3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS
“It’s difficult to grow tired of artificial chicken.” If there’s one true sentence in this IFComp, then this is probably not it. But I found it hilarious, and 3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS is full of small well-crafted details like that. At one point you go to a class that teaches the ability to talk in a normal way about sex, rather than being totally repressed about it as is normal in this society. The teacher says: “Let us start with oral practice. Repeat after me: Penis.” Hilarious.
But let’s take a step back and talk about sex, society, and intimacy. In Brave New World, the novel by Aldous Huxley, free love is the norm; more than the norm, it is seen as a serious social defect to either not engage in sex at all, or to have sex with the same partners too often. Sex has been turned into nothing but a fun activity. It has been drained of all the guilt and shame, but also of all its deeper meaning. This, of course, fits perfectly into a society that requires everyone to be a happy cog in the machine, all smiles, all surface, no hidden depths. There is no such thing as intimacy, because there is no distance between the inner and the outer. If the whole you is already reflected in a physical mirror, you don’t need to see yourself reflected in the eyes of significant others.
The world of 3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS is at the other end of the spectrum, but as is so often the case, the spectrum bends around and its ends are in some weird sense identical. Here we have a world where sex has been excised – completely. It’s not just that there is no porn, or that there is only sex within marriage, or that revealing clothing is forbidden. There is literally no sex at all. Through a slow progress of censorship and repression and Bathroom Laws, the ruling Sensible Party has abolished sex. Perhaps children are born as they are in Brave New World, in factories. This is not explained. But certainly sex has lost its connection to intimacy and meaning, as it has in Huxley’s novel. It has, in fact, become extremely dangerous. Everyone in this society has so much repressed sexual energy that getting Turned On leads to spontaneous combustion. Fatal combustion. This is why people are not allowed to see anyone else before the age of 43, and even then they have to cover all of their skin area except the face when they go out in public.
This is not a subtle allegory, but NHB (as I will call the game henceforth) has no interest in subtlety. It revels in the absurdity of its premise and pushes it far and fast. Our protagonist is an investigative cop whose job it is to handle cases of sexual combustion. Clearly he (the cop is still thinking of themselves as male at this point of the story) is a highly sensual individual himself, avoiding death by arousal only by taking extremely high doses of an arousal repressing drug. There’s a little investigating in the beginning, just a little, and then – bam! – the game shifts gears. It turns out that the drug has turned the cop into a woman; what’s more, she now realises that that’s what she always wanted to be. And not just any woman, but a gorgeous sexy woman. What’s more, the cop is an exhibitionist and wants nothing more than to show off this gorgeous sexy female body to people, and she unconsciously exhibits herself to the first person who comes along, a food courier… who gets turned on and dies in spontaneous combustion. Of course, this will lead to a police investigation! But do we get into trouble? No! We get a chance to buy female clothes, and experience first-hand the thrill of wearing clothes in which we not only feel wholly ourselves, but in which we also feel really sexy. I felt sexy myself when playing this scene, so I though it was effective. (While I am perfectly comfortable with my male body, I would love it if we had a way of switching gender at will. Being just one gender is so restrictive.)
Then, the game shifts gears again. We become part of the revolution! And the leader of the revolution is our boyfriend! And we cum while he watches, perfectly fitting our exhibitionist desires! There’s also some stuff about classes, and organising the revolution… but then the game shifts gears again again. The leader of the Sensible Party contacts us and claims that he wants to adopt out entire programme! But we know that he will betray our principles, because he is not acting from real LUST, and so we kill him by doing our exhibitionist thing and fulfilling his sexual kink, which turns out to be getting a golden shower. And thus sex conquers all! Everyone lives happily ever after!
Its breathless, it’s fun, it’s well-written, there’s some good barbed satire about current events, and of course it is 100% a wish fulfilment fantasy. Waking up one day as the gender you’ve always wanted to be, looking far more sexy than you ever did, changing society into a sexual paradise, getting the man of your dreams, and all that without paying a serious price or even having to confront much difficulty – it’s wonderful. And if that was all that NHB was, it would have been a very fun game with good pacing, a highly original premise, and a happy ending that you can’t begrudge anyone.
But it’s not all that the game is. Just before the end, the ‘author’ breaks in and tells us about their worries and real-life problems. Drew’s recent topic about my game The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode has no doubt raised my sensitivity to the distinction between the real author and the author that appears in the game, but even without that it’s easy to see that the ‘author’ who interrupts the game cannot be the real author, Kastel. The ‘author’ tells us that they’re worried about making the game a happy wish-fulfilment fantasy, but okay, they’ll make it anyway, because some people will like it. Well, but that’s not the game that Kastel has made. Because the game Kastel has made is the one which also contains, in addition to the happy fantasy, these remarks by the ‘author’, which make the fantasy go *pop* faster than a balloon that is consummating his marriage to a cactus.
Here’s what the ‘author’ character writes about the game, after telling us about their own feelings of isolation as a trans person visiting Japan and not really getting near to anyone:
Now let me give my interpretation of what is going on here. The game itself, as a whole, is an allegory for a particular way of thinking about sex. The game is a story of wish-fulfilment, and the picture it paints of sex is also that of wish-fulfilment. You have an exhibitionist fetish? Alright, then good sex means masturbating while somebody is watching. You have a golden shower fetish? Alright, then finally fulfilling that wish by being pissed on is an explosive event perhaps worth dying for!
There’s an infamous interview with Bioware marketing guy David Silverman where he explains that in this game they’re making, if you press a button, something awesome happens. “So button, awesome, connected!” That’s what the picture of sex we just discussed is like. All I need is somehow who will press my buttons (whatever they may be), and then, bam!, awesome happens. My kink is the button, you press it, awesome! Button, awesome, button, awesome.
But when we treat sex as wish-fulfilment, it has little to do with intimacy. This can be fine; sometimes, perhaps, one just wants sex. But the desire for intimacy is both stronger and deeper, and it ties in with sexuality in ways that are messy, complicated, sometimes glorious, and sometimes full of all the difficulties of human relationships. Crucially, intimacy is never mere wish-fulfilment. It essentially requires a vulnerability that is more than physical; a working through of problems, both our own and those of the other person; and the terrifying work of self-knowledge. You can’t get it for free. Most people, and I certainly don’t mean to exclude myself, often settle for less than intimacy because we are too tired, too distracted, too afraid, or too hurt to do this hard work. On the other hand, even small moments of fleeting intimacy can be worth much; and we can slowly get better at being intimate, over time, with courage and hope and determination. This is the work of love.
The messy story of sex and intimacy within a relationship was the topic of my own 2023 game, Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates. It used sex to get to talk about intimacy. In a very different way, NHM comes to the same messy story of sex and intimacy along the same path. Sex is used to get to talk about intimacy.
If there’s a message to take from this game, I think it is this: clearing the ground for guilt-free sexuality is important, perhaps even crucial. But it’s not by itself the royal road to intimacy. For that, we need to get beyond the wish-fulfilment fantasy, difficult though that may be.