In my most recent piece, I talked at length about what Sukeban Games’ VA-11 HALL-A, a cyberpunk bartending game, did right, particularly around its portrayal of sexuality. But my language was qualified for a reason and I’d like to prise apart just where VA-11 HALL-A went wrong, even if so much of the game is brilliantly forward-looking in its imaginative, sensual writing. Its biggest failing lies in its inability to authentically capture how women talk to one another about their bodies, providing a stark reminder that male writers who seek to write women, especially women who are sexually active in some sense, should pay closer attention to how we actually speak to one another.

I should emphasize that this is not a re-evaluation of my effusive review, but should instead be thought of as an extended footnote expanding on some of its critiques. These are issues that should be explored, after all, if we are to help improve the state of games writing, particularly around women and sexuality--two areas where games, from indies to AAA titles, still awkwardly stumble.

Keeping Abreast of Things

I dinged VA-11 HALL-A for its incessant boob-comparison chatter, so frequent as to be a veritable blizzard of awkward mammarian conversation. We are treated to an extended disquisition about one character’s genetic heritage of endowment, how large breasts are a point of pride in one family to the point of having spawned a maternal aphorism, the great lengths another takes to hide her breasts while still having complex feelings about their prodigious size, the relative flatness of your own character’s chest, a running gag about the size of one character’s bosom, on and on and on.

There are a couple of circumstances in which this uncanny valley of boob talk might be appropriate. 

One, if this were an eroge/hentai/porn game. The nature of most pornography is that it saturates the fictive world with its sexual subject; it is an alchemy that turns pizza deliveries and plumber visits into erotic escapes. Most pornographic worlds, whether literary or virtual, are sex-suffused places where their onanistic purpose shapes the need for erotic ubiquity. In other words, if you want to whack off/jill off to this, it’s useful if sex is everywhere; the lack of realism actually helps. The haze of eroticism gets you in the mood.

Second, if it were better integrated into the speculative genre of the world. Legendary sci-fi author Samuel Delany was an expert at sexualizing the future in ways that were deeply embedded into the societies he created. For instance, in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, he envisions a future where, among other things, the word “bitch”--with all of its sexist, animalistic, and sexual connotations--is extraordinarily common. Its status as the insult men whisper behind women’s backs is elevated to the level of an unremarkable commonplace; spoken less in anger than in description of a highly gendered world where all women are “bitches” when one is not speaking to them. It’s jarring, but carefully woven into the world, and the way the language is deployed might be awkward or pretentious in another setting, but it works perfectly here as an efficient expression of a strange desert planet’s gender order.

VA-11 HALL-A meets neither of these standards. In the first instance, it’s a sexy game but not a pornographic one; its visual portrayal of its women characters is mercifully fanservice-free. No one could mistake this game for a masturbatory aid (thank goodness, all things considered). In the second, it is a beautifully realized cyberpunk world dripping with Gibsonian social commentary aplenty, but unlike, say, Delany’s work, it fails to make all the awkward boob talk anything more than what it appears to be: a man’s fantasy of what women talk about to each other. If VA-11 HALL-A’s sci-fi society had a better grounding for all this, it might work. But it doesn’t; from both the pornographic perspective and the spec-fic perspective, the boob comparison talk just feels disconnected from the rest of the game.

Erotic Incoherence

This isn’t to say VA-11 HALL-A is bad at sexuality. In so many other ways it’s starkly imaginative and sensual in the best way. We get interesting dialogue about how hacking an AI might be akin to a sexual experience for them, and how sex work occurs in this dystopian future. Nanobots serve as a defense mechanism in AI’s bodies against rape and assault. Metallic skin dangerously overheats while in a jacuzzi (at least so far as delicate human hands are concerned). There’s a large fetish market for invisible people taking their clothes off. On and on, delightfully this time. 

We see a wonderful imagination at work here able to conjure intriguing details of our sexual future. Fernando Damas is a brilliant writer, able to capture the small details that make any fictional setting worth immersing one’s self in. That skill is especially necessary for a game like VA-11 HALL-A because it’s a game all about the small mundane details of this world. You play an ordinary bartender, after all, just talking to patrons drowning their sorrows. The way in which Damas gives us sexy details of the setting in a way that makes the otherwise tedious act of clicking through mountains of dialogue enjoyable is no small feat.

But the breast talk remains, to use critic Lana Polansky’s excellent understanding of this term, incoherent. This is a bit on the wonky side of games criticism, but stay with me. As she puts it when critiquing Bioshock: Infinite, a game whose ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ was much discussed, the problem was, “not so much that these problems clash particularly noticeably in the moment of play in such a way that jars and therefore leaves an impression on the player. It’s that, under scrutiny, they don’t make any sense to what the game and its various elements are trying to accomplish.”

When I watch Alma and Jill circle the drain discussing Alma’s breasts for what feels like an eternity, it doesn’t feel dissonant--that delightful feeling comes whenever holographic Anna makes an appearance and it's a discomfiting bit of weirdness. It just feels like it’s an offramp from everything that’s making VA-11 HALL-A worthwhile. Everything in the game seems to be flowing in the same direction of presenting a cute, astute, social commentary on our future from the ground-zero perspective of an ordinary resident of it. Then this comes along and it feels like incoherent graffiti on the experience, like a penis sharpied onto a bathroom wall.

At the risk of stating the obvious, women do not really talk like this. Yes, we talk about our breasts quite a bit. Yes, I’ve been in situations where women I’m not sexually involved with have showed me their breasts for one reason or another--discussing the fit of clothing or a health concern or some such. Sometimes we joke about each other’s tits. But none of it, across all my experiences with wildly different kinds of other women, has ever even vaguely approximated VA-11 HALL-A’s talk. Not even close. That’s not inherently bad, of course, it is sci-fi after all. But as I pointed out earlier, there’s nothing narratively supporting it; nothing in the setting, nothing in the characters, nothing in even the game’s very genre.

The Female Gaze

You need only replace all discussion of breasts with penises to get a sense of the magical unrealism of this dialogue. “Your dick alone would fill my entire bathroom.” “As my father always said, ‘puffing up your dick is a sign of confidence! And a bigger dick means more confidence to show!’” It all just comes off a bit, well, odd. 

The one redeeming thing here could be lesbianism itself, and indeed some of the talk of Alma’s well-endowed attractiveness is centered on Jill’s own unrequited lust for the staunchly hetero hacker. This is the beginning of what we might call a “female gaze,” the attractiveness of a woman as seen through another woman’s eyes. 

But we never quite get there because the descriptions remain couched in rather puerile terms that I’ve just never seen come from women. I’m rather straight-laced, but between an exhibitionistic partner and several saucy friends with loose tongues and looser morals, the way their sexualizing language is framed just doesn’t sound like all the big-boob worship. For one thing, when we discuss each other’s attractiveness it’s remarkably non-boob centric; or, put another way, we find the beauty in each other’s breasts irrespective of size. They’re part of a larger picture that includes everything from the sensitivity of one’s breasts to their place in the longer arcs of your body’s curves--from lithe to voluptuous, it takes all kinds.

A dialogue where two women are verbally pawing at each other’s breasts, even if they’re ostensibly attracted to one another, feels at once myopic and unnatural. This isn’t how queer women (whether lesbian, bi, pan, or what have you) talk to each other. Compliments tend to be paid to the whole person, even (and perhaps especially) physical compliments. Finding someone “cute,” in the parlance of many a queer circle, tends to be an all-over sensation. Breasts are a part of that, but abstracting them away feels like dissecting a person; they make no sense without the whole. For those friends of mine whose large breasts may enter the conversation, they’re often large folks themselves--while all of VA-11 HALL-A’s ladies are thin. For these friends of mine, the comforting presence of their pillowy bosoms are coupled with the softness of the rest of their bodies. Once again, they’re of a piece, inseparable. And saying my friend couldn’t fit in a washroom because of her boobs would be less a joke than a particularly rank insult to her whole person.

If you find all this to be a bit TMI, then consider that this is the reality of women who love women. If you want to look through the female gaze, then this is what you’ll see.

I must emphasize that all of this is a small part of a much larger game that has much to recommend it on every level and is, perhaps, my favorite game so far this year. It shows cyberpunk hasn’t quite been exhausted yet and remains an ideal stage for acting out very contemporary anxieties and fantasies. 

But it felt worth the effort to explore this small matter in detail. Let there be no doubt: men can and do write women very well, oftentimes. I have never subscribed to an essentialist vision that suggests people can only empathetically write from a subject position that matches their own. But conversely, this doesn’t mean that certain glitches can never be identitarian in origin. Without careful attention, there are ways in which men can specifically flub the writing of a female character--this is one of them. Yet if you want to write about women being sexy with each other, you could do worse than to actually talk to us about what it actually looks like.

I promise it’s much more interesting than the fantasy.

Katherine Cross is a Ph.D student in sociology who researches anti-social behavior online, and a gaming critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications.