A sexy visual novel (mostly) about lesbians on a boat, Ladykiller plays kind of like a "choose your own adventure" comic that takes place on your computer. Most of Ladykiller is spent directing the main character's conversations into or out of sexual encounters or guiding the sex itself.

The idea is to make sure players continue to have "an active role" in the in-game sex. Instead of just unlocking a sex scene to watch, players are active participants in Ladykiller's sex, conversations, and conversations during sex.

This is the opposite of the approach that you’d find in BioWare games and the like, wherein players unlock sex scenes and then watch what Love succinctly sums up as "a really awkward, 12-second animation." These games have no input from the player on how that sex plays out, which puts distance between them and the idea of sex they see on the screen.

It feels phony, the sort of thing that, as Love puts it, encourages us to only "engage with [sex] at an irony level." But with Ladykiller, the developers tried to acknowledge that sex itself is plenty silly already. You're meant to be laughing with the game rather than at it. When a character makes an overly loud (and very much unsubtle) discovery about another character’s anatomy, they're just as in on it as the player. The writing draws the player closer to the characters rather than distancing them from what's happening on screen.

Since the player usually has to choose where, when, and how to touch their partner during these scenes, as well as how to react, it's nearly impossible to disengage without shutting the game off. And so the sex, and comedy of this sex, circles back in on itself to say that, yes, "real sex is awkward, and funny, and that can actually tie into being hot," according to Love.

Sexy character building

That design means most of the game’s character building moments — humorous and otherwise — need to occur during sex. Pandering to NPCs outside of the bedroom until a hands-off sexual encounter pops out isn’t even an option.

"The Beauty and The Stalker barely appear outside of their sex scenes," Love pointed out during our interview, referring to two of the game’s three main characters. "So every bit of characterization has to be conveyed during sex, or surrounding it."

The third part of the game’s main romantic trio, The Beast, is what Love calls a "super-cool heroine put unfairly in way over her head,” and her storyline requires no small suspension of disbelief. The player guides The Beast through a week-long cruise while she pretends to be her male twin brother, navigating suspicious and very horny young adults in the process. But the plot mainly provides an excuse for nightly sex scenes, which can be used both to fend off suspicion and to get The Beast closer to a $5 million payday at the end of a game within the game.









As Ladykiller in a Bind's name implies, there's more than just a little bit of kink backing the parade of sex scenes, although Love calls it "very 101 level." Think blindfolds and ball gags—even if you're not into them, you probably at least know about their use in the bedroom.

According to Love, that's very much an intentional way to broaden the game’s appeal. "I feel like there's a lot of kink fantasies that, I think, would be really fun to make games about, but also would be possibly too alienating to actually reach any sort of market," she said. Not that an erotic visual novel is an extremely mainstream game genre in the first place, but Love said she wanted to make sure that nearly anyone could enjoy it if they gave it a shot.

Players who aren't familiar with Ladykiller's kink will find The Beast is just as clueless. "This is all completely new to her," said Love. "The Beauty really guides you into what it means to be submissive, for example." Meanwhile, Ladykiller is meant to appease those already "really into weird, kinky fantasies" by using sex as a medium for great character studies.

Relieving the “avatar for queerness”

Queer creators are often held to a double-standard when it comes to crafting queer characters. There's an expectation, even an outside pressure, to not just include them but to "represent" the entire LGBTQ community. If cisgender and heterosexual creators won't do it, surely it's a successful queer creator's obligation to fill in the blanks...

Love agrees that "there was always a pressure," to fill Ladykiller with a mostly queer cast. Although she and her team "try to ignore [that pressure] as much as possible."

"I'm interested in having relatable characters," Love added. "I'm interested in having queer characters because as a queer woman, I want to see myself in games. I have a mostly queer cast because I feel like this represents reality."

Love specified that she "wanted to model real social dynamics" with Ladykiller, and that meant not creating a "bizarre fantasy world where you have ten people, and you decide that one out of ten must be queer." In other words, Love is side-stepping the exact kind of tokenism that leads to people thirsting for better "representation" in the first place, without making that the goal. She set out to make real, believable characters, and that just happens to align with what she wants to see in games.

A side benefit of creating a cast of mostly underrepresented people is that you're actually freer to write them in different ways. In that way, Love likened Ladykiller to Marvel’s Luke Cage series on Netflix. "One thing I'll say about Luke Cage is having a nearly all-black cast means that it doesn't need to worry so much about, like, ‘What are the implications [of a character’s blackness]?’" she said.

"When you have one black character, you need to be really careful that you're not having them represent everyone." But just as none of Luke Cage’s characters needs to be an “avatar of blackness,” Love said, in Ladykiller, none of the characters needs to be an "avatar of queerness.”

"There doesn't have to be one perfect queer character who does nothing problematic and hits no uncomfortable tropes. You can lean into people doing uncomfortable things, or people doing bad things, or people even sort of hitting on some stereotypes, because it's not one person representing everyone."

If there’s one thing Ladykiller is full of, it’s deeply flawed queer characters. There’s The Boy, a hopelessly lovelorn, despicably manipulative jerk who tries to dominate through guilt-tripping. There’s The Stalker, who similarly lacks self-confidence, but is also earnest. Then there's The Beauty, who doesn't hide her dominant personality but negotiates it through trust rather than forcing herself on people.

Besides demonstrating Ladykiller's excellent understanding of social capital and how we use or abuse it, these three queer characters give each other room to exist comfortably by simply co-existing.

It's only when the trope-y, villainous characters in a work become an archetype for all queer people that things get uncomfortable. But in the real world, "there is at least one person out there who's like that, and if [that character type] is in a large cast, that's a different matter."

Just sit there like an idiot

It's all part of creating interesting characters that behave believably. That idea extends even to the player themselves, thanks to a novel approach to in-game dialogue choices. Just like in a real conversation, blurting out the first thing that comes to mind in Ladykiller isn't always the best idea.

"We have a thing where choices appear as they occur to the player, then disappear as they're no longer relevant to conversation," Love explained. "So it turns into a matter of 'Well, I could say this, but what if something more clever comes to mind? What if I think of the perfect rejoinder?'"

Since options flow out of and into conversation, you run the risk of having The Beast "just sit there like an idiot," as Love puts it.

But that's a danger in any real conversation. We don't all have $5 million riding on our ability to talk our way through good sex, but we've all worried about saying the wrong thing. Those times when you don't know whether to stay quiet or rush to speak are among the most relatable moments in a game full of relatable moments.

Real sex (or at least believably written sex between fictional characters) is definitely at the heart of Ladykiller. Yet the game deftly winds its way through more ideas than you might expect, both in and out of bedrooms. Love’s obsessive attention to writing authentic characters creates situations that effortlessly weave themes of power dynamics, sex, humor, and social manipulation.

It's also, y'know, still extremely hot.

Ladykiller in a Bind is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can currently buy it from the Humble Store for $25/£20.