Designer Tina Gong is on a mission to free the world from the “silly social stigma” that is female masturbation, and she’s going to do it via her videogame HappyPlayTime.Gong didn’t actually tell me this—that is the mission statement on her game’s website, which features a anime-ified Dutch-looking vulva named Happy. Gong did tell me on the phone that she grew up in a conservative social environment and was branded as a “black sheep” when she told her friends she masturbated.“They called me disgusting, and it was quite harmful as an adolescent growing up. No one should have to go through that,” said Gong. In the sex-positive feminist “war," which Gong describes as being “problematic in that it is so serious,” she’s decided to fight “with wacky dancing vaginas and inappropriate jokes” because humor is usually “the first step for people to deal” with controversial issues, hence HappyPlayTime.Not many people are laughing about the idea of an educational game about female masturbation, however. And no, it is not conservative religious hordes—both Kotaku’s Patricia Hernandez and trans indie developer Anna Anthropy (aka Auntie Pixelate) took great issue with the theoretical game over the weekend. They write it will pressure women to feel bad about their masturbation habits—a point they draw from a sentence in Gong’s infographic that reads “gals, you can do better!” on low statistics—and both feel female masturbation should not be gamified. Writes Auntie Pixelate:there’s this unfortunate idea of “sex positivity” i encounter all the time that essentially just shames people for not having enough sex and pressures them into doing it more. making masturbation into a universal competition is going to achieve only that: people are going to get pressured into using their bodies in the ways that are arbitrarily defined as normative.In our phone interview, Gong said she agrees with both Kotaku and Auntie Pixelate in that that the “gals, you can do better!” sentence on her infographic needs to be changed, explaining it as a 2 AM rush job. “It does make it sound like I am pressuring people to do this, which is not my intention.” The game is "not about forcing or manipulating you to do this one kind of action." Instead, it's more about exploration and awareness.As for whether or not educational video games should be made about female masturbation, I can’t help but say “Yes! More please!” Video games' place as a highly popular, highly experimental medium makes them the perfect choice to help women feel better about their girly bits. Saying that video games are no place for this type of learning or discussion is just furthering the stigma around women masturbating. In fact, the backlash against Gong’s game and sense of humor made me feel bad about my masturbation habits and sex-positive championing more than the controversial words on her infographic.Gong’s is not a game designer or developer by trade, which is a sign that more people are looking towards game to share their message, and it's good to see her pushing the boundaries of the gaming community. The game is currently only a concept, but given the controversy and press, Gong said she is most definitely going to create the game now.
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