Robert Yang’s Gay Video Game Fantasy

One of the most banned game developers in the world right now, Yang makes games that deal with and explore gay sex, intimacy, and culture. You may have heard of or seen his game, Rinse & Repeat, in which you get to wash a tempting gym rat-type of guy in the gym showers, only accessible by adhering to this sexy character’s schedule. Yang started with playing Mario at age 4, and now designs and simulates complex and immersive LGBTQIA+ scenes that allow players to navigate themselves through and explore sexual situations.

The BOFFO Residency Fire Island is an artists' residency located in the Pines, which houses queer artists every summer and provides them with a beautiful environment in which to make work. BOFFO is now looking to contribute to their community in socially distant ways, including screenings, artist talks, and a book club.

When was the first time you played a video game?

I was maybe 4 years old. I played the first Mario game on a Nintendo. I didn't really understand what was happening, but I was into it.

What video game made you love video games, and what ultimately made you want to start making them yourself?

I think Half-Life is probably the game I hold in my heart, it was one of the first games to really invest in its 3D world. In general, imperfect games motivate me the most—the gaps or omissions or problems suggest new game ideas, and then it's up to me to make that game exist.

When did you start making them, and what was your approach at first? How did you learn to make video games?

At first I started by modding my favorite games, making new stories or game worlds, and self-publishing my mods on the internet. It's kind of like fan fiction, but for games. It's about building on top of something you already understand, which is great for learning.

Was the subject matter always about gay culture? When did that become your focus?

I think maybe it started in 2009, when I had come out as gay to my friends and family, and started getting involved with the indie games movement—which is about making smaller games that are more personal, so I thought, why not also make gay games that explore this part of my identity.

How is gay culture defined in the gaming world? What kind of representation does the LGBTQA+ community get in the gaming world, and in what ways do you think this could change, is changing, or won’t change?

LGBTQ representation in games is still unfortunately focused on tokenization and "respectability politics" -- big budget blockbuster productions throwing some gay crumbs, like a secondary trans character here or a bi character there. This is fine but it's always strained through the market requirements of big commercial games, when we should be pushing for so much more imagination like a radical queer rethinking of video game culture itself, e.g. Marina Kittaka's recent call to "Divest from the Video Games Industry."

You’ve made many games; what’s your favorite one you’ve ever made?

I think Succulent is my favorite. It's short and sweet, and I made it in just 2 weeks, which is very very fast for a video game. It really just came together without much pain. It's short and sweet.

What does your game Succulent entail?

Succulent is a short music video game where you help a man eat a popsicle/"ice lolly"/"ice block"/oblong frozen treat. It's very straightforward, it's just about puppeting a sexy man eating something in a sexy way. But he also symbolizes a very specific muscular white stud masculine sexiness, and at the end, he devours the player. It's a cursed fantasy.

Which has been your most successful?

Rinse and Repeat is probably my most played and YouTubed game, and it was even featured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as part of its big "Videogames" exhibition. The tone and core fantasy are probably the cleanest work I've done, so I can see why people gravitate to it so much.

Can you explain Rinse & Repeat a little bit?

Rinse and Repeat is a shower simulator game about washing a guy at the gym. He'll tell you where to scrub, and how he wants to be touched, and you have to do your best to fulfill his desires. So it's about listening to a partner, but it's also about the boundaries we set. The hunky shower man will only appear at certain times in real-life, once per day, so like sometimes he'll be showering at 3 AM on Monday.

Will you reconfigure your real-life schedule just to play this game? What are you willing to do to maintain this virtual relationship? In what ways are you exploring sex through your games?

The main goal of my work is to normalize sexuality and sexual culture in games. Sex can be fun, boring, sad, beautiful, disappointing, annoying—sex is all these things, and excavating the depth of sex is a crucial project for sex positivity, feminism, and LGBTQ rights around the world. I'm also currently one of the most banned game developers in the world right now, so I frequently simulate the police in my games. It's important to understand the oppressive ways that sexuality has been policed in the past, present, and future.

Is your work changing at all due to quarantine & COVID?

As you can imagine, most video game development work already happens on a computer, so my work has been minimally disrupted, apart from the usual existential dread and depression facing everyone everywhere.

What has your residency at BOFFO Fire Island been like? Having time to rest and reset has been vital, and me and my collaborators are just so immensely grateful for this respite. We've been going to the beach like every other day, and we sorta can't believe rich people get to do this all the time?

But then I'm told that rich people actually think going to the Pines is sort of like, slumming it, which is absurd. So a lot of this residency has been about learning about all these perspectives.

Does living and working in Cherry Grove, a well known gay haven, inspire your material? If yes, how so?

We're based in the Pines, which has been funny for our research—there's been almost no parties or big events here due to quarantine—and everyone keeps telling us how weird and unusual and empty everything feels. So do we spend our residency making a game about this very abnormal time, or do we make something about a fantasy gay circuit party paradise that we never even witnessed? We decided to sort of try both: acknowledge the reality and the fantasy.

You’re collaborating with Eddie Cameron, Fernando Ramallo, and Kevin Watters on developing a new gay video game… What can you tell us about this project?

We wanted to make a Fire Island Pines sim game, playable in-person by a non-gamer audience, while preserving social distancing restrictions. So there's a big screen where we project a big 3D recreation of the Pines that I kinda built, filtered through Kevin's social simulation and Fernando's camera director AI, and Eddie built a system that lets players send text messages to control their avatar. It's kind of like an interactive decentralized mural, where the accumulation of all the players' decisions add up to this collective image. We wanted to make something public at a time when the public sphere has basically disappeared, to reflect this community back onto itself in a playful way.

Kind of like another dimension where Quarantine never happened?

Well, not exactly, because we've never experienced the quarantine-free Fire Island ourselves. It would feel dishonest. It's more about the tension between these two dimensions, maybe? The BOFFO director Faris Al-Shathir has been working so hard to finalize the physical public installation at a time when society is killing off arts and culture—so pending approval from the local government, we're going to try to setup a big projection in the Fire Island Pines Harbor, which should allow enough space to safely socially distance. It'll be like going to the ferry docks to leave physical Fire Island, to go to a virtual Fire Island... but in real life, you're still sitting there socially distanced, you're still masked, you're still under this weird public surveillance of lockdown America, it all becomes part of the game experience. So in the game, between sex parties or beach outings, your avatar also might be masked, might encounter story beats about dealing with lockdown, might even participate in a Black Lives Matter march, etc. Fantasies are never completely detached from reality, but rather they collide and intersect with everything else—and this is just the mess we live in, every day.

Culture

The Club Is Coming to the Stage

We enter and make our way to what is approximately front left of the DJ booth, where we’re accustomed to dancing at clubs in New York. “So is this a techno club or a dance performance?” yells an uncertain participant in my boyfriend’s ear. He laughs, bouncing along to Ben UFO, and yells back, “It’s both!” The club has long been a hot topic in European contemporary dance but it is only now making its way into New York performance venues, largely through transatlantic tours. R.O.S.E. follows recent examples like Michele Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn. at MoMA PS1 (May 2024), (LA)HORDE’s Room with a View at NYU Skirball (October 2023), and Gisèle Vienne’s Crowd at BAM (October 2022).

Do these performances compromise the club’s spirit — a space idealized for its anonymity, dark lighting, and thundering music? The notion of the club as a utopian escape is admittedly just that — an ideal — because of how its intense conditions can create barriers to entry. Still, the club remains sacred for many, a place to forge connections and embrace an alternative state of being. Looking at how performances transfer this spirit to new settings reveals what aspects of the club are essential and those that aren’t.

Sharon Eyal, R.O.S.E. 2024. Photography by Stephanie Berger, courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.

Eyal’s dancers make their entrance. The lighting shifts from roving blue to yellow spotlights as Ben UFO’s tracks transition to more melodic beats. Clad in deconstructed lace Dior lingerie with dark red tears painted on their faces, the dancers move cautiously in a tightly maintained pack, slicing paths through the horde with hoof-like steps and jerky leg extensions. After around ten minutes of this controlled choreography, the dancers vanish as the lighting shifts back to blue and Ben UFO picks up his dubby beats. The club, as we knew it, resumes. This cycle of tightly executed movements and free-flowing club-goers repeats several times, each time emboldening the dancers to plunge further into the crowd.

Clubbing in a building once built for the U.S. Army National Guard on Manhattan’s Upper East Side turns out to be surprisingly successful — at least for the audience. What starts as an awkward, scattered group searching for their non existent seats gradually gels into an engaged, bouncing crowd that erupts in cheers each time the dancers enter and exit. Performance patrons who might never step foot in a club find themselves swept up in its potential for communion, moving in unison with fellow ticket holders. But it isn’t until the very end of R.O.S.E. that the dancers finally break free from Eyal’s choreography and join the fired-up audience in a brief moment of improvisatory movement with the music. By keeping her dancers at arm’s length, Eyal seems more interested in the club as a backdrop for her signature movement style than wholly as a space with meaningful stories to be told.

Michele Rizzo, HIGHER xtn. 2024. Photography by Cameron Kelly courtesy of MoMA PS1.

Back in May, I attended Wire Festival, a multiday electronic music event at Knockdown Center that had no shortage of organically united dancefloors. It attracted a crowd of seasoned ravers who were eager to celebrate the start of spring as they danced alongside DJs who played well into the daylight. I left Wire in an afternoon daze to see Michele Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn. at MoMA PS1. My sleepless euphoria only deepened as the performance unfolded, starting with a lone dancer who looked plucked out of the festival.

The dancer, dressed in sneakers, baggy jeans, and a tight tank top, shuffled slowly into the gallery, perfectly in sync with the looping bars of an understated electronic melody. Soon, other dancers, clad in the same staple rave uniform, joined him — each having traveled from Europe for the U.S. museum debut of HIGHER xtn., which premiered at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in 2018 and quickly became a fixture at kunsthalles and festivals across the continent. As the score’s tempo climbed, the choreography locked into a 16-count sequence, which the dancers executed with precise synchrony. They remained intensely focused, never making eye contact with each other, as they sought release in the endless repetition of synthesized beats. Once the dancers reached their limit, they stopped the sequence and exited the gallery, one by one.

HIGHER xtn. used the focused daylight of the gallery to highlight the meditative release found in the repetitive movements that dominate dark dancefloors. The performance’s restraint brought more consistency and intentionality than Eyal’s all-encompassing club construction in R.O.S.E. Yet both performances offer enticing entry points into club culture for those who may not frequent raves. Rizzo’s ecstatic, hypnotic repetitions reveal how the club can mirror other meditative practices, while Eyal’s interpolation of performance and clubbing helped hesitant audience members blossom by the end. Still, both works overlook one of the most underappreciated aspects of clubbing — its potential for individual expression. HIGHER xtn.’s pristine uniformity especially risks promoting the outdated techno trope that there’s a “right” way to dance to electronic music.

Maybe this shortcoming is, in fact, a benefit. For habitual ravers jaded by one too many sunrise sets, it’s a reminder to return to the club with more intention. If you pause and peer through the darkness, you’ll see hundreds of people moving to the same beat, each with their own subtle variations. This collective choreography is a ready-made spectacle that doesn’t need validation in a theater or museum. And when the music shifts slightly, you can watch the ripple effect sweep through the crowd while feeling the new beat in your body. Maybe this small bit of magic is best left on the dance floor.

Culture

Real Slick, Jack: Psyche Organic Arrives in New York

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Culture

Porsche SCOPES Brings Art, Music, and Design to Toronto

The festival was a full immersion into Toronto’s dynamic creative energy. Day one set the tone with DJ collective Living Room, followed by an experimental performance by Claire Rousay that captivated the crowd. Jewelry designer Steff Eleoff unveiled her Porsche Taycan 4S art car installation—a bold fusion of automotive and wearable art inspired by her Sedona ring—while OVO Sound’s Naomi Sharon and DVSN wrapped up the night with powerful, genre-defying performances.

We witnessed SCOPES Toronto bridging underground and mainstream with day two’s lineup. DJ Korea Town Acid’s set paved the way for Angelphroot and Dameer’s debut of BASSMATI, a track blending South Asian influences with bass-driven sounds. Chippy Nonstop’s return to Toronto and Richie Hawtin’s extended set were milestones of the evening, proving that the city’s underground scene has a global resonance.

The final day featured standout performances from local pianist Harrison, Indigenous artist Tia Wood, and hip-hop visionary Sean Leon, who elevated his set with a live choir. Moonshine Collective’s film and musical performance explored themes of African utopia, showcasing art’s power to bridge culture and technology. Rising Toronto star SadBoi, who paused her tour to perform at SCOPES, further underscored the festival’s commitment to nurturing local talent.

Throughout the weekend, we experienced installations from artists like Mitsu Mitsu and culinary creations from Bar Mordecai, capturing the multifaceted creativity Porsche SCOPES brought to Toronto. This milestone 10th edition, open to all, allowed Toronto’s vibrant arts scene to thrive, underscoring SCOPES’ mission to celebrate local talent while connecting it to a global audience.

office had the chance to connect with rising star SadBoi ahead of the event. In our conversation, she shared insights into her creative journey and reflected on what performing and growing up in Toronto means to her and her work.

How are you, and where are you at right now? You told me you were traveling.

Um, I’m good, I’m feeling really good right now. I’m traveling back to Salt Lake City. I had a show yesterday in Seattle. I’m on tour right now with Coco and Claire.

How is touring life treating you? Do you like it?

I love being on the road. To be honest, I feel like I don’t know—like I’ve had good experiences and bad ones—but this time it’s really fun, especially with the people I’m surrounded by. It’s also the longest tour I’ve been on; I have about four more weeks to go. I’m trying not to think about how many days I have left.

Do you feel homesick?

Yes, because when I start thinking about how many days are left, I start to miss my dogs. I’ve just been trying to stay in the moment—I don’t even know what day of the week it is, to be honest with you.

Oh, sweet! What are your dogs’ names?

Jillian and Winston. I know, they’re crazy names.

You’ll be performing at SCOPES in Toronto, which is where you grew up. Do you feel like the crowd is different when you perform in Toronto compared to other cities?

Yes, I mean, Toronto just feels different because it’s home. Every time I come back to perform, something in my career has changed. The last time I performed in Toronto, people just wanted to have a good time, and I’m excited to perform back home again to see everyone’s reactions. I know it’s going to be different from the last time. It’s exciting to see your own growth. Toronto is a tough crowd, though. If we’re with you, we’re really with you.

So, they’re super picky? You have to gain their respect, or what is it?

I think Toronto people are in their own world, but when something really connects with them, they’ll lose themselves in the moment. But it takes something to bring them out of that. Toronto crowds are tough because even if they like you, they won’t show it outright until they’re really vibing with you.

It’s like a vibe check, right?

Exactly. They’ll enjoy your performance, but it’s hard to explain. When people visit Toronto, they often say, “Oh, you guys are so nice,” and I’m like, “I don’t think we’re that nice, we’re just polite.” Like, you can walk down the street, and no one will say anything, but it’s just our mannerisms.

You mentioned Toronto can have a moody energy, especially at night, and that the underground night scene there really inspires you. Can you talk more about what makes Toronto's nightlife so influential for you?

Absolutely, Toronto has this unique energy that comes alive at night. Similar to New York, there are the popular clubs everyone knows, but you need to find your niche—the people who know where the real parties are. I remember going to raves in high school yards, sneaking in because I wasn’t old enough. Events like Baby, Jerk!, and Yes Yes Y’all were pivotal, exposing me to DJs blending dancehall with EDM—something I hadn’t seen before. Toronto nightlife is moody and intense, but when everyone’s out, it’s like the whole city is alive.