How a ridiculous game uses jousting dicks to interrogate toxic masculinity

A lot of the time, gaming can feel like just a bag of dicks fighting each other.

If you play enough games, you come to expect what is, in essence, the same rote, predictable, hyper-masculine cockfights, only reskinned to varying degrees of grittiness.

But one game has flipped that script in a way no other game ever dared to. The ridiculous comedy game Genital Jousting by Freelives makes the cockfighting literal, and in the process, creates one of the most cathartic, challenging, provocative, and liberating play experiences in recent memory.

Despite appearances, the game's much more than just a really good dick joke. Years ago, Genital Jousting began as a simple multiplayer where you and up to eight friends played as sentient dick-butt creatures trying to penetrate each other. Yes, you read that correctly.

It was vile. It was devilishly fun. And, more than anything, it opened up a dialogue about the most pressing questions facing male-dominated cultures.

"Genital Jousting is largely about disarming masculinity," the designers wrote in a manifesto. "In a patriarchal society, penises are associated with power. They are considered the dominant sexual organ. But in Genital Jousting, they are often the butt of the joke. We want to present the phallus as something silly, abject."

The early version of the game (much like its titular genitals) quickly exploded, its massive popularity leading to a variety of expansions on its multiplayer modes. Lots of players came for the raunchy fun. Some picked up on the underlying messages. Most just wanted lolz.

But the final version (released last week) introduced its most evocative and controversial addition yet: a robust Story Mode that indisputably turns this silly penis game into a poignant exploration of the disenfranchised male ego.

And it couldn't come at a better time.

You play as John: your average dick fixated on impressing a girl at a high school reunion who shafted him back in the day. He does everything he's been socialized to believe will make him successful and prove his manhood hard AF: Buying expensive shit, getting swol, banging chicks, traveling to exotic locales for Buttstagram pics that can attract more Tinder dates.

Yet after all that, he finds himself more alone, unfulfilled, and pathetic than ever. And of course, he blames this hollow dissatisfaction on the women who reject him, rather than the patriarchal ideals that fed him false promises.

Spoiler alert (but you should already see where this is going): By the end, John's privileged indignity and rage towards women turns him into a sexual harasser.

Yeah — shit gets real. Fast.

Not your usual cockfight

Genital Jousting's story doesn't always hit the mark. It's messy, ambitious, and enormously risky. But the sheer balls of trying to engage with questions of consent, gender, power, sexuality, assault, toxicity, and masculinity in the current gaming climate is noteworthy in itself.

Genital Jousting lays these difficult questions at the feet of a demographic that's not really used to being forced to think about them. The Freelives designers know most of its players will be people like them: white, heterosexual, cisgendered men.

And in that they found a golden opportunity.

The game can be seen as something of a Trojan Horse: It's disguised as just another variety of a gaming cockfight, but it relishes in making these male "players a little uneasy when they’re confronted with a pile of dicks writhing and squelching up each other’s buttholes," according to the manifesto.

Story Mode doubles down on that discomfort in ways no other game would ever dare to. From start to finish, it's jarringly visceral. The opening level, for example, shifts from a tutorial in an idyllic playground — to suddenly devolving into a nightmare hellscape of body horror presumably directed by David Cronenberg. The implied threat of sexual assault is hard to miss.

It's so effective, in fact, that I asked the designers whether they considered a trigger warning. They did, and are waiting to hear more player feedback. (Personally, I'd strongly recommend it.)

But, arguably, no demographic needs the disarming experiences of Genital Jousting more than the community that allowed an online hate mob like Gamergate to fester into what we now call the alt-right.

I asked programmer Robbie Fraser for his thoughts on the game's astounding timeliness, as Trumpism and sexual violence continue to dominate the cultural discourse. But, to him, the messages in Genital Jousting are unfortunately evergreen.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

"Things like the #MeToo movement are bringing the symptoms of toxic masculinity and patriarchy closer to public consciousness, but the underlying problems have always been there," he said. "But perhaps the world is more ready to think about the meaning of this story now than it was before."

Contributing to the dicks-course

Fraser said the team worked hard to keep the game fun and avoid preachiness even while tackling serious subject matter. Because, "if players feel like you’re trying to change their minds, their brains go on the defensive and disregard any message."

So they weaved “on message” sentiments with “off message” silliness, establishing an "emotional rhythm" that counterbalanced John's awful behaviors with Genital Jousting's characteristically absurd dick humor. It makes the toxic male discharge — I mean medicine — go down easier, if you catch my drift.

Keeping John relatable to male players was key to the game's resonance. Not because he deserves our sympathy necessarily, but because his relatability allows male players to simultaneously condemn his actions, while also uncomfortably identifying with the feelings that lead him to unforgivable actions.

While making the game, the team saw "John's journey as an exaggerated version of our own paths, trying to understand our masculinity and the patriarchy that shapes it." Their design meetings centered around discussions on, "how toxic masculinity affects us personally; what anxieties it causes, and what we’ve had to overcome and change in ourselves."

A look at the game's Steam comments (see some below) shows every type of reaction imaginable.

"We’ve had men comment that the story was 'too real,'" said Fraser. Others range from outrage, to the expected toxicity, but also sobering realizations, and even relief from survivors of sexual assault. Fraser said he's heard from "queer players who found that embodying a flaccid fumble-core penis reflected their own experiences with body dysmorphia and soft packing."

But by far one of the most beautiful consequences of playing a game as unapologetically explicit as Genital Jousting is how it encourages male players to have "conversations that are very difficult and unusual to have with other men," Fraser said.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

"Each of us certainly considered ourselves feminists before the project started," Fraser said. "But I think we’ve all gone through a tremendous amount of personal growth throughout the course of development."

Here cums the climax

Genital Jousting is disconcerting — sometimes in the best way, and sometimes in unhelpful ways for a female player like myself. But I can't help but forgive its few missteps, because I don't see a lot of other men diving dick first into these dicey conversations.

Even fewer are earnestly reckoning with their complicity in the worst aspects of our culture, while also taking responsibility for their role in actually fixing it.

Because above all, Genital Jousting is a call to action, making clear that, "Every man needs to take the first steps towards understanding and embracing alternate forms of masculinity," Fraser said.

John's story doesn't just dismantle the self-victimization narrative that plagues men's rights activists and alt-right trolls. It imagines what a world ruled exclusively by dicks looks like, from the empty consumerist culture to the castrating fears of patriarchal pressure.

Ultimately, the game isn't about guilting male players for how they've been socialized to act. It's about showing how much patriarchy hurts men, as well as women. In a world full of nothing but cocks, no one gets treated like a human being.

The game's biggest twist of all, then, is the slow realization that Genital Jousting's penis-centric world (phallic-shaped birds aside) isn't all that different from our own. Which means a dickbag like John isn't much different from your average John in our real world.

And if a literal penis can learn how to be less of a dick, then so can every man.

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DISCLOSURE: The author of this article socially knows Martin Kvale, one of Genital Jousting's sound designers.