'Good Girl Gone Bad' and the fascism of the self
Eva Kiss's uncanny porn game is a journey into the darkest recesses of desire
The world presented in Eva Kiss’s erotic visual novel, Good Girl Gone Bad, is like our own, but also very different. It is a world in which there is no end to the sorts of sexual debauchery one can involve themselves in, but all acts of intimacy wind up looking about as erotic as a Wikipedia sex illustration. There are some more potent, general semiotic distinctions that exist as well—having a single tattoo, for instance, or even just wearing a choker, is treated in this world as about as much a statement of moral debasement as walking around in broad daylight in a rubber gimp suit, and is the most immediate way to discern the ethical persuasions of those around you. Kanye West is still here, only his name is now “Tyrone” and he’s… ultimately a lot more emotionally-stable, actually. This world is also where we find Ashley. Ashley is, by most metrics, an average over-achiever. She’s career-driven, gets good grades in college, lives with her dad, and has a boring, awkward boyfriend. It is a life of contentment, empty of purpose. But some sort of existential anguish nips at the skirt of her mind. Ashley expresses a desire one day to know what it would be like if things were different.
Suddenly, Ashley finds herself possessed by a malevolent ghost that wants her to make nothing but bad decisions. That ghost is me. It begins innocently enough. A simple flirt here and there. Then in no time Ashley is sporting a plastic choker and gets a shitty tattoo, which her friends and family react to like she just got enough body-modification to look like Orlan. Very quickly Ashley becomes a force of chaos in the lives of everyone around her—every woman she knows starts wearing chokers, and she begins cheating on her abroad boyfriend with his best friend, his best friend’s girlfriend, with his sister, his dad, even her own dad. She flunks out of college, buys sex toys larger than her arm, appears in hip hop music videos (where the game’s Kanye West analog gets a train run on her), and begins snorting cocaine. In a bizarre twist, her boyfriend is then presumably killed by Al-Shabaab, and with my continued decisions it doesn’t seem to really impact Ashley’s life in the slightest.
There is something deeply cathartic to it all, like going on one of those shooting sprees of innocent civilians in Grand Theft Auto, only the itch it scratches is something much deeper and somehow even more antisocial. On the day of his mother's funeral, Meursault, the anti-hero of Camus’ L’Etranger, has sex with a woman he has just met, condemning him in the eyes of society. On the day of her boyfriend's funeral, Ashley has sex with an entire Mexican drug cartel. Then, later that same day, her boyfriend’s dad again.
Ashley convinces her now-choker-adorned friends to cheat on their boyfriends, then gets their boyfriends to cheat on them with her, and then she tricks her boyfriend’s sister into fucking her own father. You can choose to be good, an option which presents very limited choices, or you can choose to be bad, an option which seems to open up nearly endless choices. Morality and prosocial behaviour is depicted explicitly as a capitulation to “living in bad faith.” “Choice” itself is presented as an instrument of amorality or just plain immorality. “Freedom” is primarily the freedom to do bad, to harm others and yourself. You do not have to be bad in Good Girl Gone Bad, it’s perfectly possible to play through the game without any significant transgression—but why would you want to do that? This is the digital Sade. Is it time to do more blow? asks the game. Of course it is! I say as I enthusiastically click the “do more blow” option.
Slowly, however, the game begins to take a turn. Eventually even I have lost control of Ashley. She is beyond my influence. The game no longer presents me with options to “do the right thing”—I can only sin. I can only transgress. I have no choice but to do blow every day, the game doesn’t even let me say “no” anymore, there is no longer an option to abstain, Ashley merely “does.” When presented with morally degrading acts, I am no longer given an out, the game only provides me with options for just how far I’m willing to take these acts. Much of this is of course merely a result of the constraints on the game’s development—the game’s choices cannot simply give you an “out” at every single step in the game’s story, it would take an absurd amount of man-hours to achieve this amount of in-game freedom—but the resultant effect on the experience of the game, whether intentional or not, is surprisingly powerful.
If I might risk getting sophomoric: Ashley’s depraved descent into moral anarchy is more than just a personal story, it becomes an allegory for the societal unravelling we bear witness to as the True Face of global capitalist order reveals itself from behind its mask of liberal illusion. The relentless push towards transgression, the glorification of chaos, the worship of self-interest. Ashley begins to embody the fascism of the self: the internalized belief that freedom means the right to destroy, that morality is a cage, and that to truly live means burning everything else down. But this is inevitably in service of our own destruction. We wake up one day to find ourselves trapped in a world where the only choice that remains is how far we’re willing to fall.
So—is it time to do more blow? the game asks, and we click yes, not because we want to, but because it’s the only option left.
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This was a very interesting article. Very well written. Great job.