Yeah, yeah, I’m not the biggest fan of the name either. I think “consensual” and “torture”—and even to an extent “simulator”—have a lot of linguistic baggage attached to them. Particularly, in the gamer world. Put them all together and you get a verbal history that makes the kinky wordsmith in me more than a little queasy.
But bear with me.
The mindset this game seems to have—the aim and premise it promises to present—gives me hopeful pause. In this game, you play a top who’s about to have a romantic, loving, kinky night with your female partner. The night begins with cuddles and hugs and, most importantly and most romantically, upfront negotiations. Your character is given a wide array of choices—from activities, like spanking and slapping, to toys, like canes and floggers—to achieve the night’s goal, which is to make your bottom cry. There’s even a safeword, “tulip,” that’s given that your bottom will use if it gets to be too much. The game involves all the right stuff like check-ins and after care, all the things responsible kinksters employ and enjoy in real life.
The thing that intrigues me about this game is that “there is an actual humanity to the game that is missing from mainstream porn (and dare I say it, many of those triple-A games that feature torture). As far as the game is concerned, you care about this person. They're not just someone you're screwing/hurting. You'll hug and giggle with them before anything starts. You'll comfort them after the beatings end. You may even soothe your girl mid-game.” So often, in media, kinksters are presented as less than human. We’re the crazy ex who was psycho nuts but a wild ride and one helluva one-up sex story. Or we’re the damaged victim who gets raped or abused because we got into stuff we shouldn’t have that needs to be saved or cured. Or we’re the dead body left humiliated and strung up like a cross between bad gallows humor and leftover holiday decorations in the middle of a crime scene.
Kopas created the game because she believes, rightly so, that “there are a lot of videogames about violence but not nearly enough about consensual forms of violence and non-normative forms of intimacy.” Kopas’s girlfriend and play partner goes on to say that “so much of the violence in videogames is not only nonconsensual, but also consequence-free, a power fantasy where the digital world has been designed to be permissive of your whims.” I really like that the game, according to Kopas, deals with the “special kind of vulnerability involved in asking someone to hurt you until you can't take it anymore, until whatever defenses you're still holding up and might not even know about crumble and you break down in hot, streaming tears. There's a lot of risk involved — and not just for the party on the receiving end.” And that “It was really important to me to portray the player character as a human being, not just a pain-dispensing robot.”
However, there are a few things that still make me a little wary. Like how the game offers some options that aren’t mainstream or advisable within the kink world, like slapping and punching to sensitive and almost universally off-limits areas like the face and breastbone areas. And how, according to some players, it’s not as easy to check-in and to know your boundaries as they would like. Your bottom may look like she’s getting more and more exhausted and she will start to cry, but still won’t say her safeword.
A part of me, like the player, agrees that there is something very interesting about that—the vulnerability of the top, where you’re never sure if you’re going too far or not far enough. But, if actions that would cause a normal person—masochist or not—to safeword out don’t in the game, I think I’m still a bit troubled and on the fence about it. A lot of the game relies on the conscience of the player—whose storyline is based in love and care for their simulated partner. As Kopas says, “I won't pretend that the game is perfect in that respect, like, I'm putting some trust in the player not to just keep going as far as they can, because it's not a perfect simulation of course.”
I’d like to think that the people who play this game will take that into account and not gut-instinct back to the kind of programmed presentations of violence that this game seeks to challenge. But, without the knowledge of how to do responsible sensation-based S&M, I don’t know how well a likely vanilla, more mainstream player could be expected to do so.
But, overall, this game presents a side of kink and BDSM that isn’t seen nearly enough in media and is hopefully gaining a stronger voice in the mainstream. I think I just might have to check this ten-minute experience out. Consensual Torture Simulator is just $2 on Gumroad.
**For more kinky gaming fun, check out Riding the Iron Bull - Kink and Dragon Age: Inquisition
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