Sex & Games

It's played by helping adorable rabbit-like creatures fly through beautiful environments. The creatures are analogous to female erogenous zones, and by making the creatures happy -- petting them on the ears, tickling them on the nose, putting them in a good environment, singing to them, etc, you can fly through gorgeous fantasy environments and so take each creature to its "happy place," one might say. :) In the process of learning what kinds of stimuli these creatures like, the player would learn techniques of female sexual pleasure, though that wouldn't be obvious or even mentioned as a game goal. The idea was to make the game's style and gameplay appealing to a wide variety of females. So, the actions are sensual in nature, and the rhythm of play is akin to sexual pleasure and orgasm, but the gameplay itself does not depict sex.

Modesty aside, why do you think your entry was the winner?

Well, I think there were some design reasons and some presentation reasons. Design-wise, I tackled the subject of sexual pleasure itself, more directly than some of the other games. And I did it in an accessible way. Presentation-wise, I showed a cool little game demo that I put together with some amazing friends. That helped bring my concept to life in the minds of the audience.

What was the most challenging aspect of the design for you?

I spent a lot of time trying to think of a game idea that was fun, challenging, funny, interactively valid, and not simply a cheap shot to entertain the conference audience. Most of my ideas fell short of meeting all those criteria, of course. Finally, when I came up with the Lapis concept, the biggest hurdle was to decide whether I would really go with this proactive, sex-positive feminist concept that represented what I believe, rather than just presenting a funny idea that met the requirements of the challenge, but didn't represent my perspective as well. Once I committed to being myself, in fact kind of "outing" myself as a feminist designer and not just "one of the boys," and when I committed to revealing that stance in the design itself, it became a lot easier to design, if not less frightening to present.

Did working on a sexually-themed design change any preconceptions you had about sexually themed games?

It changed my preconception that sex-related games need to be about intercourse. My as-yet-unchanged preconception is that a game like the one I designed could never get funded, distributed, or properly marketed, but I welcome someone to change that one too!