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Sex, love and romance are a huge part of being alive. But when it comes to video games it's largely unexplored beyond the surface level appeal of conventionally attractive bodies baring lots of flesh. Occasionally these themes are explored a little deeper in titles like Gone Home, Dys4ia, and Cibele, but rarely do they crop up in mainstream titles beyond as a mere window dressing for why our virtual heroes are slaughtering minions (be it for Link to rescue his beloved, Mario searching for his princess, Wander trying to resurrect his lover, or Travis Touchdown trying to get his end away). Lots of video games pay lip service to our more earthly urges, but few actually explore these in any meaningful way.Enter Patrick Jarnfelt and Andrea Hasselager of the Copenhagen Game Collective, who've launched the government-funded annual game jam Lyst, an exploration of video games about romance, love and sex.
The state-funded Lyst network now consists of multiple Scandinavian countries banding together to promote gaming based around these topics. The Lyst Summit is a four-year venture into this fluttery realm with its inaugural conference having launched in Copenhagen in 2014, followed by a Helsinki, Finland summit earlier this year. A Norway event is planned for June 2016, and an epic finale will transpire in Sweden the following year.
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