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Robert Yang is an artist and video game developer whose work explores a number of queer issues.
Over the past year, he has created several games tied to sex and sexuality, including "Hurt Me Plenty," a spanking games about consent and kink, "Succulent," a game about fellatiating a popsicle, "Stick Shift," which focuses on giving your car a handjob and "Cobra Club," a dick pic studio game that touches on issues of surveillance and privacy.
In his latest game, called "Rinse and Repeat," the user is positioned in a communal locker room shower with a number of other bathing men. One man walks in, addresses the player as "Guy!," and soon asks for help scrubbing his back -- and other areas -- as he showers.
Ultimately, what Yang seems to be exploring in "Rinse and Repeat" is a sub/dom relationship in a hyper-eroticized space that often serves as a fantasy for many men who have sex with men. He told The Huffington Post:
"I got feedback on my spanking game, 'Hurt Me Plenty' from players who wanted to roleplay more of a submissive role, so I thought about what submission might be for a video game player. I decided one form of submission could require players to conform to the game's terms -- the game tells you how to scrub him, and the game tells you when it will feel like playing. The game acts like it doesn't really care about the player, which is maybe part of the fun of it. My game isn't unique in this sense, lots of video games have domineering relationships with their players, but I think my game is one of the few that sexualizes this dynamic, especially in a gay way designed to poke at a predominantly straight dude gamer audience."
Much of Yangs work also focuses on disrupting the traditionally heteronormative and misogynistic world of the video game industry. Not only do all of his games involve some exploration of sex or sexuality, but they are also inherently queer.
"Gay sex is the only thing that's hot and dirty enough to subvert the video game industry's lazy reliance on graphic violence and consumerism," Yang continued. "In this way, I see sex as a powerful way of diversifying video games, to help re-think what kinds of games are possible to make. Don't get me wrong, I love games about killing people and looting their corpses repeatedly for hours -- but when that's 99% of what's marketed to gamer audiences, I wonder whether there's room in games for the other 99% of human experience that doesn't involve killing people and looting corpses. It's a cursed art... but a kiss will set it free."
Want to play "Rinse and Repeat" and check it out for yourself? Head here to download it from Yang's website.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the creator of "Rinse and Repeat" as Randy Yang; his name is Robert Yang.
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