Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream Won't Judge You If You're Horny

It is a weird time for sex on the internet. We live in both an era of extreme sexual permissiveness and constant restriction. Formerly niche fetish terms like “gooning” have reached mainstream usage. The advent of machine learning has made deepfake pornography more common than ever, to horrifying effect. The release of the Epstein files has revealed how pervasive sexual exploitation is. Yet, ID-restriction laws have been passed in the UK and Australia, and several US states have floated or passed similar laws. Dozens of sexually explicit games were banned from Steam and Itch last year, in large part thanks to payment-processor pressure. Tomodachi Life exists at this curious intersection between permissiveness and restriction.

In early community-made videos, Tomodachi Life players made their little Miis talk about lesbian sex, frotting, and other sexual acts and innuendos, taking advantage of the game’s surprisingly lax text filtering. This is not the first Nintendo game to create room for such a community–in 2015’s Splatoon, some players posted more explicit images and text in the early hours of the morning, when the game’s kid-focused playerbase was less likely to see it–but Tomadachi Life’s cutesy mundanity makes it an especially subversive space for horny posting.

One Bluesky user, baffled that the game lets her type “lesbian sex,” laughs along with the strangely coherent conversation that follows (and several other copycat posts on Bluesky have followed that one). On Twitter, streamer Blake Jennings’ Mii befriends “human Shrek” by discussing “clapping your booty cheeks.” And multiple posts on both Bluesky and Twitter describe the game as “writing boobs on a calculator,” and that feels like an accurate assessment. Making your grandma say “farting” may be tamer than making outright innuendos, but both driven by a similar sort of glee. The player is turning the game to their whims, and the game is letting them.

This might seem odd, as there is perhaps no video game company that is as concerned with its image as Nintendo. As noted by Polygon, previous entries of Tomodachi Life did not even allow same-sex pairings, on the pretense that including them would be “a political statement.” The game only allows them now because the cultural tide has sufficiently turned and, subsequently, they are perceived as being less controversial. But surely a Mii talking about lesbian sex would be damaging to Nintendo’s family-friendly image, no?

There’s a chance, I suppose, that Nintendo failed to anticipate how players might take advantage of unfiltered text–a chance that looming updates could prevent these kinds of shenanigans in the future. However, there’s still no sign that Nintendo will update the game in this way and it’s been nearly two weeks since the game’s launch.

With that in mind, there is another explanation as to why the text filtration is relatively lax that seems more likely. The only way these player-made videos make their way to the internet is through the Switch and the Switch 2’s share features, which allow players to save clips and screenshots from games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Doom Eternal, as much as they let people share things from Animal Crossing: New Horizons or Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Tomodachi Life, however, has no share features. When players attempt to do so, they are met with a message alerting them that they are unable to share screenshots or video from this particular software. And while there are ways to get around this restriction, it’s still an undeniable barrier. It’s not easy for someone to share something geared toward adults in a space designed for kids without going through several different steps and, more importantly, already being a member of that child-oriented space. And Nintendo isn’t responsible for keeping on top of spaces outside of its control.

If Tomodachi Life had online multiplayer or more easily connected to the internet, creating a space where players could freely share posts and videos with other players, I assume it would force Nintendo to moderate: to take responsibility for the things that people are creating. We see this already in action–the game has moderation tools that kick in when activating the game’s local multiplayer mode. But the game allows people to type what they want because, well, what happens in Tomodachi Life stays within Tomodachi Life, unless players spend the effort to share it. Both children and adults can cultivate the game’s absurdity and enjoy it in different ways.

In an article for Lux Magazine, cultural critic Kate Wagner argues that, to reclaim eroticism from internet surveillance, we need privacy. She writes, “Too many of my friends and acquaintances–of varying degrees of ‘onlineness,’ from veteran discourse observers to casual browsers–seem to have internalized the internet’s tendency to reach for the least-charitable interpretation of every glancing thought and, as a result, to have pathologized what I would characterize as the normal, internal vagaries of desire.” The widespread sharing of Tomodachi Life reflects this soft surveillance culture. Outrage, or even just laughter, at the sex other people are having characterizes a lot of our online posting culture. Yet, Tomodachi Life’s structure is mostly private. It lets players have freedom to explore what is funny, silly, or yes, even sexy, to them. Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream’s little island is a place where no external force must intrude.

All this, of course, has in no way prevented memes from populating internet discourse around the game. A blog post from critic Abram Buehner bemoans the way people are “playing for the algorithm.” Buehner’s target is less horny posting in particular, rather the broad posture of edgy provocation many posts about the game take. Buehner objects to the fact that many online people refuse to put their IRL friends in this game. He writes, “To believe this is to assume Tomodachi Life must be a site of depravity, and that your loved ones are undoubtedly sucked into an irony-poisoned vortex of MadLibs provocation if they’re invited.”

And to that point, spending any amount of time with Tomodachi Life proves that it is intended for people to add their siblings, partners, parents, and grandparents. Surely, the kids who make up a sizable fraction of the game’s audience are doing just that. They just aren’t posting about it. Tomodachi Life’s lack of a filter and wide array of customization tools means that it is largely what players make it out to be. In other words, not everyone is horny posting and those who are are just as likely to be doing it with their real-life partners or friends as “human Shrek.”

Buehner also addresses the lack of social features, which he cites as a primary criticism of the game. “The upload function being disabled is only such a defeating restriction if the goal of play is manufactured virality shared wide at the highest fidelity.” Bruehner is right to point out that this is far from the point of the game, likely even for most people playing it. It is the fact that, presumably, children and adults are playing the game in a more normal way that makes any of these posts funny. Some child somewhere is laughing at making Sonic say “six seven” or getting to chat with Goku about muscles. It is the fact that the game is, presumably, not designed to be bent toward edgy memes that makes the memes edgy.

The other thing that makes it work is Tomodachi Life’s nonchalant posture. The Miis’ text-to-speech cannot differentiate between the profane and the mundane; each Mii will deliver it all in the same whimsical tone. It is not only that the Miis are saying something provocative, but that they say in the same cadence they would talk about anything else. In a strange way, this makes its absurdity all the more real. In conversation, a joke can spiral into a tearful admission, and a horny comment can become vulnerable. In Tomodachi Life, the lack of explicit social norms can make anyone’s island feel warm and open. In other words, it reflects the way close friends talk to each other. Tomodachi Life can become a grotesque spectacle, but it also can be intimate, surprising, and funny. These are things sex, and the way we talk about sex, can also be.

Let us go back to the “lesbian sex” video that opened this article. Though it is to some degree staged (the person is recording it after all), it is also spontaneous, the way a funny conversation about sex can be in real life. The phone camera shakes with each laugh. The fact that it was taken from a phone, in bad lighting, makes it feel all the more authentic. We are watching something with the person who made the video. They are not only presenting it for likes on social media, but laughing alongside the viewer. On Tomodachi Life’s island, sex can become a normal part of life: unexplicit, sure, but also away from prying eyes. In our puritanical, judgemental, and depraved online landscape, that feels almost utopian.

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