metro. sexual.

this piece contains descriptions of sexual assault as depicted in fiction.

i play xbox to see boobs sometimes, or, sometimes, if you play xbox you see boobs? boobs as a thing are not hard to catch sight of, i have boobs and can see them any time, there’s loads to see on the internet, and i can even draw them pretty easy too.

i guess, there’s more to it. the eroticism of the moment? of what the player is doing? xbox is a weird erotic object, machine, in that way, makes images and sounds happen under corporate specifications of how that can happen. dictates how its games can be horny.

not just on the part of the genocidal American company Microsoft, but developers, content rating boards, people trying to make money from selling something that’s not close to pornography, but is still adult entertainment. these limitations are interesting. i think of Metro: Last Light as a game a friend said they remembered because you have sex in it.

game about killing? or about life? this is the question in Metro: Last Light (2013). You get the option to knock out or kill enemies, moral quandry! Erotic content is considered to be on the path of life. i play this game as the sequel to Metro 2033 the FPS adaptation of the sci-fi novel of the same name by Dmitry Glukhovsky. this game is not an adaptation of Metro 2034, the book’s sequel, but Glukhovsky does contribute writing.

You cannot kill the women who exist in sexualised positions in the game, and it is only women who are actively seen as “erotic”, i.e. depicted with the intent of sexually stimulating the player. Sexualising.

though i think that, sexualised, is a term you could apply to the two soldiers in the game depicted raping a woman in the carriage of a dilapidated train. they are sexualised as figures engaging in pleasure at torturing another person. if you do not alert them to your presence quick enough the woman dies due to the physical violence during the assault. she is murdered by the soldiers.

if you stop the assault, by way of making noise in the side tunnel the train carriages are in, then the soldiers will come to try and kill you. you kill them. the woman will remain at the back of the carriage, crouched in fear.

i play games with subtitles on and listen to other things while doing so. in this way i wasn’t sure where the assault was taking place, but knew that it was because of text lines depicting the woman’s despair and the soldiers’ berating and commentary. it happens off-screen, but your attention is purposefully drawn to it. i believed it to be two different soldiers, further along in the main tunnel, but when i got there they were simply guarding the outpost, no captive in sight.

this is a heroic storytelling trope that turns up so often. the potential to stop a rape in progress. which is either told as tragedy at the failure to prevent, or triumph at its prevention.

at another point in the story, Artyom arrives at a town which has a theatre. there is a burlesque show and a line of dancers do the can-can. through the back of the theatre is the next mission, and so through the changing rooms, where dancers stand in their costumes, smoking, shooting the shit, smiling at you. here you see, behind a screen, the silhouette of a woman changing. after leaving this area you see the washing facilities for the dancers and here, Artyom, through clouded glass can watch a woman shower, and one take a bath.

In this way Artyom engages in sexual gratification on the part of unwitting participants, he’s peeping. a sexual offence. but not really Artyom, but the player, because, it would be too easy to say that in emodying Artyom there is an immersion that takes you away from your own desire. It would also be a lie to say that this was a situation set up for anything but the purpose of permitting voyeurism by the developers of the game.

The representation of bathing behind glass, in line of sight of the player’s vision and with no depicted agency for the bather, is designed as a voyeuristic act to engage in for sexual pleasure. Whoever designed this then is the one to decide to create a sexual offence for the player to engage in as a ‘viewer’. Camera operator.

The player will engage more in depicted sexual acts in the game. In another town, they will visit a brothel where an enemy group meets in order to overhear their conversation. As the group discusses in a room, two erotic dancers peer in through the door to listen. The player prevents them from being caught by pulling one back and into a booth just before the enemies leave. Artyom holds his hand over the dancer’s mouth to keep her quiet. After this, she acts as though this was a way of instigating, and offers to dance. You can then sit down in this booth and watch the 3d modelled striptease style dance. The dancer will say she has more moves, to watch again you pay 5 bullets. The player can return to pay for a dance in this way.

In another booth in the brothel, a soldier is also watching a dance, from a dancer wearing a tie. You can watch in on this for as long as you like. This, again, is voyeurism baked into the functional operation of the game’s imaginary about player sexual gratification. Artyom cannot become aroused by catching these moments, but you can.

Later, Artyom and Anna, who is a fellow soldier alongside Artyom throughout the game, sit together on a bed. Anna tells Artyom that she wants to feel alive and connected to the world after a harrowing experience they have just shared. She takes Artyom to her, letting her top slip, her breasts exposed, and she guides Artyom to lie with her. The scene fades to black.

In this case, the player is assured that this is, as in the paid for striptease, consenual.

LATER: As the game ends, and Artyom dies, we hear from Anna and see her holding a child, describing the death of its father. Since the characters are implied to only sleep together once, the child of Artyom was conceived during the fade to black.

EVEN LATER: After the game, looking at the extra content that came with it, i load up ‘the developer pack’ a level with a ‘museum’ and ‘shooting range’. In the museum is an array of the 3D models found in the game. I was surprised to see no version of the erotic dancer, since the team is obviously proud of her, until I noticed the roped off section with a door in the corner.

You can get around the barrier and in the room is a small replica of a burlesque/speak easy lounge, with the performer on stage. You can then look at them in the model viewer, and cycle through the dance animations.

It’s a funny long necked dance. It’s not too sexy, but not unsexy. There is no exchange of bullets and the character is no longer speaking. With the ‘forbidden’ room and disembodiment, it’s almost like finding a sex doll in an academic’s closet. A secreted away erotic reality.

All of the eroticised figures are pale, white, thin and feminine, with perfect bouncy breasts and smiling eyes. There is no ‘graphic’ nudity, with depiction of genitals for instance, and no form of ‘male’ nudity in the binarised world that is set up for us. The game is in its way an indulgence in voyeurism on a certain iconic burlesque feminine form, these models posed in order to be sexually attractive to the player as a figure engaging them consensually and encountering opportunities to abuse the power to look in ways intended, by design, to be, sexually exciting.

sexual violence, as part of the experience of humans, is depicted artistically in many ways and for many intents, and it appears here both as a traumatic, ultraviolent event to be prevented/endured/provide exploitation movie type fascination, and, in the case of voyeuristics as light erotic stimulation for the player through the embodiment of a young man.

breasts are designed as ready to be exposed.

women designed as sex workers, as preyed on victims, as companions in bed, and as mothers.

it’s hard not to see last light as a strangely ancient type of misogynist artefact of a narrative first person shooter, where the sexual woman is the only woman in a survival world (even the woman who you think is a cool badass for doing the man things becomes Mother), while the men engage in LIFE in all the violence, joyful discovery of alien babies and political bureaucracy it brings.

as someone who goes to games for eroticism and intrigue, and writes erotic games about violence and sex, it’s interesting how dull it is in that respect, while being hornier than most other games in its field at the time. horny, and yet strictly limited.

reading list: first person stimulator – freya campbell (2020) + spectator – quincy gunders (IAN MARTIN for Domino Club – 2024)