initial statement

this is a research blog devoted to my collections of information, notes, and images preparing my senior thesis - a dating simulator game proposal, titled 'Spunk.' here is the initial artist statement.

My mom used to play Super Nintendo to get me to fall asleep when I was a little kid. I couldn’t go to sleep without watching a swordfight in Prince of Persia or another dungeon cleared in Zelda. From that magical time of pure-hearted heroism, I gained a love for stories of mysticism and might. I grew up in the age of the internet, however, and exposure to the vilest and grandest of things turned my love of the light on its head. A fascination developed within me for the failings of people and the consequent quagmire of obsession and delusion that inevitability determined their lives. Perhaps this fixation stems from my pre-pubescent realization of the perversion rampant in the average human mind, due to my startling accidental observation of hackneyed porn of the worst sort of my favorite Japanese cartoons. Whatever the case, ‘weird sex’ was the topic on my mind from the age of 11 and it never left.

Dating sims always particularly intrigued me for their extremely particular pandering to niche fetishes of the most heinous kind. Some of them feature watersports or mutilation, hypnosis, rape or slavery – but 100% of them focus shamelessly on the intense objectification of the featured characters. I’ve always loved erotic art and the depiction of intimacy in all forms, but I’ve never understood the need for pornography to destroy the viewer’s sexuality over time, limiting it to a narrow view of subject-object kinks, and these dating simulators are notorious for doing just that. The otaku of Japan are nerds ridiculed for being shut-ins who masturbate all day to these hentai sims, for the most part, and that culture of exclusively withdrawn and self-serving sexuality is quickly pervading the American mainstream. It’s not surprising, since defiantly entitled misogyny has taken a stronger foothold than ever in American culture.

So I thought, if people who spend all day jacking off to cartoons can put together a game, surely I can do one better. My thesis project is a dating simulator pitch – comprised of pre-production illustrations and research as well as an animated trailer summing up the most tantalizingly horrific parts of the game. The game’s WIP name is ‘Spunk’, a play on a trashy vernacular for semen and the DS dating game ‘Sprung!’. In hand-drawn digital black and white 2D animation, the trailer begins by explaining the player character’s situation. A young man with asperger’s, Zetsubou, the player character, enters a formerly religious state reformatory for social misfits at the behest of his parents. He goes on to meet 10 other characters total, all of whom he can pursue graphically sexual relationships with of various natures, including a diaper fetishist, a predatorial dominatrix, and a porn-obsessed ‘bro’. These characters’ bizarre sexualities only come to light after progress into a relationships with them, and the player is exposed to their quirky and often loveable behaviors on a regular basis before the player ever witnesses their shameful secrets – often only after it’s too late to dip.

Some of the central ideas I’m grappling with have to do with the idea of humanity in character. I think it’s definitely possible to hate a character while being attracted to them at the same time or vice versa – this is the nature of human beings. Media sexuality has become so far removed from what is naturally titillating in the human form or character of a person that we need perfectly oval breasts and clear skin on any billboard meant to attract. With my game, I want to challenge the notion of what is appealing or offensive or relatable. I want the viewer to be uncomfortable the entire game, wondering what it means to find this or that character relatable or loveable, or to become entrapped in a sex life into which they feel misled by appearance. I want to make a game that’s both off the cuff hilarious as well as startlingly uncomfortable.

Ultimately, I hope to be able to sell my pitch some day, but for now I’m satisfied with the viewer coming away from the trailer desperately wanting to play the game, to know what it’s all about. Between the preproduction work and trailer, the viewer should be clamoring for the game to be made, for it to be played. I want the viewer to come away from the preproduction work feeling strongly desirous to experience the world and characters and enjoy my wit, ignorant to the discomfort inherent in the branching narratives of the game to be made.