Skyrim is one of the most mod-prone games of the past decade. Everything from Spider-Man costumes, Thomas the Tank Engine costumes, machine guns and nudity mods abound. And now, a kissing mod, Not the first, in fact. But this one is interesting because it does not employ custom animations. Instead, it uses some ridiculous tweak to the ragdoll systems which results in characters making preposterously dramatic lunges at one another, during which mouths may or may not connect.

This is (tenuously) relevant, because what we have here is not so much a kissing gesture, as much as a weird jumping-like motion that has been repurposed and packaged as ‘kissing’, and which we accept as such, partly because the movements are vaguely familiar and partly because the modder tells us to. The kissing is implied rather than executed, which is to the consumer the same as being executed. It was not kissing but now it is.