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This article discusses the relationship between play and space through the examination of the porn-viewing room of men’s sex saunas in Taiwan and South Korea. In these spaces, varying notions of play and playfulness are encouraged and experienced. Through an examination of the spatial layout of the room, the content of the videos exhibited therein, and the physical manifestation of the enveloping cultural context, I consider how the intersection of these three elements serve to guide bodily pleasures by encouraging some forms of sexual pleasure over others. If the sauna is analogous to a playground, then the porn-viewing room is a piece of playground equipment that sets out to guide players to engage in acceptable use through its design, without necessarily accounting for the ways in which the equipment can be co-opted for other forms of pleasure. Ultimately, I seek to situate the question of what bodies can experience in terms of sexual pleasure in a specific setting and subsequently consider how the cultural context may influence the forms of pleasures experienced in these spaces.

While many studies suggest media representations of marginalized social groups play a vital role in shaping one’s worldview (Gerbner et al. 1994) or normalizing power imbalances (Harwood and Anderson 2002), videogames continue to privilege characters that are White, adult and male. This paper revisits key questions addressed in Williams, et al.’s “The Virtual Census: Representation of Gender, Race and Age in Videogames” (2009) to examine how representations of gender, race, and age in videogames have changed over the last ten years. The present study analyses the United Kingdom’s top 100 best-selling games of 2017 and looks for changing and continuing trends in the representation of videogame characters compared to the original study. While our sample still shows a preference for White, adult, and male characters, a small but significant increase in the representation of female characters and people of colour offers hope for the future of gaming. By revisiting the 2009 census, we aim to provide empirical evidence that may contribute to further discussions of how gender, race and age are portrayed in videogames, both within academic and industry circles.

Despite its ability to arouse and titillate or disgust and anger (and sometimes both simultaneously), porn has only recently been examined through an affective lens. Writing in the inaugural issue of Porn Studies, Susanna Paasonen (2014) advocates for porn studies scholars to consider how the application of affect theory can help us better understand the appeal of pornography. Drawing on Paasonen’s concept carnal resonance and Margaret Wetherell’s (2012) affective practice, I propose the concept _carnal practice_ as a way to examine how one engages and makes sense of online pornography through the affectively felt practice of searching for, finding, and getting off to online pornography. This is done through an analysis of 48 semi-structured interviews, conducted between February 2019 and September 2020 and in 5 countries—Taiwan, South Korea, China, Japan and Canada—in which I discuss how queer East Asian men navigate their respective internet space, are drawn to particular content and platforms that satisfy their desires and curiosities, and make sense of the porn they view. In some instances, participants discussed notions of being drawn to authenticity in porn as well as porn that seems real (that is, most similar to their lived experience), attraction to particular sex acts, scenarios and races, and, in other cases, allowing a platform’s algorithm to help facilitate and fine-tune their desires, to name a few. Although this study focuses specifically on the practices of queer East Asian men, the concept of carnal practice is not limited to this group and has wider application.

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