Hello! All this week, Eurogamer is marking Pride with a week of features celebrating the intersection of LGBTQ+ culture and gaming. Today, Sharang Biswas takes us on a tour of bodily pleasures, exploring the perhaps surprising connection between pornography and analogue gaming - and highlighting the creators designing in the spaces between intimacy and play.
At the 2020 San Francisco Porn Film Festival, I watched a pretty arresting piece named Tidal, part of a French film project called Vespéral.
At seven minutes long, Tidal focuses on a nude brunette woman and the half-a-dozen pairs of hands that touch her, stroke her, caress her, and appear to bring her immense pleasure. The scene is scored with a thrumming, meditative track. Clips of waves hitting the beach, whose to-and-fro movement is often mimicked by the motion of the hands, intercut our vision of the woman - not interrupting but punctuating. It was an exquisitely poetic, and highly erotic film. Even I — once described by a classmate at grad school as "gay as fuck" — was titillated.