Faggot Games II: Faggot Philosophy
A draw-over image collage of Diogenes by John William Waterhouse.
I am cursed to write these things in interesting times. I am drafting this introduction laid on a friend's house on July 26th, 2025. It's the same week that Itch.io put sweeping limitations on 18+ games on their platform, from limiting search visibility to entirely barring downloads and regional page access. This is because of a cruel payment processing system that has allowed the whims of the most craven and cruel to dictate what the rest of us are allowed to play, read and make. One of my own games, a deeply personal one called "Don't Test My Love", was suspended from Itch because it's page had a content warning for incest.
If you wish to do something material about this, there are plenty of places where folks are compiling ways to put pressure on the payment processing companies, including yellat.money. That work is being done now, and should be done until these payment processors lay off our faggot games.
But, then there’s the work, the work of making freak shit. The long-term work, once the payment processors give up.
I want you to do it, I want you to do it right now and I want you to do it the worst you can. It's the only way we survive this pressure from corporate evil.
I'm loathe to draw lines around what is and isn't a Faggot Game (enough have been made to Start Capitalizing It), as such an act would contradict the movements' closest-held values. How can I say, 'build safety around desire instead of excisement,' when I'm out here excising, curtailing and (god-forbid) gatekeeping?
With that in mind, I want to be constructive rather than restrictive. I want to hold all of us to a strange standard. I want to tell you what a Faggot Game is, so you can make them today when they don't want you to, and tomorrow when they begrudgingly accept our united power. There's a part of me that wants to write this blog to meet the moment head-on, but I feel that this is the work of journalists and influencers. I have unfinished business in the fag pit, some demons to fuck, some trophies to win. I come to you, orb in hand, a faggot wizard. I offer my knowledge, my wisdom, my…
FIVE FAG AXIOMS
Fag Axiom I — YOU HAVE TO WANT IT
The skew-mirrored runes that utterly cover my censored game “Don’t Test My Love.”
I didn't mention this in the first blog, but this is earnest work. Faggot Games are about what you're into. You will have to bare your soul and put your cock in that glory hole, not knowing what waits on the other side. You have to be willing to sit naked on the floor with the games you make, covered in each other's spit and slime, and talk for hours about your feelings while weakly palming eachother - and you have to send me a video.
To move with Faggot Games is the art of being honest about what gets you off, especially the stuff that the world despises. The fag lattice depends on all of us being naked in our work, because when puritans come for our work we won't be alone. ABDL, incest, eroguro, degradation, non-consent - whatever you're the most scared of putting out into the world, put that into your Faggot Game. We have to all protect each other by all being perverts.
This is especially true now - flood Itch with your fetish, don't include 'nsfw' or whatever else in the tags, and make more art than they can reasonably filter for the really cool stuff. The lattice grows stronger when they cannot tell what is honey and what is air.
Fag Axiom II — NO REPLACEMENTS, NO REQUESTS
Some old Sapphicworld food art for The Hills, in need of revision.
It is not your job to imagine every critique, concern and complaint that a cishet prude might direct at your work. It is especially not your job to preemptively provide optional mechanics, overlong clarifications and constant declawing for their imaginary sake. A faggot game is direct and honest about what it offers, and doesn't serve ketchup in blood's place.
When you make a Faggot Game, you should have a little voice in the back of your head that says "do you really need to qualify this one?" You'll write a whole explanation for why a thing hurts less, why it only touches on your most marketable kinks... and then you'll hit backspace and leave only the parts that are true and beautiful and dripping.
Edit out your apologies, even the little ones. If your first draft says that the werewolves fuck any consenting thing they can get their hands on, remove the word 'consenting' - let your readers decide what that means. You don't need to be the arbiter of your reader's morality, or your morality, or anyone's morality. We're artists, not servants.
Honestly, I've failed this in the past. My first drafts of Sapphicworld were full of bits that made it's people too nice, it's lovers sexual but unsexy, and it's play-tips full of adjustments and justifications. Most of my work in the edit has been undoing those softenings, and when I write new things I simply don't include them. These are games for faggots, and I assume faggots get what I'm going for.
A side road - when I interviewed Sage the Anagogue for The Dovecote, she sent me some truly heinous hentai doujin pages throughout the show without remarking on it. When I asked her why she did this, she explained that it was about getting us into the mood for the show. She was so right about this, and it reflects an important philosophical element of Faggot Games; Porn in, porn out. You have to make your art grosser and weirder by force, by choice, by way of scrutinizing your intake.
I am not saying you just need to consume heinous hentai doujin, or even just pornography. We discussed this in the self-same episode of The Dovecote — A well-rounded media and life diet is necessary to create work that will fulfill your fellow freak. I've taken back up reading recently, which has given me a lot of really diverse inspiration. I've been around one of my girlfriends a lot, which has helped remind me of the things that turn me on. I play and run TTRPGs once in a while. I have a really exhausting job.
To put it back together, all of this goes into what the fag artist does. Faggot Games are made by curious eyes, filthy hands and full minds. If you're going to make a game that scares prudes and excites freaks, it will benefit you immensely to come from a place of unabashed enthusiasm and experience. You gotta believe in what you do, and the best way to do that is to make what you do incomparable.
Fag Axiom III — SAFETY? YEAH, I BROUGHT YOUR MOM HOME 'SAFE' LAST NIGHT AFTER I GAVE HER A COUPLE NEW DISORDERS
An ‘unsafe’ place.
But, besides fucking your mom, I've received a lot of questions about this line from Faggot Games: An Urgent Warning, which described a central tenet of Faggot Games:
“Departure from popular axioms around player and character consent, and broad rejection of the modern safety framework for something more interpersonal and robust.”
I've done my best to explain this concept when it comes up, but every time I've said "wait for the second blog for more thorough review of this issue!" So, here that is. A lot of what I'm going to say here is far more eloquently detailed in Jay Dragon's The Palette Grid (a safety tool), which both identifies the flaws of the Lines & Veils safety system and provides an alternative. The Palette Grid is really effective and is what I would describe as an ideal Faggot Game safety tool.
Storytime, so I can help you see what I'm saying. A few years back, I played a game at a convention and I was the only trans woman present. We made our characters and went over our lines and veils. The GM had plenty of physical safety tools present, X-Cards and an open door policy, and yet I still felt that everything I did with my character was putting me in an unsafe situation as the player. I was playing a girl who liked stealing little things, and the GM didn't understand this, so they gave me a strange look every time I had my character do so. By the end of the game, I felt that things were tense between me and the GM.
On reflection, I realized that the issue was a lack of clarity. I chose to play a very strange character, and we didn't discuss what I wanted to do with that character before getting into it. We only discussed what the table didn't want to see, not what it did want to see.
Playing Jess Levine's PLANET FIST playtest sessions, with her house safety tools that asked the players exactly how gorey they want to get, made me realize exactly what I was looking for. I wanted safety tools that centered DESIRE! What do I want to see? What do you want to see? What does the GM want to see? Ohoh, and what do I want to see that my character doesn't want to see? To Jay's point in The Palette Grid, what am I anxious about, but excited to see in this game?
These are the crucial questions we've been rejecting in the pursuit of convention-convenience, and they've made tables deeply boring. Who is kept safe by a table where we're trying to thread the thin needlehead between our fears? It's designed in such a way that games between strangers will always kinda suck. We can't just replace a good safety tool with a bad one, however. Some part of actually keeping players safe at tables has to revolve around making better and more active players, encouraging each other to talk about their needs, anxieties and wants as they come up. Prompting the table to think about these top-of-game is great, but at some point we need to instill good habits in TTRPG players.
Monstrosity, the erotic vampire LARP, explicitly asks it's players to be clear about what they want. In fact, many LARPs are miles ahead of TTRPGs on this issue, as there's an expectation that you carry your safety wants and needs with you through a living, breathing environment. You have to tell people what you want to happen, because no one else can save you in an open, potentially multi-room environment.
To be clear, LARPs do have safety discussions that preempt play (called workshops, akin to a session zero). I'm not an expert on LARP, but my LARP friends tell me that community is having constant discussions about this issue. My point is this - a safety tool is a life raft, but designers, facilitators and players need to teach themselves and each other how to swim. This has to start in design, with designers actively including guides to self-advocacy in their safety chapters.
For those who chafe against the expectation of self-advocacy at the table, who worry they won't be able to tell their fellow players when they're hurt, overwhelmed, underwhelmed, in need - this may be an issue you want to navigate with a professional, and I mean this with full sincerity. Keep playing games, have fun, and go somewhere to work on those skills.
Consent
If something happens to your character and they don't consent, and you do consent, are you being violated? The answer is obviously 'no', but I feel that we often write our games like the answer is 'yes' when it comes to sex. Why are we so strictly leashed to our characters' desires, their consent?
To ride with Faggot Games is to explore the boundaries of consent in play. Mind control, non-con, dub-con, drugging, mixed feelings, messy intimacy... these themes are historically under explored, deeply fascinating and super faggy.
More crucially, our framework for consent ignores the fact that in real life, people don’t always ask before they can do something, and the person on the receiving end isn’t always permanently traumatized. It can actually be pretty hot to have something be done to you, if you have that sort of trust with a partner. I’m going to run a finger down my girlfriend’s spine without asking, now.
I could (and may yet) write a full blog on this subject, but for now it's a sidebar. If you want to hear more about this sort of design, let me know.
Fag Axiom IV — THE FETISH AXIS
A piece from WE LIVE FOREVER.
Great works of art revolve around a central question, and similarly great Faggot Games revolve around a central bundle of sexual themes. This is the Fetish Axis, and you can reliably make a hot and beautiful game by continually returning to it. More crucially, this tool will help you take sex seriously in your work as you constantly draw lines back to sex from the places your writing takes you, even the darkest and strangest recesses.
First, think about the sexual themes, kinks or fetishes that your game revolves around, and the color/tone/tempo you'd like to express them with. For example, Sapphicworld focuses on domination, submission and desire, and paints them in warm interiors and open wilds. When you write or review part of your Faggot Game, ask yourself these questions:
Does this connect back to the sexual themes in my Fetish Axis?
Does this depict those themes in the color/tone/tempo I want?
Can I get off to this?
How can I make this worse?*
*Worse (adj.) - Sluttier, dumber, angrier, uglier, more likely to piss someone off.
Now, you may have your own focus-keeping and editing process that you would like to use instead. Don't tell me this, or I'll put you in my Faggot Dungeon where they'll hit you with shovels a whole lot.
AXIOM V — FAGSTHETICS
Art of my character from an early playtest of Praise the Hawkmoth King.
In an early draft of Faggot Games: An Urgent Warning, the advice on Faggot Game aesthetics read as such:
“Optionally, outsider visuals - a break away from cozy-core visuals, and a meaningful dip into the burlesque, the outright pornographic, the wet and the sketchy.”
Besides failing another axiom (NO REPLACEMENTS, NO REQUESTS), this advice just didn’t land. Sage the Anagogue (yes, her again) quickly and correctly pointed out that it's reductive to say visuals make a game more or less faggy, and gave the example of Mork Borg and Wanderhome. Mork Borg is definitely more wet and sketchy in its aesthetics, but is it more faggy than Wanderhome? This helped me shape the position on fag aesthetics I actually published:
“A focus on challenging and unexpected visuals. Blend the cozy and the macabre, the outside and the mainstream, in ways they didn’t know they even wanted. Keep them guessing.”
I admit, this is partially the result of a personal fascination with gonzo art and huge aesthetic swings. There's a reason why, three planets in, Autopsy Feast suddenly goes from a slaughterhouse sci-fi aesthetic to religious pirates skiffing on metal seas. Artistically, I like zigging where others would zag, and I get my kicks by encouraging others to do the same. Beyond my personal aesthetic fetishes, this edict touches on a simple reality of making art - your audience doesn't know what they want until they see it, and only you know what aesthetic will best fit the other elements of your design. Layout, visual art, accompanying soundtracks, supplemental material - get a little silly with the paper you wrap your game in.
I would really like to see some more really hot porn in these games, though. If we’re going to get censored, I better see some shortstack goblins getting their organs redesigned by tree-width dragon dicks, and maybe the goblin is mind controlled or something. Is it a hatefucking thing for the dragon? I think this goblin stole something and is getting hypno’d and filled with dragon cum like a water balloon as revenge. I dunno, we’ll figure it out together.
Cozy
It should be said - I don't hate cozy, but I'm tired of the way we've decided to use it, the way it's been conflated with its devil-twin 'wholesome'. For once, I am sad that sisters are making out.
In its greatest weakness, in its unholy trysts with 'wholesome', cozy threatens to be reactionary and escapist, to null out all concern and consequence, and to give power to those who create crises worth caring about. We depoliticize cozy, dehumanize cozy, when we imagine coffeeshops and cottages whose problems cannot be too serious. We let the settler on stolen land say that the plundered house of the dead and displaced is cozy when he adds an air purifier and a flag.
When it is strong, cozy is qualified by pain and loss. It's making a meal for the person you love, and the recipe is your late grandmother's, and the person you love isn't sure how long she can stay here. Life is full of difficulty, and warmth, and feelings, and death - cozy is the acceptance of the full of life, and the idea that it is sweet in its whole. It is a seasoned optimism, of warm water and soft bodies, of the few quiet days we get together.
Good cozy knows that everything is always about to change... but wouldn't you like to lay down, now?
THE DARK MIDDLE CHAPTER
The weird heart I used to promote the Faggot Games TTRPG Jam.
To conclude - this movement finds itself in extremely difficult times. Our work is censored by corporations and states, shunned by online puritanism, and stifled by the global rise of neo-fascism. The Faggot Games blog that describes our grand cultural victory will not be written in my lifetime. Our role in this story is to fight for this art, make and share this art when it's unsellable and despised.
I say that, but people are broadly, shockingly supportive of Faggot Games and of queer freak art in general. I've seen people who were anxious about this work giving it bandwidth because they know it's important that it survives. We have allies all around us, and they are often the people we'd least expect. We must keep being proud.
I've been a little afraid, if I'm honest. I've seen my own gross game get denied by an actual play for the explicit reason of anticipatory self-censorship, while a non trans woman colleague's far less explicit self-identified Faggot Game was accepted. The games that get seen, sold, discussed in this space will naturally be the ones made by people with acceptable fetishes and acceptable identities.
I don't know how we fix this. As always, I fear kinky trans women will /continue/ to have to make our own. There's a reason why the Faggot Games Salon has a channel just for the dolls, and it's because we are uniquely disempowered among queer identities. I’d tell you I’m sorry to end on a sour note, but I’m not.
We're still in the middle of it, but I'm glad to be in the middle of it with all of you. It's been lovely seeing everyone get worse*.
