Genital Jousting and the need of the penis

The creators of Broforce released as of 2016 a game on Steam which has a lot of people shocked. Genital Jousting is a local/online multiplayer party game with penises as a core part. You play as a dick, you penetrate dicks and you wrestle other dicks. Its form is an alternative party game. Those games which you can play when you have a gathering with friends, such as Duck Game, Ultimate Chicken Horse or even the Jackbox Party Pack series. Genital Jousting, although a game in the same absurdist lineage is banned from Twitch for sexual content. Freelives, the developers of Genital Jousting, currently have an article on their website explaining what their intentions are with this game. The article can be found here.

They argue that they never meant to offend anyone and that they wanted to make a game for everyone. I would like to justify this point and even go further by asking; Why exactly do we need a game like Genital Jousting?

Note : this article will only talk about the multiplayer modes of Genital Jousting although the recently added single player story is interesting in it's own right.

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Sexual content, the main focus of the game is also the source of the issues around it. The objective of this sexual openness is not only to make the player laugh but most importantly to take away the stigma of sexuality in video games. Here comes a game that has cute graphics, the dicks are pink, blue, yellow, they can be dressed up. This deescalates immediately whatever prior ideas the player could have on this game. The things you play as are single organisms, not necessarily male that can move on their own in a cacophony of slightly disturbing wet organic sounds. Most of the actions you will do is penetration and being penetrated. A play-through of this game is always punctuated by people exclaiming; “I just penetrated you”, “Oh no, don’t penetrate me”, “Come on let yourself be penetrated”, sentences that sound rape-like out of context. That is why the developers make a point in their article to state that the game includes a “Hold up to consent” prompt at the beginning of each game with the possibility to drop out at any time.

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Despite what it may seem, alternative games posing the questions around sexuality are nothing new. There has always been sexualization, suffice to look at games as old as Street Fighter with scantily clad women or the controversy around the character Tracer from Overwatch. In that last case, all that sufficed was a simple pose that seemed inapropriate and over-sexualised for the character to spark a debate on wether to keep it in the game or not. Sexuality on the other hand has started to be explored in abstract and different ways by games such as Plug & Play by Michael Frei and Mario von Rickenbach. There, the content is more in allegory and imagery but in the game, the player interacts with plugs, pulling and plugging them. There are humanoid characters who develop relationships in a way that could be defined as sexual.

In La Petite Mort by Adorable Hat Cult, the player must literally caress the screen of their phone to complete an objective. The game has 4 levels that are actually blurred, pixilated and colored photographs of women’s genitalia. The goal is to get them to “orgasm”.

So, having a main interaction in a video game be sexual by nature may finally come out of a certain taboo, especially thanks to a game like Genital Jousting with it’s platform on Steam. It is a fun party game, with many options and game modes for players, to the contrary of the previous two games cited which are much more linear experiences with little replay value.

That doesn’t diminish in any case the fact that there is an adversity towards sexuality and it’s representation. Fifty Shades of Grey and Nymphomaniac, in the movie industry had a certain amount of controversy but that didn’t diminish their cultural importance or popularity.

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Representation is also a key feature of this game. The devs counter the argument that this game is only for homosexuals by saying that they would only want to normalize gay relationships. The image of the penis is seen as strictly male. Surely, two penises is homosexual ? Not necessarily; the developers didn’t make the game about homosexuality. The penises can be dressed up in clothes such as a policeman with a mustache, a hot dog vendor and even a hula dancer, a female outfit. The designers also make the avatars do things only women can; child birth. They can also be a variety of colors usually associated with women, pink and purple.

That established, I believe that this game also normalizes polygamy, another subject deserving of some recognition. As said before, you can get an orgy of friends to play, in any number possible from 2 to 8. In this case, the players share controllers, each having to use one joystick. This reinforces the bonds between players who need to share the controller. This puts them in the same situation as in a true relationship where being able to divide things evenly is important. It’s about giving but also receiving. Nothing in the game requires engagement in the long term but there is the ‘Date Night’ update where the developers added a 2 player story. Here, the game tells the story of a 2 person mutually exclusive relationship through time. That is from the first date, to the marriage, to the untimely death of one of the two. All this, of course with the visuals of two penises.

Is this the perfect game to speak for the whole of the LGBT community, swingers etc? No, it has limits to it’s message. The game was made by a team of mostly males who thought the idea was funny. Those organizations could never get behind such a product. What Genital Jousting does accomplish is normalize and at the very least, introduce for some, alternative sexualities.

A happy ending?

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For these many reasons, I declare that the video game industry needs a game like Genital Jousting that deals with the subjects it does. The format of the local party multiplayer game also needs to be explored further, whether to satisfy those markets and fill a certain void in the industry. These sorts of games used to be the only ones available but with the rise of high speed internet, it got a bit lost. Despite this, Genital Jousting as of it's 1.0 release is fun and accomplished although it's always in need of a little bit of love.

Happy Valentine's Day to all, have a fun , sexy, lovely time!