Exhibition Poster

September 7th – September 30th, 2018

Curated by Marina Molarsky-Beck and William Lee

Featuring: Pierre Corbinais, Victoria Dominowski, Christine Love, Giant Sparrow, and Robert Yang

Opening Reception: Friday, September 7th, 6 – 9pm

 

No Love Lost brings together recent, largely experimental games that probe the dynamics of intimacy, developed by Pierre Corbinais, Victoria Dominowski, Giant Sparrow, Christine Love (Love Conquers All Games), and Robert Yang. Games are constructed by rule-based parameters, feedback loops, and interfaces that extend abstract ideas into digital instantiations, so too is social behavior constructed and learned. Yet, the expectation prevails that human interiority remain obscure. We understand emotions—love and desire in particular—as ineffable, undefinable, and unregulated. Games, though, find their best expression through an unambiguous understanding of the rules. The most compelling games produce meaning through not only narrative, but through the rule systems that structure play. Because games rely on players ascertaining and engaging with these predetermined rules and conditions, they can take on emotionally fraught material in ways quite distinct from other forms.

 

NFSWare by Pierre Corbinais

NSFWare, Pierre Corbinais, installation view1
NSFWare, Pierre Corbinais, GIF content1
NSFWare, Pierre Corbinais, GIF content2
NSFWare, Pierre Corbinais, GIF content3
NSFWare, Pierre Corbinais, GIF content4
NSFWare, Curtain screen, Projection, Pierre Corbinais, installation view3
NSFWare, Curtain screen, Projection, Pierre Corbinais, installation view2

 

What Remains of Edith Finch by Giant Sparrow

What Remains of Edith Finch, Gaint Sparrow, installation view4
What Remains of Edith Finch, Gaint Sparrow, installation view1
What Remains of Edith Finch, Gaint Sparrow, installation view3
What Remains of Edith Finch, Giant Sparrow, screenshot4
What Remains of Edith Finch, Giant Sparrow, screenshot1
What Remains of Edith Finch, Giant Sparrow, screenshot2
What Remains of Edith Finch, Giant Sparrow, screenshot3
What Remains of Edith Finch, Giant Sparrow, screenshot5

An overabundance of games expound heroic narratives and inevitably cater the gameplay and level-design to encourage such power fantasies. Through reworking the gameplay conventions of crystallized genres, however, some developers have built narratives that emphasize the nuance of intimate relationships. In Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch, the player navigates a labyrinthine house to discover the tragic fates that have befallen the members of a purportedly cursed family. This “walking simulator” transforms the simple traversal of space into an investigation of individual experience, weaving through the subjectivities of the protagonist’s relatives. Victoria Dominowski’s Secret Little Haven recreates the pastel-infused aesthetic of late ‘90s internet through a pixelated computer interface. The game takes place within folders, chat rooms, web forums, and desktop games, as a teenage trans girl, Alex Cole, comes to terms with her identity and navigates on-and-offline relationships. Meanwhile, The Tearoom by Robert Yang deconstructs the aim-and-fire reflexive nature of shooters in a historical cruising sim. The core mechanic, the act of looking, takes on erotic significance, as the player tries to pick up (and then jerk off) another man in a 1962 Mansfield, Ohio restroom without being busted by cops.

 

The Tearoom by Robert Yang

The Tearoom, Robert Yang, installation view4
The Tearoom, Robert Yang, screenshot1
The Tearoom, Robert Yang, screenshot2
The Tearoom, Robert Yang, screenshot3
The Tearoom, Robert Yang, installation view2

 

Ladykiller in a Bind by Christine Love

The Tearoom, Robert Yang, installation view1
Ladykiller in a Bind, Christine Love, screenshot1
Ladykiller in a Bind, Christine Love, screenshot2
Ladykiller in a Bind, Christine Love, installation view

In games, sex often functions as a reward or as a narrative tool. More rarely, though, sex is central not only to narrative, but to gameplay itself. In NSFWare, Pierre Corbinais riffs on the minigame genre, popularized by games like WarioWare or Feel the Magic: XY/XX, to make a series of sequences modeled on clips from Pornhub. Per genre convention, the controls are simple, relegated to the four directional arrow keys, their functions shifting to fit the particularities of each new scenario. With these surprisingly maddening 8-bit trysts, Corbinais toys with the popular depiction of sex as an easy in-out procedure in which pleasure is painless. Christine Love’s Ladykiller in a Bind is an erotic visual novel in which the player flirts and fucks her way across the Atlantic on a cruise. Gameplay largely takes the form of dialogue choices; because the protagonist is disguised as her twin brother, the player must consider whether each line of speech might rouse suspicion, offend, or titillate. Through their genre subversions and mechanic innovations, these games unveil the sometimes contradictory, confusing, or illogical conditions that make love and intimacy so slippery, but also so vital.

 

Secret Little Haven by Victoria Dominowski

Secret Little Haven, Victoria Dominowski, screenshot1
Secret Little Haven, Victoria Dominowski, screenshot2
Secret Little Haven, Victoria Dominowski, screenshot3
Secret Little Haven, Victoria Dominowski, installation view

To introduce the gameplay in detail, an accompanying exhibition manual was published.

Click to read Exhibition Manual

 

For eight years, Pierre Corbinais (Pierrec, pierrecorbinais.com) has been covering experimental/ innovative/ alternative/ weird video games on his websites oujevipo.fr and ShakeThatButton.com. He’s also a video game writer and worked on/created several narrative games such as ‘Til Cows Tear us Apart or Bury Me My Love.
Victoria Dominowski (ristar.itch.io) is a game designer living in Seattle. More than anything, she enjoys making games about personal connections between people, and between the art they create. Games can be a space of infinite possibility if you let your imagination take hold. She wants you to know that computers are magic. <3
Christine Love (loveconquersallgam.es) writes narrative games about queerness and technology, and believes strongly in the power of cuteness and sincerity. Her works include Analogue: A Hate Story, and the IGF-winning Ladykiller in a Bind. She is currently working an RPG about a lesbian road trip to fight an ancient evil, called Get in the Car, Loser!
Giant Sparrow (giantsparrow.com) is a small video game company focused on creating surreal experiences people have never had before. Our dream is to make the world a stranger, more interesting place. We’re based in Santa Monica, CA.
Robert Yang (debacle.us) makes surprisingly popular games about gay culture and intimacy — he is most known for his historical bathroom sex simulator The Tearoom and his male shower simulator Rinse and Repeat, and his gay sex triptych Radiator 2 has over 150,000 users on Steam. He is currently an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU Game Center, and he has given talks at GDC, IndieCade, Queerness and Games Conference, and Games for Change. He holds a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley, and an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School for Design.
Marina Molarsky-Beck is a doctoral candidate at Yale University, where she studies nineteenth-century art, with a focus on (self-)portraiture in relationship to histories of psychology, literature, and photography. She received a B.A. from Harvard College in History of Art and Architecture in 2015. She has worked on exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Harvard Art Museums, and the Museum of Modern Art, and served as an artist liaison at Greene Naftali Gallery from 2016-2018.
William Lee is an artist and curator. His interests include video games, slow cinema, and neurophilosophy.