Cobra Club
Cobra Club is, to avoid beating around the bush, is a virtual dick pic simulator. Created by noted game creator and digital theorist Robert Yang, it features incredibly [and hilariously] comprehensive adjustments to create endless virtual permutations of male genitals. Coupling this representational system with an equally robust bathroom cell phone camera simulator and a text message style interface, this game wryly attempts to “democratize” the dick pic. While on the surface, there is certainly some degree of taboo-breaking humor involved, as the user explores further, it is increasingly clear there are a number of deeper issues that Yang is engaging with. One of his larger arcs of inquiry is to call attention to the repressed, often homophobic, sexual tendencies of the big-budget video game world. This game, as much of his oeuvre, calls us to engage from new perspectives with the ways that we navigate representations of our seemingly private bodies and their alternating shameful, intrusive, or erotic functions in digital communications technologies. Indeed, questions of cybersecurity, legislation of sexual identity, censorship, and digital surveillance come to the surface of the work when in the final cycle, your hard-craft (virtual) work is “leaked” to a public website for the whole internet to see.
Creator: Robert Yang
Link: https://radiatoryang.itch.io/cobraclub
Connections:
Lucian Freud - “Nude With Leg Up (Leigh Bowery), 1992”
Cosey Fanni Tutti - Prostitution
Robert Mapplethorpe - “Self portrait (PD 175)”
Game Skill Rating: 1 (No particular video game-specific skills required.)