Written by Jack Becker, M.A. Student in Film & Media Studies at Georgia State University     
     Of all the ways that mods can serve as sites of negotiation between fandom and text--means of mapping desires and reshaping play to accommodate them-- sex and sexuality is a constant and prolific focus. Over the past four-odd years, there has not been a single month in which the most-downloaded spread of mods on the popular hosting site, Nexus Mods, did not include at least one page tagged for adult content.[1] While it would be easy to dismiss the subset of fanworks often labeled as ‘horny mods’ due to their overwhelmingly heteronormative and misogynistic tendencies (or place them on a pedestal as a way to celebrate open expression of sexuality), I wish to instead focus on the ways that the imperfect and unexpected elements of these mods reflect the flaws and contradictions of codified, hegemonic relationships. Most implicit to this is the orientation around the player as the primary locus of desire. How could it not be, when very structure of play so often ensures that romance, marriage, or intercourse is a prize to be won for performing a correct series of actions? Mods that displace the locus of control from the player in favor of unpredictable and emergent NPC actions are thus able to move out-of-step with otherwise implicit expectations of ownership and control while still fundamentally embodying players’ drive to curate their gameplay and obtain the unobtainable.

     Scholarly attention has been just as riveted as fan attention by the use of modding as a tool for expressing and exploring sexuality, with Evan Lauteria and Tom Welch looking at the ways mods can queer expressions of desire within the vanilla[2] game through the removal of gender-locked romance[3]  or total replacement of gameplay and narrative[4]  despite still remaining at least partially beholden to the original text’s heteronormative affordances. Critically, escaping ‘straight play’ often requires a relinquishing of control over the narrative of the game, something that modding instead tends to explicitly re-introduce and intensify. To achieve a more negotiated perspective requires placing trust in a narrative constructed by another modder or leaning into the emergent happenstance of procedural behavior. Lauteria’s reading of the Radiator mod series for Half-Life finds this potential form of negotiation partly in the foregone failure of its central relationship, whereas Bo Ruberg identifies a similar kind of queer relinquishing of player control in the wholly autonomous Grand Theft Auto mod, San Andreas Deer Cam.[5] My own interest in the matter lies, as it does for so many other fans, in Skyrim and Skyrm: Special Edition’s vast canon of sex mods.

     Sairion’s OStim - OSex Overhaul & API,[6] the currently most-used sex mod for Skyrim: Special Edition, is more framework than standalone modification. Born out of predecessors such as OSA (Open Skyrim Ascendancy, a broad-range animation implementation mod predominantly used for screenshot generation and Player-NPC sexual cutscenes) and SexLab (which did much the same thing without pretending otherwise), OStim specifically allows for the implementation of custom-animated, player-controlled sex and romance cutscenes through a bespoke minigame. I find myself most interested not just in the affordances and assumptions of Ostim’s gameplay loop but also in the way that control over its parameters is negotiated and displaced by secondary mods using the same base framework.

     Chief among these is ORomance, a mod by the same author that introduces randomly generated personality attributes for NPCs that dictate their preferences and responses to player actions within its romance progression system. According to the mod’s documentation, “this system is intentionally convoluted in order to make it harder for the player to spot patterns in the AI,” and while player actions, such as engagement with the relatively sparse vanilla ‘relationship rank’ system or previous interactions through the mod’s framework, influence the success or failure of individual interactions, so too do factors wholly out of the player’s control, including sexuality, should the player not wish to leave everyone default-bisexual.

     This lends the NPCs an illusion of internality and opens the door for procedurally-generated contradictions within an NPC’s character. For instance, within the parameters of the mod, a heterosexually-married shopkeeper with all of three dialogue lines to her name might become a sex-repulsed lesbian who is highly comfortable with public conversations about intimacy, deeply dislikes the idea of cheating, and (due to the constraints of the modded game) will never leave her husband. On a different playthrough, she may instead be immensely closed-off when discussing her private life but highly interested in cheating heterosexually on her husband. Or they might both be bisexual and seeking a third. What does this say about her marriage? What does this say about one of her oft-repeated friendly voicelines that she will give to the player after they have completed her personal quest?

     Aietos’s OStim NPCs - NPC Sex Lives Improved expands upon this speculative internality and, to some extent, subverts the inbuilt binary often constructed by single-player games of ‘actor’ and ‘acted-upon.’ By simply extending Ostim’s cutscenes to occur randomly and autonomously between NPCs without player intervention (a boon to voyeurs and immersion-seeking nitpickers alike), it decenters the player as the singular locus of sexuality and positions them instead on oddly level footing with the rest of the game world as it unfolds independent of their intervention. In decoupling these elements of romance and sexuality from fixed narratives, the combination of OStim, ORomance, and OStim NPCs can facilitate play wherein desire is semi-fluid and resistant to external control. Perhaps it’s a pity, then, that an additional patch exists that allows the player to manually edit the stats and behavior of NPCs to their own specifications.

     Regardless of the queer potential these interactions open within the base text, both OStim and the mods that expand it fall prey to the same pitfalls of many of their precursors and contemporaries: mods using the framework rarely deviate from intercourse between a dominant male partner and a submissive female partner, and the animations they introduce often conform to exaggeratedly cisnormative standards for how bodies should behave. ORomance’s progression system assumes movement along a linear, normative path, and OStim NPCs, by default, only autonomously introduces sex between heterosexual couples (though this can be changed in the mod’s configuration settings). Subverting the intrinsic hegemony within both these mods and the vanilla game is an active process that modders must engage in, not a path of least resistance, and I cannot in good faith argue that modding is fundamentally resistant play when the texts its participants produce are so often more normative than the base text of the game. It certainly can be resistant. It can be ephemeral and precarious and a vehicle through which one can explore the nuance of sexuality. The heteropatriarchal structures informing these mods can fail, break, or warp in some way so that we are able to see through the cracks and interrogate the necessity of their presence. The surface, however, remains unchanged.

Bibliography

Lauteria, Evan W. “Ga(y)Mer Theory: Queer Modding as Resistance.” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 12, no. 2 (2012): 7–7. 86285791, pp. 7–7. Ethnic Diversity Source.

Ruberg, Bo. “After Agency: The Queer Posthumanism of Video Games That Cannot Be Played.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28, no. 2 (2022).

Welch, Tom. “The Affectively Necessary Labour of Queer Mods.” Game Studies 18, no. 3 (2018). https://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/welch.