(Re)regulating gay sex in viral times: COVID-19 and the impersonal intimacy of the glory hole.

COVID-19 has transformed the way we live our lives, and sex has been a significant element of that transformation. Gay male sex in the UK has faced the most significant (re)criminalisation and (re)regulation in living memory with intimacy outside of the heteronormative framework of domestic coupledom at best discouraged and, at worst, made into a criminal offence. This criminalisation provides a temporal praxis in which gay men experience sex in the shadows once more, an echo of a historic legal and cultural regulation of desire. This history also provides a space for experiencing forms of impersonal intimacy and queer desire in a way that is arguably well-suited for viral times, namely the glory hole. These historic partitions and apertures - connecting gay men across legal and cultural boundaries of desire and affirmed through modes of anonymous and promiscuous sex - may once again provide a queer way to experience intimacy as impersonal. This article explores this potential and situates the glory hole as a cultural and legal site of this tension between the intimate and the impersonal, as well as considering how it is being recast as commercial artefact and performance space during these viral times.

Business Models for Successfully Maintaining Games for Health.

Videogames for health provide innovative, exciting, and possibly highly effective new media for helping players change their behaviors or otherwise benefit their health. Getting the right videogames into the hands of players who can benefit most in a way that pays for the continued innovation and creation of such games is a current challenge. Entertainment videogame companies, which create games primarily to enhance players' enjoyment, have used the general business marketplace (e.g., online stores, walk-in stores, app stores) to deliver their products directly to consumers and earn enough capital to invest in making new products. No one believes, however, that enough kids or adults would use the general business marketplace to purchase games for health in sufficient volume to provide the down payment for the innovation and creation of new games for health. A successful business model is critical to the financial future of games for health. We asked members of our Editorial Board who are in health-related companies (Fikry Isaac, MD, MPH), in several game development companies (Chris Ashford, Ron Goldman, David J. Lenihan, Brent Poole, and Richard Buday, FAIA), and the head of the Games for Health Europe Foundation (Jurriaan van Rijswijk, MSc) to address questions in a roundtable about the current and possible future business models for games for health.