The Newest Sexy Skyrim mod

For my game art I decided to watch Kara Gut’s intimacy mod, a rather bizarre experience of characters seemingly kissing and then flinging themselves off very high places. The purpose of this mod is a critique of the hypersexual modding culture of adding a sex mod to most every game they play. Now I’m not going to pretend that I’m the purest soul on Earth, nor will I claim that I’ve never watched porn but I can respect the message behind this mod as well as the absurd clips that come along with it! Now the video starts off with two burly Skyrim characters spouting innuendos, they go in for a passionate kiss… and promptly fling themselves off a cliff in dramatic slow motion, it’s hilarious and bizarre and I watched all 9 minutes of it. Now you might ask why the mod exists, but that would bring in the question as to why sex mods exist in the first place? This reason I bring this question up is because as the text says, “Conventional gaming form relies on a notion of purposeful interactivity based on a coherent set of game rules. (Galloway 130). Because the game relies on interacting based of the games rules, to add a mechanic where two characters have sex can come off as particularly jarring, especially with what the game is: If it’s a Skyrim mod then sure why not, but if it’s a sexy Minecraft mod, that’s when it gets into the territory of immersion breaking and adding it for the sake of adding it.

I believe this critique comes from an issue we see in TV and movies a lot, which is the the inclusion of a graphic sex scene to remind the audience that the movie is rated R or the show is rated MA. Again while I’m not claiming that it’s a problem, I also see it in a way that’s like slightly immature; it does not mean that characters in universe don’t have sex, it just a examaning the way that people will shoehorn in something sex related whether is is canonically or not. The structure of the game is also subverted because the mechanics of Skyrim are clunky at best, the animations they use are for combat… and that’s about it; so to suddenly include a very intimate hugging animation could lead to a double take from the player. Regardless I do like the way that Gut uses her mods in a humorous way as well, it’s not some anti-sex crusade, it just takes the concepts of these mods and makes us ask ourselves “why?”.

Gameplay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7f7myhdjy4

Citations
“Countergaming.” Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, by Alexander R. Galloway, University of Minnesota Press, 2010.