He Made a Game That Simulates a Gay Man's Life, but Hopes It Doesn't Blow Up | 100 People With Ideas

He isn't after a sudden hit — he just hopes it survives, as a record of the gay community in this era.

"Blind dates, marriage to a straight woman"

or

"Coming out to family"

"Key branch: what do you decide to do next?"

In A Gay's Life, a first-person text adventure game about being gay, this question comes up at the start of Chapter Five. What you pick decides the rest of the life of Ling Hao, the protagonist you control: whether he keeps hiding and starts going on blind dates, or comes out to his family and triggers the romance storyline that follows. You might also fail to come out, of course, and be sent by your family for conversion therapy.

On October 20, the game's creator, Huang Gaole, finished the branching storylines and the artwork for all nine endings — 137,000 characters in all. The game lays out, in full, the life a Chinese gay man might live across several decades, carrying both the factual knowledge of academic literature and the intimacy and estrangement of gay community life today, which outsiders rarely see.

The game is free. It spread after several big Weibo accounts recommended it, and more than 810,000 people have now played it on Chenguang, the platform that hosts it. That is not a small number: text adventure games are a niche genre to begin with, and for various reasons serious games on gay themes barely exist — nor does the platform recommend them.

The attention exceeded his expectations, and Huang Gaole began to feel torn. He wants more people to see the game; he is also afraid that too high a profile will draw the wrong kind of attention. He says he holds back on how often he talks to players on Weibo. "I haven't dared let it get too hot. As long as you don't push it on purpose."

"We actually made this to inform people. I didn't expect that once the game was out, so many people would argue about the plot so passionately," Huang Gaole told QDaily. "During testing it felt like reading an illustrated public-health pamphlet from the Center for Disease Control. None of us knew then whether this format would be accepted."

1.

The protagonist is named Ling Hao — it sounds like "number zero," gay slang for the receptive partner — and he is the eldest grandson of a large family. He is about to finish his PhD, which means he has reached marriageable age, and although he studies and works far from home, the pressure from his family keeps building.

Playing as Ling Hao, you spend the first half of the game living a gay man's sexual awakening from childhood into adolescence: how he falls for a straight friend, and how he then loses that friend. In the second half you follow him either into an unhappy marriage, or into coming out, socializing and dating.

On Weibo, the word that appears most often in reviews of A Gay's Life is "authentic," and most of those reviews come from inside the gay community. Among straight players, "Teacher Zhang San," a 30-year-old official-account writer who teaches psychology at a university, is fairly representative. After reaching an ending, he wrote that what struck him most was this: "Things I could seem to get so easily as a straight person are so hard to get here."

"Self-awareness" is the only stat in A Gay's Life. Most of the time players only have to make choices to move the game forward, but in the coming-out sequence at the midpoint (assuming you chose to come out to your family), "self-awareness" matters.

"I was so nervous during the coming-out scene that I threw up. My parents and relatives attacked in waves, I gave ground and gave ground, and in the end I was sent to Dr. Yang for electroshock therapy." That recommendation, reposted 16,000 times on Weibo, came from a user going by Su Wuli, who failed to come out because his "self-awareness" score fell below 50.

"The Coming-Out Trial" is the tensest chapter in the game. It is set at Spring Festival: Ling Hao is surrounded by relatives pressing him to marry, and the mellow classical background music turns steep. The relatives fire 12 questions at you, each on a 20-second timer; answer wrong and the elders' words fly at you like blades, while Ling Hao's self-awareness score drops by 10.

"I read Wang Qingfeng's Homosexuality Studies: History, Experience and Theory (《同性恋研究：历史、经验与理论》). He argues that when you come out to your parents, their emotions pass through five stages. Denial: is there some mistake? Anger: how could you do this? Third, bargaining: could you not do this — for our sake, or if we send you for correction? Fourth, grief and depression: why is this happening to me, to my child, to our family? The fifth stage doesn't appear in the coming-out trial — it comes much later, when parents accept it and find peace. That's what happens to the protagonist's parents later in the story."

Huang Gaole says the 12 questions in the coming-out trial were designed on that framework; the dialogue itself he collected from first-person accounts of coming out posted on Baidu Tieba, on forums and elsewhere. "Sure enough, the problems people face after coming out really do sort into these four stages — the 12 questions came together easily."

In the game, some of the basic facts about LGBT people that Ling Hao heard from a psychologist in college become options he can use to fight back against his elders here.

One question costs you points whatever you pick: his parents are in the hardest "fourth stage," and the only way through is to "ask for help" from his younger cousin.

To make the game, Huang Gaole read more than a dozen academic books on homosexuality along with reports from gay-rights organizations, taking stories from them and gauging how far the wording could go. "These books had all been published openly in mainland China, so the limits of what passes review were already laid out for me. At the time I thought: I'd love it if every single word were one that had appeared in these books — I didn't want the game banned the moment it came out. So I was very careful," Huang Gaole said. "For example, 'sexual practices involving multiple partners.' We don't normally talk that way. Normally we just say qun P — group sex."

That is also why one common complaint from players is that A Gay's Life has long stretches of preachy, bookish text. Especially late in the game, where the tight schedule left less and less interactive design and the plot had to be carried by dialogue. Some character traits you unlock along the way — labels such as "straight male chauvinist," "equal-rights advocate," "average build" — have no visible effect on where the plot goes either.

In the second half, if you come out successfully, you meet three men you can pursue: Xiaolong, Chenyu and John Billi — a closeted rich kid, a doctor working on HIV/AIDS prevention, and a socialite of the nightlife circuit. Of the seven endings the three of them lead to, only one leaves Ling Hao happy.

In that second half, once Ling Hao has come out and won his parents' support, they turn up from time to time to back him.

Part of why A Gay's Life feels real is that Huang Gaole worked real events into it, hinting at social pressure the game doesn't dwell on but that is there all the same. Besides the 2017 rainbow matchmaking corner, two other clear references to the news appear at the start and in the first half: in 2005, when police ordered mainland China's first gay culture festival shut down; and in 2001, the last episode of Ma Dong's talk show Tell It Like It Is (《有话好说》) before it was taken off the air — an episode called "Approaching Homosexuality."

2.

Huang Gaole is 27 this year and doing a PhD in Beijing in applied computing. He has been interested in making games since high school, and was a devoted user of 66RPG, a community site for Japanese-style text adventure games, whose founder Liu Xiaoyu was then still a student at Tsinghua. In 2013, 66RPG released its own game-making tool and renamed itself Chenguang.

Liu Xiaoyu had originally wanted a platform for male players, like Japanese gal games, but after Qing Palace Scheme (《清宫计》), a text adventure about imperial-harem intrigue, took off, Chenguang pulled in a large female audience — about 6% of whom became creators on the platform — and turned, gradually, into what it is today: a platform where women are 85% of users, and users born after 1995 are 70%.

In May 2018, Chenguang announced a 100-million-yuan Series C strategic investment and launched a program called "Golden Chenguang Producer," soliciting new project ideas from its contracted writers to bring fresh blood to an increasingly uniform platform, in the hope of turning out a few hits. The project description says: "'Golden Chenguang Producer' is Chenguang's most ambitious undertaking of 2018." Titles released under it so far include Matchmaker Master (《红娘大师》), Desperate Game: Zero (《绝望游戏：零》) and Every Girl in the Dorm Is a Battlefield (《女寝皆是修罗场》).

Huang Gaole had become a contracted Chenguang creator after making a hit game, If You Are the One (Chenguang Edition) (《非橙勿扰》), over the winter break of his final undergraduate year. When he heard about the Golden Chenguang program, he signed up.

The subject had been forming in his mind for a while. In the summer of 2017 he watched Crystal Boys (《孽子》), a Taiwanese drama about gay life; this April he finished Subculture of Homosexuality (《同性恋亚文化》), a work of sociology by Li Yinhe. The anxiety about self-identity in adolescence and the confusion about the future in adulthood that the book and the show describe both struck a chord with him. He thought that if he strung this knowledge and the different life choices facing the gay community into one complete life, told through branching game paths, "it might pull people in more."

"I also wanted to make a game that records gay life in mainland China in this era, telling a gay story in the first person. I hope that through A Gay's Life I can raise my own voice, spread understanding and empathy, and add a little more tolerance to our society and culture."

In the pitch deck he submitted for approval, Huang Gaole stressed above all that he would keep a tight grip on the limits, using the language of academic works wherever he could. The year before, China's broadcasting regulator had labeled homosexuality an "abnormal sexual relationship" in an official document.

Once the project was approved, Chenguang assigned Huang Gaole an artist, Huixi, who turned out a few pieces of CG art a week, though her hours were limited. Over the next six months Huang Gaole spent 30 to 40 hours a week in the library, reading and writing the script, and met Huixi once a week to talk through what needed drawing, the two of them finding somewhere to sit and work together past 10 p.m. In the end, though, the title never appeared in the official Golden Chenguang Producer lineup.

A Gay's Life was made mostly by Huang Gaole and Huixi; a producer and a second artist joined along the way, and neither stayed to the end.

Huixi chose a spare illustration style: big blocks of color, little shading, a person's eyes reduced to a dot. It cut the workload, and it carried a sense of reality not meant to entertain.

Some online commenters noted that the game's art and some of its interactions closely resemble Florence, the indie game that won an Apple Design Award in 2018 — especially the cutscene of Ling Hao scrolling through Moments on the subway. The discussion caught the eye of Florence's own creator. Ken Wong, the former lead designer of Monument Valley, said on Twitter not long ago: "This is amazing, does anyone with better Chinese than me want to give it a try and tell me what it's like?"

"Next to Florence, our game is still weak. What makes Florence clever is that it barely uses text; it tells the whole story through interaction. The characters are all animated — even in a still shot, the hair moves in the wind. If we tried that in our game, our artist would lose her mind," Huang Gaole said.

A Gay's Life recovers its costs from flowers that players send, each bought with an equivalent sum in yuan; it has received 16,900 so far. But you don't need to download the app: you can open the web page and play free, you just can't save. Huang Gaole says he chose Chenguang to build it on mainly because it supplies a library of licensed music and art, leaving him to handle only the script.

"People have questioned whether what Chenguang produces counts as games at all — is it something between a novel and a comic? Or more like a slideshow? I'd rather call our work 'interactive reading' and 'dynamic comics.'"

After the May funding round, Chenguang announced a "brand upgrade," and now calls itself an "interactive reading community." It is hard to argue that has nothing to do with China's game-license system, in force since 2016 and frozen for new approvals since March this year. At least 14 of Chenguang's more popular past titles have shipped as standalone apps, and every one of them needs a license.

Huang Gaole has lately been thinking about turning A Gay's Life into an app of its own, and has even asked a friend to help re-record the game's music. "A lot of people ask me whether I'll put it on Steam, or the App Store. Right now the work circulates as a piece of 'interactive reading.' To circulate as a formal, finished work, it needs more polishing. And it would need a game license before it could be distributed commercially."

Even if it were released, though, A Gay's Life would probably be the kind of work that gets three stars in The Guardian's games section and does unremarkable business. Its gameplay is much weaker than its educational content. Even on Steam, most indie games only fold gay elements into part of the story. The very few built entirely on gay themes — Gone Home, A Normal Lost Phone — don't label themselves "educational" either; they pull players in with puzzles.

We contacted Chenguang about the game; it had not replied by the time this article was published. On the platform's 30-day popularity chart, A Gay's Life, which the platform's editors have never featured, has held first place for more than two weeks.

It is something of an outlier there. Most of the other games on the chart are fantasy titles like What Rank Will You Reach (《官居几品》), Comeback: Stardom Shines Bright (《逆袭之星途闪耀》) and Empress of the Realm (《妃容天下》), and most of them carry an "Editor's Pick" tag.

Huang Gaole says that even without a recommendation, he is still grateful Chenguang let him publish the work at all, though he isn't sure whether "their silence is protecting me, or something else. I don't know either."

3.

While he was writing "The Coming-Out Trial," Huang Gaole decided to come out to his own parents.

"I wasn't especially nervous — part of it was that I wanted to see how they'd react. I sent a WeChat message that same night. Maybe I knew deep down my dad would be fine; he's highly educated and very rational. And I always felt he already knew."

After his father replied that he "could accept it," the two of them chatted for a long while. Over the Dragon Boat Festival, back home in Shandong and out shopping with his mother, Huang Gaole told her about his sexual orientation too. "My mom insisted on seeing photos of the person I was seeing." "I felt like I'd been so stupid — if I hadn't made this game, maybe none of us would ever have said anything. But now I know that they know."

Before that, Huang Gaole was already out everywhere except at home, and had even received private messages on his university's BBS forum advising him "not to be so high-profile." He calls his own road to coming out "not particularly rough." He came out to his class back in middle school; his grades were good, his teachers took his side, and he wasn't worried about being bullied. On his first day as an undergraduate in Changsha, he told his roommates his sexual orientation. He once wrote on his blog: "Sometimes we'd have late-night dorm talks about love and sex — they talked about the opposite sex, I talked about the same sex, and somehow we still met in the middle. It turns out the feelings are the same."

When he talks, Huang Gaole often leaves himself and the game behind and turns to the whole community, to the wider environment, quoting arguments from the academic books he worked through over the past six months. It has become a kind of "after-effect" of making A Gay's Life.

All the thinking that hasn't fully settled shows up in the second half of A Gay's Life too. Once Ling Hao is out, "self-awareness" stops having any effect, and all that is left is different choices and different endings.

The pink economy's consumption of the gay community, the debate about deeply closeted men, middle-class gay men on social media selling the idea that "getting out of poverty is equality" — the second half does its best to lay all this out, but its means of expression are limited, and most players end up paying more attention to how to win over the three love interests.

One player who finished the game commented: "The protagonist starts from a high level of education. Someone like me, without much schooling, probably wouldn't run into a Dr. Chenyu."

Besides being a bit preachy, this is the other obvious flaw in A Gay's Life: there are too few choices.

Huang Gaole's own values come through clearly in the game, and family takes up most of it. During the interview he said several times: "I think that under traditional Chinese values, family pressure is the greatest pressure. China has no religious soil for discriminating against and persecuting gay people, so the social pressure on the gay community isn't as enormous as in some other countries."

Today most of that "family pressure" has gone for him, now that he has come out to open-minded parents. But pressure from society has shown up all through the making of the game, as self-censorship. In the original plan Ling Hao had two more endings: in one, a Ling Hao who chose to stay in the closet grows old alone; in the other, he lives a life of "wine and flesh, gilt and glitter, one long chase after pleasure," and contracts HIV through unsafe sex.

The first was cut because the plot before Ling Hao comes out already shows the life and the state of mind of a man in the closet, and Huang Gaole saw no reason to belabor it. Also, "in reality, deeply closeted people strip themselves of the right to speak," so there was little reference material to draw on.

"The second line stood for subverting the mainstream and rejecting normativity — the original design had the protagonist explore open relationships and various other models of sexual relationship with John Billi along that line." His team, he added, was also fairly worried about how far it could go, so in the end it wasn't kept. "We understand and respect that way of living, but it isn't the value system our team stands for." "What I really didn't want was for one storyline to drag down the other nine endings."

A Gay's Life can be played here (click the yellow underlined link) without registering, or you can download the Chenguang app and play it inside the app.

Cover image and in-article images are from A Gay's Life (art: Huixi, Gouren).