Queer Power

Submitted by Amélie Paquet on Fri, 06/29/2007 - 12:12

Author(s):

En reprenant l'interface des jeux de combat en deux dimensions, Queer Power détourne la relation habituelle entre les deux joueurs. Les internautes sont invités à incarner les acteurs de scènes sexuelles où les rôles ne sont pas déterminés à l'avance. Par le biais d'une touche du clavier, il peut à tout moment changer d'identité sexuelle pour atteindre autrement le but fixé : l'orgasme. Si l'oeuvre offre un rapport à l'identité plutôt alternatif, il demeure enclos dans une certaine conception de la relation sexuelle où la satisfaction personnelle prime sur tout le reste. Une version hors ligne est aussi disponible.

Contenus reliés

Jeux vidéo d'activisme politique

Infos

Hosting website:

Molleindustria

Hosting website URL:

http://www.molleindustria.it

Date of last consultation:

June 29, 2007

Coordonnées de l'artiste:
http://www.molleindustria.it/contacts-eng.php
Groupe de recherche:
Nt2

Taxonomies

Citation(s)

Queerland inhabitants don't have fixed sexual orientations and roles. They fornicate following their highly changeable desires. Forget what you learned at school about the two genders and enjoy trip in this odd world!

Notes

« 5. 'Queer Power' is very interesting to me because it seems to me that a) it makes the claims of queer theory visible and playable, particularly those about the flexibility of desire, pleasure and identity b) related to this, it seems like it could be played in a number of ways - players could race to orgasm, they could compete to bring one another to orgasm, or they could try, cooperatively, to arrive together! c) you seem to have built consent into the game - the power switch means that players can stop the encounter at any time d) in playing with sex we come to think about how sex is always mediated by images and ideologies e) it seems like a very clever parody of 2D 'beat-em-ups' like 'Street Fighter' or 'Mortal Kombat' where everything in those games is reversed - instead of dealing out pain the player must accumulate pleasure, instead of a health bar there is a pleasure bar, instead of special combat moves there is the ability to change gender, sexual position and so on. How does all of this fit with your interpretation of the game, and your intentions in making it? We are glad you remarked our purposes. The funny thing is you are the first who paid attention to the power switch. It's a recurring element of our games: we provocatively emphasize it to invite the player to not waste too much time with a silly game. Queer Power started from a reflection on game genres. Nowadays, the mainstream videogames industry is stuck in the same old genres, there is a great technical advancement but no one wants to take the risk to propose new structures and new gameplays. There are many analogies with the "golden age" of Hollywood: a massive and expensive production based on few narrative models. We saw in this stagnant situation an opportunity to play a trick on players used to these standard structures. Unhinging the typical workings can be an excellent way to make the people think. For example, in Tuboflex the typical level gradualness is broken. In the real world, for the flexworkers there are no social climbing possibilities so we decided to show this with a frustrating random level structure. In the Orgasm simulator there is an unwelcome identity swap, the player starts in a disadvantaged situation instead of being put in a hero's place. Reversing all the "ideological" features of the beat 'em up genre like the win/lose scheme, the violence and the stereotyped gender roles we quickly come to Queer Power. Unfortunately in Italy the queer theory is almost unknown due to our different feminist traditions and the difficult academic language used by its followers. We hope that our simple game can help to spread this fascinating theory.» http://selectparks.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=16

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