Much like sex itself, it’s hard to get a sex game right at the first attempt. While the genre known as interactive fiction often explores themes of sex and sexuality, players of mainstream video games are used to little more than the occasional, awkward and intensely unerotic cut scene. Creators, consumers and critics of this relatively young artform are still figuring out what the culture deems acceptable. That can lead to difficult conversations – as it did this month with one highly divisive scene in a game released late last year.

Christine Love is a writer and programmer known for making visual novels: interactive narrative games with static 2D art, in which the player’s choices often involve selecting which response to give in conversation scenes. Her latest project, Ladykiller in a Bind, is a piece of erotica, which turns out to be complicated in a medium built on interactivity.

“I make the games that I would want to play,” says Love. “And usually this is fine, but in this one case I think that resulted in not being thoughtful enough about the potential for players to be made uncomfortable.”

Ladykiller in a Bind (alternate 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!!) is for the most part a lighthearted, funny game that Love describes as a “palate cleanser” after her previous, much darker work, Analogue: A Hate Story; a science-fiction visual novel that explores gender, sexuality, and interpersonal (including between humans and AI) relationships.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ladykiller in a Bind. Photograph: Christine Love

The premise is intentionally absurd. You play as an 18-year-old woman (the Beast) whose twin brother (the Prince) has blackmailed her into taking his place on a week-long cruise with his classmates, all of whom are enrolled in a game that involves earning/coercing digital “votes” from one another throughout the week – a popularity contest that is made more interesting by the willingness of some characters (including the Beast) to use social/sexual favours, or blackmail. At the end of the week, the winner is awarded $5m. “The stakes are really low,” says Love. “The world is not at stake. Everyone is kind of mean to you anyway.”

Like the cast of Gossip Girl, these students are privileged, manipulative and hormonal, especially in the confines of the cruise ship. That the protagonist is masquerading as her brother provides an excuse for both the player’s ignorance about the other characters (“the video game amnesia plot”, says Love, referring to a classic plot move whereby video game protagonists have amnesia and thus no knowledge that the player doesn’t share) and – since the Prince has a reputation for being a bit of an arsehole – some questionable behaviour. For Love, it also presented an opportunity to provide “safe escapism” for players who in their real lives might have to worry about the response of sexual partners who discover their genitalia to be different than they expected; anyone who gets to see the Beast naked from the waist down just rolls with what they find.

“I definitely wanted to make the game where you don’t have to worry about that,” says Love. “Like, at no point does anyone respond in any sort of transphobic way. The most is that the President is slightly overbearing in how supportive he is when he thinks that you are coming out as trans, and that was the most I wanted to touch on that, because I feel like it’s very easy to find a lot of media that portrays the trans experience as terrifying and overwhelming and scary, and there’s not a lot that makes it feel like it could be OK. So I wanted this to feel aspirational and safe.”

Part of that safe escapism is how explicit many characters are about consent, but Love says she doesn’t think the game needs to make a political statement about it. “Consent is obviously important,” she says, “So any portrayal of a good relationship is going to include that by necessity, by nature.” Most mainstream games don’t think about consent because, as Love points out, they often reduce sex to “like, three animations that convey an entire feeling in 12 seconds.”

Love’s studio, Love Conquers All Games, released Ladykiller in a Bind in October of last year. It was originally only available through the Humble Store, a digital storefront for smaller independent games – but then Love managed to get Ladykiller included on Steam, the gigantic online games store that currently dominates PC software sales. This brought the title to a new, much larger audience, and with that greater exposure came greater controversy. Two weeks after Ladykiller debuted on the platform, Love announced that due to “strong player feedback” she had updated the game to remove a scene in which the protagonist, a young woman who until that point has only had sex with other women, is subjected to – and aroused by – sexual humiliation by a male character known as the President.

“The original goal of the scene was to demonstrate a darker – certainly not safe IRL – fantasy,” Love wrote in the announcement. But this particular fantasy, common as it is for many women, ‘blindsided’ players because of the contrast with the rest of the game. “I think I failed to account for the player’s context,” Love wrote.

But the ongoing relationships that the Beast can have with the dominant Beauty and/or submissive Stalker, which build up each night after a day of careful manipulation and flings with other characters, feature what Love refers to as clear constant negotiations, “because the player is supposed to feel safe there.” With the Beauty, for instance, the player feels safe because she rewards the Beast’s submission by removing any suspicion points (which are gained when the Beast acts out of character for her brother, and if left to build up can lead to a game over) and the Beast herself feels safe in the hands of a caring and experienced domme who clearly communicates her desires and expectations. In contrast to that safety, it’s no wonder some players were blindsided by a scene in which the President mocks the very notion of establishing trust and boundaries before sex: “Come on,” he says during one encounter. “Where’s that ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT?”

The issue is made more interesting by the relationship between player and protagonist. “In a work of fiction you can do things that would not necessarily be either safe or smart in real life,” says Love. “So, like, there are some arcs that lead to you just getting your shit wrecked in a way that I think would be deeply uncomfortable in real life. But in the context of a sexual fantasy, you know, the player has control over this, and it’s okay to fantasise about that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ladykiller in a Bind Photograph: Christine Love

What’s important is that the player knows what to expect, which is why, one or two weeks after release, Love added an option to skip any or all of the sex scenes. Since the game is framed as flashbacks while the Beast reports back to the Prince on her escapades (“a dramatic technique that we really hope you won’t think about too hard”), this involves a funny crack in the fourth wall as she tells him he can change the option at any time in the settings menu.

More subtle management of player expectations is in the way the dialogue response options are clearly marked with their effects (e.g. adding suspicion, adding votes, opening further choices, or ending that character’s route) and colour-coded by tone. But every now and then the Beast fails to deliver, like when in her unfamiliar submission to the Beauty she is rendered speechless. “She’s falling into subspace”, explains Love, “A mental state where it’s very difficult to communicate.” The possibility for discrepancy between player intentions and character actions makes games a great medium for exploring this specific sexual dynamic.

Sometimes surprises are OK, like when you direct the Beast to say something cool and she almost inevitably doesn’t: “I think it’s okay if it’s a surprise in a funny way,” says Love. But the President’s scene was an uncomfortable shock for many players even after Love attempted to patch in clearer warnings. In the end, she removed the sex from that route to ensure that no one else could be blindsided.

But she was still happy with what she wrote. “If the game had been one that was entirely about this no one would have been surprised by it,” she says. “Though I don’t know how that hypothetical game would be received. I think it’s really difficult to discuss fantasies of that sort. You know, there’s often a desire to model healthy relationships while not discussing that being a woman in our society gives you often a lot of baggage and, you know, dealing with trauma often gives you fantasies and coping mechanisms that are definitely not things that you ever want to see show up in real life.”

No doubt we have a long way to go before most people are ready to explore darker fantasies – like those Love originally intended to portray – in a computer game, and then to discuss them. As a culture, we’re still squeamish about BDSM – and not just in games: apparently the cast of Fifty Shades Darker are banned from “making sexual and graphic references” during interviews. As a self-confessed “awkward person”, Love gets that: “When you make a game that’s sad, people are like, ‘Oh, I loved it. You made me cry.’ When you make a game that’s erotic you want a little bit less detail from your players ...”

But there are times when she does want that detail. When developing the game, for instance, Love needed playtesters who were willing and able to provide detailed feedback on whether specific elements of the sex scenes worked: “If you’re playtesting an action game obviously you need people who have a good vocabulary for describing action dynamics, right? In the same way, it was important that everyone who I had doing playtesting had a good vocabulary for, you know, discussing their personal responses to erotic dynamics.”

Many critics, however, seem to lack that vocabulary, which is a problem when the main design goal for Ladykiller in a Bind was “make it hot”. “We wanted all the important character beats really to happen in a sexual context,” says Love. “If you’re nervous to really discuss the sex in much detail, it’s like 50% of the word count of the game. I do feel like it’s the big problem of just, like, no one quite knows how to talk about this, and that was also very much reflected in most of the reviews I read.”

Innuendo is fun, but if we want to encourage creators to use this medium to explore such a fundamental part of many of our lives we’re going to have to aim for smarter, more nuanced critical discussion. Much like sex, it’s hard to get a sex game right on the first try. And in both cases, if we want better, we’re going to have to learn how to talk about it.

