Continuing from Part 1, we're now in the 1990s and will take a look at the videogame boom of home consoles, at a time when it was still difficult to find games where you could be a girl at all—let alone a girl who kisses others girls. Nonetheless, there’s a few early cases of lesbian feelings portrayed to varying degrees of overtness, and in fascinating ways; I ended up writing an entire essay about SaGa Frontier in particular, now split into part 3.
It is a curious consequence of marginalisation that it’s much easier to find lesbian characters in porn stories than in non-erotic content. Without the titillation appeal, all you're left with is human relationships, and homoexclusive affection is a bigger taboo than sex; straight people can conceive of queer sex as a sort of fetish or deviancy, but to marry a woman and be happy without a man? Why, this threatens the very fabric of (a shitty) society! On the one hand, this dooms most of 90s console GL to the realm of mask-and-signal, not unlike old Hollywood movies, never able to put into words the love-that-shall-not-be-named. (One of the first console games to have an overtly lesbian-identified character whom you can date is, meaningfully, the Utena game from 1998). On the other hand, the focus on relationships puts emphasis on emotional issues that didn’t feature at all in the earlier, sex-oriented games. However, we do not have in these games any representation of actual Japanese queer culture or how real-life queer people live; rather, we have fantasy-world explorations of gender expression and sapphic attraction beyond normative boundaries, many of which struck a chord with queer gamers at the time—and still today.
Being irrationally interested in the question of what was the First Yuri Game, I thought being able to read Japanese would make this a simple question, but my naïveté crashed against a messy reality—how much queerbaiting does it take to count something as “lesbian”? how much subtext do I need to assume text? what to do which games that are very obviously sapphic but the author dismisses the notion? are adaptations toned down from a textually yuri original media still yuri? Are porn games made by-men-for-men yuri? if your answer is “no”—how many of the alleged men are closeted trans women? is an empty field of grass the yuri of absence? What even is “yuri” anyway?
Anyway, I'm jotting down my discoveries so far before I forget them.
The way this list ended up is; in this first part I summarise what I found about porn games I never played, from the late 1980s to the early 1990s; in Part 2 I talk about console games with non-pornographic sapphic content from the late 1990s, including my own memories/reviews of those I played back in the day.
Touching Grass: The Game is a solo journaling game played with pen and paper, a deck of Tarot cards, and the plants outside. Touching Grass: The Game is a ludditoludic technoparanoid hallucinatory amusement about the notions of modern technology as a mind-controlling conspiracy; of proximity to plants as magically inducing psychological growth; of “touching grass” as a demanding ascetic exercise in a world of addictive distractions. I have distilled these common feelings until the exhortation to touch grass became an exercise in recreational psychosis.
To finish Touching Grass: The Game, you will need to go outside somewhere between 8 to 78 times, depending on how you play it, the phase of the moon, and your luck. I suggest planning for one outing a day for a couple lunar cycles. If you complete Touching Grass: The Game at least once, you may publicly present yourself as a Phytocultist of the Green Gate.
One of the biggest reliefs ever for me was to find out that native English speakers often can't make out the lyrics of songs either. That native English speakers also feel like modern TV is better watched with subtitles. In the same way, one of the biggest reliefs was finding out that native Japanese gamer also have no fucking clue what the hell Amakusa Shirō-Tokisada is mumbling on Samurai Shodown IV (=Ten-samu). The voice capabilities of the old videogames was quite crunchy, and recordings often only vaguely resembled the original sample. (Somebody could probably do a phonetics paper on this.)
We live in a society that incentivises productivity and consumption, and devalues maintenance, cleaning, repurposing, degrowth; even though the first type of thing is destroying the world and the second type of thing is what is needed to avert collapse. In fact, perversely, the more problems are created by productive labour the greater its prestige, because doubling down is a method of denial.
I was looking at my bright, artistic, sensitive daughter bringing me tea after I watched her play the latest seasonal event in Animal Crossing, and thinking that the caregiving relationship already started to shift directions without even me realising it. I don't remember when it was that she started cooking for us more often than I do; then, at some point, it had just become the norm. At some point she was caring for me when I’m sick and giving pep talks when Ḯ’m sad, as if mirroring back our caring of her. I mean I still expect that at some point she'll leave the nest since she's an adult now and the capitalistic nuclear family has undermined the natural order of things, but we still experience it like this, on the edges.
And what this made me think of is of when she was born. This tiny red little thing, unable to cry or breathe. Of her first 15 days of life in these vaguely dystopic-looking but literally life-saving incubators,¹ her skin now bright yellow from jaundice, her face stuffed with plastic-metal tentacles. What a delicate dance of flesh and machine it must be, to calculate the precise parameters to pump a newborn's lung. To engineer breath in, breath out.²
You grew up experiencing the analog world, then were an earlier adopter of the digital world.
Therefore you are forever pining for what was lost of the analog lifestyle, and the lost free Internet. You miss hanging out with your friends on the streets downtown when there was nothing else to do; you also miss when everyone was the webmaster of their own homepage. You’re in a transition generation, the lifestyle equivalent of being an immigrant; you feel like you've been in different lands for so long that you can't fit into any of them anymore.
You started working right before 2008. This permanently shaped how you feel about work. The system is rigged and any impression of stability is a lie. You don't trust anything. Prepper generation.
Content warning: Old woman reminisces at rose-tinted nostalgia.
No First World country would sell us games, so we pirated everything, and took from both sources. I played Rockman, Bare Knuckle, Shiritsu Justice Gakuen and Biohazard before I knew them as Megaman, Streets of Rage, Rival Schools, or Resident Evil. Sometimes I still slip and use the Japanese names when talking to USA people. On the other hand I played Earthbound, Secret of Mana or Fatal Fury before trying Mother, Seiken Densetsu or Garō Densetsu. It seemed quite random which one we’d get first. I played Rockman 3 but Megaman 5.
The Dynavision 4 Radical, a Brazilian Famiclone—an alternative console to play Famicom/NES games. There were many such models. A common feature was to have dual connectors for both the narrower Japanese and wider USA cartridges, like here; both formats were widespread in the country. If your console didn’t have both slots, then you owned and adapter.
