The Epilogue – VideoBrains February: Mount Your Friends

With the theme of Mount Your Friends, the party game where players create a totem pole of skimpy muscular men, VideoBrains February had talks about sex, in all its glory. Well, some of the games mentioned are certainly not glorious.

Due to the content, you probably don’t want to play these talks out loud in your office. You have been warned!

We started off with Dr. Ashley Brown, and her talk Good Sex, Bad Player. Everyone has their own personal desires with sex, but the best kind is when it’s playful, when it’s two consenting adults just having fun. She’s done research on this, and how adult gamers play together, and spoke about how the relationship between what players want and what games can offer is awkward.

You can’t always get what you want in games. Unless, of course, you’re a AAA protagonist, in which case the world falls at your feet. By using Wario as “the mirror to which we hold up all of humanity”, Benjamin Maltz-Jones looked at how some games let you be a bit of an arse, but still give you exactly what you want, even if you might not deserve it.

So far at #videobrains we have learned that Wario is sexy and that sex should not be like melted ice cream. I think that's what it was.

— Tom Battey (@tombattey) February 29, 2016

Starting his series as resident speaker, Rob Morgan introduced new terms for us to define those moments in games that many of us recognise but can’t quite easily describe, in beautiful hashtag form for you all to use in your day-to-day Twittering. This is just the first of six talks – we’ll have a whole lexicon eventually!

"#noootagonist: a character where we start to move away from their motivations and they just look a bit foolish" #VideoBrains

— Nicole Williams (@EliElicole) February 29, 2016

Couples in games are weird. They’re goals or the result of two characters being locked together during a world-shattering event. Established couples, though, are rare, despite being a key part of, well, human relationships. Lucie Prunier looked at some of the good examples of the happy balanced couples that aren’t the Prince who saved the Princess or something similar, but just two people who love each other.

Sex in entertainment isn’t limited to videogames, but has been the subject of many a board game in the past. James Wallis ran through some of the highs and depraved lows of board games that tackled sex. When he says not to Google one of the games – he does mean it. Not a good idea.

This talk has even inspired some VideoBrains-goers to buy one of the games mentioned, The Beast! Alice Bell, who followed James in speaking at this very event, has already got her copy!

https://twitter.com/BabyGotBell/status/710066469606916097

To finish the night, Alice took a look at how Sex in Games is Fucked Screwed. Similarly to how some of the board games James Wallis mentioned in his previous talk just don’t quite get it, neither do many, many videogames, or the people that use them as a basis for some interesting results. Oh, and there’s apparently a lot of porn parody puns for videogames.

Also at @VideoBrains: #porn #puns! Thanks, @BabyGotBell! pic.twitter.com/KHtx5E9vRX

— Jan Schneider (@janschne1der) February 29, 2016

That’s it for VideoBrains February: Mount Your Friends, if you’d like to watch those videos back-to-back, we’ve set up a lovely playlist for your viewing pleasure! 

If you want to support VideoBrains, please consider telling your friends about us (although, you might not want to show some of these talks to some friends, I imagine) or supporting us on Patreon! VideoBrains March has already been and gone, but we’ll have information about VideoBrains April coming very, very soon.