There is a video game for your smartphone called La Petite Mort, and its goal is to get you off.
This “one of a kind digital erotic experience”, according to its creators, is European – of course – and it features a series of pixelated shapes standing in for vulvas, which you touch, stroke, circle and tap in order to, ahem, elicit a change in your smartphone.
If you play your cards right – so to speak – your phone will redden in colour, it will heat up, it will start to vibrate and it will play pulsing, throbbing music. Congratulations, you just won La Petite Mort. Oh, and if there was any confusion about what this game is actually about, the French term ‘la petite mort’ means orgasm. Yep.
The app is designed by a Danish game studio called Lovable Hat Cult, and the whole idea, the creators say, is to normalise the conversation around female pleasure, not to mention up-skill users in the area of manual stimulation.
The eroticism, designer Patrick Jarnfelt told The Guardian, comes from watching pleasure simulated onscreen. By taking an active part in eliciting that digital pleasure, you feel the flow-on effects yourself.
“We have had a focus on expanding games as an artistic medium in general. We felt like erotic games was a very unexplored area.”
But Apple doesn’t like this idea, not one bit. Currently, you can only download the app on Android phones, not your iPhone or iPad. Apple has removed La Petite Mort from the App Store because it is “excessively objectionable or crude.”
“I was talking to the guy from Apple on the phone, actually, which is cool, they take the time out to talk to you,” Jarnfelt told The Guardian.
“He told me, ‘Yeah, you and me are French. We understand these things.’ But they have to reach a broad market, and America, and they have to be family friendly, so they have just not accepted anything like this. And they put their own kind of threshold on what is crude and not crude, and you cannot even discuss it.”
