Stanley Baxton is a narrative game designer who has worked on more than 20 games as a solo developer, specializing in satirical, horrifying, or queer stories. He previously worked as a game designer at Supermassive Games. Baxton was chosen as a BAFTA Breakthrough for his work on Latex, Leather, Lipstick, Love, Lust, an interactive fiction piece about a trans man going to a kink club.
How do you feel about being a BAFTA Breakthrough?
Good. I applied thinking this will just be another initiative: I’ll put the application in, it’ll go in the bin, and I’ll move on. But being picked effectively felt like BAFTA going, ‘Hey, the stuff you’re doing is important and we want to highlight the communities that you’re working with.’ And it’s like, ‘Oh, okay. That’s quite nice’.
Why do you think you were chosen?
I feel that I represent that unspoken voice in games.
I have a lot of gripes with the games industry, but my biggest gripe is that I’m part of communities who are making games very much against how the games industry says that they should be made. That’s to do with the people or the specific content, as well as the production. These games don’t need multimillion dollar budgets, they can just be made with one person.
And when I say with one person, I don’t mean the very sneaky thing of it’s a solo dev, and then you look under the hood, and there are 30 contractors and a hundred people in the Philippines who just weren’t credited.
Think of someone who has a terrible retail job. They go home, they play around on the computer making quick little games, they put it out into the world to basically no fanfare, and they’re doing it just because they love it and they want to do it. That is pretty much entirely ignored by the games industry, because they’re focusing on profits.
So I’m hoping that my inclusion with BAFTA is to try to bring light onto that, and if that wasn’t why they picked me, that’s basically what I’m going to try and turn it into anyway.
So you want to spotlight creators who are doing it for passion and not the money?
And it’s ‘for the money’ that’s the key thing there. Because you speak to any of my developer colleagues, and they will say there is no money in games. They do it just because they truly believe in it as an artistic medium. And it’s like, if I make a couple of hundred on a bundle on Itch or whatever, that’s a nice side effect, but what I wanted to do was create this and put it out into the world – because the games industry hates us, and I’m just going to do what I want on my own.
Do you really think the games industry hates you?
Well, it’s just a natural consequence of the games industry being a neoliberal, capitalist construction: it inherently hates any sort of activity that is not done for profit or motivation. You have to commercialize all your free time, you have to commercialize everything that you do, it has to have some kind of value and profit. Whereas this non-commercial game space I’m in is basically making games because they’re fun. We’re making art, we’re making it for other people, and we’re often making it free.
The hate is ignorance. It’s that complete block off, where it’s like there’s no point in paying attention to this.
So less hate, and more just the games industry not really paying attention.
Not really paying attention – but I also say hate, because a lot of us are queer and quite marginalized, and a lot of people do hate us in the more direct sense.
Were you affected by the clampdown on adult games on Itch and Steam over the summer?
I was.* The only way that anything will happen is if MasterCard and Visa entirely collapse and we move to a decentralized form of payment processing. There’s no point going after Steam and Itch; the point should be directed towards legislators, it should be directed towards the hate groups that champion this and push this, and most importantly, the payment processors, because they’re pushing the voice of a very vocal minority, and the vast majority of people are buying things that are completely legal. Even if you try to go through the legal side, there’s nothing illegal in the games that I’ve done, it just has some adult content. It has a sex scene. Movies have had sex scenes since the Hayes code was rescinded. The focus should be on them, because they’re the only reason that this happened.
Have you been in touch with legislators? Have you petitioned MPs, for example, or written to payment companies?
Yeah, I’ve done the usual. There was an initiative of just ramming the phone lines of Visa and MasterCard. I had a fun experience with Visa where I called up and I was asking about a payment I made through an online distribution platform, and they said, ‘We’ve had calls about this already,’ and immediately hung up on me. It shows you that they just don’t want to listen.
I have written to my MP, and didn’t get a response. But she’s with Labour, and I don’t expect Labour to care about trans people, to be frank. I think the change will either come from those things just collapsing in on themselves or people being vocal enough where they become something they can’t ignore because the bottom line is affected.
How will being a BAFTA Breakthrough change your career? What kind of doors do you think it’ll open, if any?
After I got laid off, I was just like, ‘You know what? Forget this industry, I’ve had enough of this, you don’t want me here. I keep reapplying, and you keep slamming the door on me.’ I think I’ve applied for over a hundred things at this point. I’ve been ghosted innumerable times.
I’m hoping it more opens the door for other people, because right now I’m doing a PhD around the communities that I’m in, why the games industry is ignoring them, and how we can help champion them or have them better respected as artists rather than a business that we can turn profit from. I’m hoping that it opens doors for and puts a spotlight on that community; I’m not too particular about myself and my career.
So you feel like you almost want to be an ambassador for the people making marginalized games, perhaps?
Yeah. And because I am trans, but also I’m a man, if someone just looks at me on the street, they’re just going to see a regular old white man in a bit of an interesting outfit. And that means, unfortunately, people listen to me more, and I feel [I have to recognize that] privilege [and use it to push for change].
It feels like the least I can do, because trans women in particular are the reason why I’m here. My mentor was a trans woman, Freya Campbell. My team at Supermassive, I’d say well over half of them were trans women. A lot of them were in senior roles, and they just get ignored. So if I can be here, at least appearing to be a regular old, straight, white man, I can go, ‘Look at this, this is important’. And then afterwards you realize, ‘Oh god, he’s one of them’.
What’s your PhD on?
It’s on punk indie game development, basically, trying to formalize a term for that community of people who are going specifically against the games industry and trying to separate as well from commercial indie game spaces. The people who are just like, ‘I don’t want to be a business, I’m an artist first, I just create stuff. I create it for my community or myself, and I just put it out into the world.’
I feel there’s important stuff being done there. So it’s almost like a middle finger to the industry going like, ‘You aren’t paying attention to this, but clearly someone in academia is’.
I like the idea of being a doctor of indie punk games.
Yeah, I do as well.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Discover more about the other members of the 2025 BAFTA Breakthrough games cohort: Kyle Banks, Sally Beaumont, Mark Choi, and Cara Ellison.
*Currently, Latex, Leather, Lipstick, Love, Lust is available on Steam if users are able to prove they are over 18 by adding a credit card to their account, and it is available on Itch via a direct link. However, Baxton’s Itch creator page is currently blocked in the UK.
