Erin S Kittens
Member
I came across this writeup tonight and just had to share it with you all.
The Tearoom as a record of risky business
Much, much more at the link.
The Tearoom as a record of risky business
The Tearoom is a historical public bathroom simulator about anxiety, police surveillance, and sucking off other dudes' guns. In it, you basically cruise other willing strangers for sex, and try to have some fun without getting caught by undercover police. It's heavily inspired by Laud Humphreys' epic Tearoom Trade (1970), a meticulous 180 page sociological study of men who have quick anonymous sex with men in public bathrooms ("tearooms" in US, "cottages" in UK), along with interviews, diagrams, and derived "rules" for participating in the tearoom trade.
My game is set in a small roadside public bathroom in Ohio in 1962. Much of the game sequences and gameplay are based on Humphreys' notes (in his book, Humphreys even calls it a "game" himself) and the layout of the bathroom is based partly on diagrams from his observation reports. And while I wanted the game to be about gay history, I also wanted it to speak to how video games think of sex and violence.
Few video games feature peeing or pooping, but still frequently feature bathrooms for the sake of completeness. To make the bathroom "useful", level designers often stash powerups or ventilation ducts or forgotten keycards in them, but those are all secondary to the bathroom's ultimate function in a video game: to signal expense and production value. In immersive sims like Deus Ex Human Revolution or Prey (2017), the player can turn on showers and flush toilets, and each fixture sports a complex effects setup with swirling particles and refracting water shaders. This "wasteful" use of draw calls and texture memory helps assure you of the game's high budget and huge production team. (For more on the expense of video game water, see Pippin Barr's water museum "v r 3".)
In The Tearoom, I replicate the logic of the pointless expensive video game bathroom. I gratuitously cover every surface with high resolution physically-based materials, apply layers of dirt and grunge decals, lightmap the room at a high luxel density, and incorporate unique period details like vintage light switches and old faucets. I also hand-modeled the Cadillac of urinals, a luxurious drop-floor "Hinsdale", scaled to the original patent drawings... I even do one better than most AAA video games, and allow the player to freely urinate as much as they like. (However, the urine does pool rather unrealistically, to exaggerate the complexity of my flushing simulation.)
Inside the magic membrane of the tearoom, there were big risks to propositioning the wrong guy for sex, whether he's totally unwitting or actively hostile. It was very important to figure out who thought it was just a bathroom vs. who knew it was a tearoom. To help players see each other, tearooms evolved a complex ritual / "handshake" of certain stances and eye contact and "showing hard" over time, allowing players to wordlessly "seal the contract" (sexual consent) quickly and effectively.
In my game, I mimic this same look-based ritual for the first phase of every encounter. To establish shared sexual interest, the player and NPC must repeatedly make eye contact. If the player is slow, the NPC coughs to try to get the player's attention; if the player never reciprocates the gaze, then the NPC eventually leaves. Some NPCs are totally oblivious bystanders who will leave right after they pee, while some timid NPCs scare easily from forceful eye contact.
This is the part of the game when you suck-off a gun as quickly as possible, which, um, departs a bit from Humphreys' 1970 sociological study. My design emerged from a difficult problem: how do you give first person fellatio in a game? As an experienced real-life practitioner, it is my opinion that video games can't do this justice because a blurry appendage thrusting toward you, clipping through the camera, is not erotic, and such a literal approach would've been inscrutable and disappointing. Instead, I wanted a bit more of the fantasy, to show the excitement and pleasure and why these men would seek each other out in a public bathroom.
But what is the LGBTQ community's relationship to violence? Historically, cops have been perhaps the #1 most dangerous enemy of gay / trans / queer people for decades, and continue to target gay people today: in 2016, the Toronto Police started "Project Marie" to target gay men who cruised parks late at night; and since at least 2004 and continuing today, the NYPD have been targeting men at the Port Authority who "seem gay", spying on them through slits in bathroom stalls and charging them with "public indecency." (Isn't going to the Port Authority already punishment enough?
In the game, the random percentage chance of encountering a black man is based on 1960 US census data. According to page 1-44 of "General Demographic Trends for Metropolitan Areas, 1960-1970", Mansfield was about 5.82% black (6853 / 117761) and so, I have hardcoded that exact probability into the game. That relatively rarity means that some players may play through 5-10 encounters before meeting a black man, and when they do, I imagine white players may feel surprised -- and then maybe feel bad for feeling surprised -- and then wonder whether he's secretly a cop -- but then were there any black cops in Ohio in 1962? etc.
The tearoom represents an exciting and radical reclamation of public space, for members of the public who usually aren't allowed any space of their own. Humphreys used the phrase "patterns of collective action" to refer to these dudes bonking each other, but to me that phrase also has a political tinge that reminds us how the tearoom is / was also a collective of white and black men, working class and middle class men, and straight and gay men... uh, bonking each other.
But if there's any simple moral to be gleaned from this game, I just hope you never look at a bathroom, or park, or office, or shopping mall, etc. the same way ever again. Above all, the tearoom is about transforming the world around you by seeing (creative, erotic) potential in every corner and crevice. Even if you're not a sex-with-men-haver, how can you remap your world to strengthen your community? All you need is some willing players.
Maybe the tearoom is just the beginning.
Much, much more at the link.