Category: Commentary

I’ve made brief reference to it both on my Bluesky and in my previous writing about Tourney of Tyranny on this blog, but this series of light novels really, truly contains some of the writing I’m most proud of so far in my career as a longform writer. I’ll prove it later on with a lengthy excerpt from the recently-released second book in the series (Tourney of Tyranny Part 2: A Conquest Claimed), but before I get to that I thought it’d be nice to write a little about how enjoyable the process of working on ToT is for me.

When you’re working on games with a lot of writing in them (like ours have), not only are you DOING a lot of writing, you’re REVISITING that writing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and so on, again and again, until everything you’ve written, no matter how clever or funny or hot it might’ve been when you first wrote it, starts to look like grey mush. You stare at what you’ve gotten down on an unfinished script while you’re attempting to cudgel your brain into producing the remainder of it. You read it over and over while doing your own edit pass, and then over and over again after your editor gets back to you with notes. You read the whole thing through while you’re implementing every single sentence in the game’s code, and you’d BETTER read every single sentence over again while you’re testing, lest you made a mistake or twenty. By the time a game gets in front of an audience, reading what I’ve written makes me want to puke.

This is not to say there isn’t quite a lot of re-reading for me to do in the process of creating Tourney of Tyranny – quite the opposite, in fact. There’s plenty of going over paragraphs during the writing process, and plenty of re-reading during the edits, and then plenty more when I’m planning out a given book’s illustrations for Blueparikeet, and then even more still when all the illustrations are completed and it’s time to format everything together. But the really crazy thing is that in spite of all that necessary re-reading, I’ve nevertheless found myself rereading both books… for fun? As in, I genuinely enjoy it? I find myself reading through them and smiling and laughing and even thinking “man, I can’t wait until there’s another one of these”. I know that this likely sounds nauseatingly self-congratulatory, but it’s the truth!

The process of writing them has also been straight-up Fun, too. Another thing about making games is that it takes FOREVER for the things you write to appear in their proper context, so working in a medium where you can just have something On The Page is so quick and easy that it basically feels like cheating. What’s interesting is that I had no great ambitions towards literary excellence when I started the Tourney of Tyranny project. It all began as a way of scratching a certain itch, kink-wise, and giving myself an excuse to contract the services of one of my favorite artists. The quality of the writing was always meant as an afterthought. However, something strange happened when I was working on the draft for Tourney of Tyranny Part 1: A Champion Chosen, and it basically hasn’t stopped happening since: I was surprising myself with how good I thought it was. I wasn’t even TRYING and yet this stupid goofy completely-unserious erotic kinky science-fiction dreck was making me feel as though I was Becky Chambers or Terry Pratchett (I’d never dream of going so far as to favorably compare myself to Sir Terry, but (as I mention in the Opportunity Retrospective), his is the ghost I’m most obsessed with chasing in my work. Sidenote: direct comparison like this is another privilege of the novel format. In games, which so often have writers’ distinct authorial voices sanded down flat by multiple revisions and notes from a dozen different stakeholders, it can be tough (not to mention unproductive) to try to compare one’s writing to well-known works).

However, I know that all of this is just me talking. If you’d like me to back up my words with, uh, words, you can go ahead and download the free safe-for-work PDF previews of Part 1 and Part 2 on Itch. But maybe you’re in a bit of a hurry, or you’re on a work device, or you just don’t want to make any extra clicks. I get you. Below is a nice chunky excerpt from Tourney of Tyranny Part 2: A Conquest Claimed. Here’s everything you need to know going in:

  • Our protagonist, Lilith Lacrimosa, was plucked from her dead-end system administrator job by Goblinoid aliens and made their Champion in a proxy tournament in which she is tasked with fucking crazy-style with more frequency and creativity than a number of far more attractive and charismatic humans. Lilith thinks they’re crazy but went along with it because the consolation prize for losing is more money than she’s ever seen in her life.
  • As part of her induction as Champion, Lilith was injected with a tiny tracking implant.
  • Unbeknownst to Lilith, the Goblinoids are cheating and have modified Lilith’s implant so that it makes her hornier, more sexually-proficient, and most crucially, makes it so that whenever Lilith makes eye contact with someone while she’s sexually-aroused, that person will become overwhelmingly sexually-attracted to Lilith.
  • Again, this is important: Lilith DOES NOT KNOW that she has been fitted with a mind-whammy sex implant.

That’s it! Happy reading!

Continue reading “Tourney of Tyranny Is Some Of My Best Writing Yet” →

​I’ll state right at the top that a significant motivator for the writing of this post is simply to push Tourney of Tyranny Part 1​ back into visibility for my audience. I’ll admit that here and now: this is a marketing exercise. As much as Tourney of Tyranny​ is a labour of love, it’s also a product that cost money for me to create, and the more money I make back from the sales of said product, the easier it is for me to justify continuing to make products like it. 

However, I’d also like to take this opportunity to write a little bit about WHY I’m bothering to perform this kind of exercise, when in the past I’ve tended to let our releases speak for themselves. The short answer: Tourney of Tyranny, due to the Payment-Processor-Unfriendly nature of its sexual content, needs extra conscious support in order to receive the same visibility our other projects enjoy.

You might have noticed this in Tourney of Tyranny’s page copy, but I’m even being coy about the nature of said sexual content (hereafter referred to as “The Kink”) because there are many documented instances of crowdfunding platforms like Patreon stalking the social feeds of people using their services and denying them said services for off-platform violations. Our Patreon income is pretty insignificant at the moment, but with things as dire as they are at the moment in terms of ways you can make money from pornography, it pays to be circumspect. Suffice it to say that The Kink is frequently characterized by glowing eyes, swirly pupils, and characters being compelled by some mixture of fantastical powers, weird science, or made-up pheromones into performing acts that they might not otherwise have performed. We all know what’s being referred to now, yes?

Continue reading “Try Purchasing Tourney of Tyranny, Please” →

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What with game development and newsletters and keeping the paysites active and doing various promotion tasks and doing the regular AAA web essays, it feels like it’s been ages since I’ve gotten to do any writing that’s Just For Me. So I thought, hey, why not shake off the cobwebs with a nice easy softball topic: sexual consent. Very little contentious or fraught about that!

Ideas of consent as they apply to pornographic video games have been on my mind for basically as long as I’ve been working on them, but they’re especially so in light of this summer’s pressure campaign by far-right fringe groups to pressure adult games from storefronts, the recent spate of nations and states instituting insane online verification schemes, attempted draconian crackdowns on free speech in the United States, and most recently Bluesky proposing to ban fictional depictions of non-consensual sex acts from their platform. All that kind of makes one think quite a bit about how their work is perceived!

Don’t take this to mean that I’m in any way interested in interrogating our work to discover if it meets a theoretical alt-Catholic Puritan’s standard of acceptability. It doesn’t, because it is porn, and to the kind of person who is invested in banning porn not only from the internet but from all aspects of society all porn is equally evil and equally deserving of eradication, and the more things that can be designated as pornographic for those purposes, the better. This is as true for porn that depicts explicitly-consensual missionary sex between two married cisgender heterosexuals that is exhaustively justified by a beautiful narrative as it is for porn that depicts snuff. Appeasement is death, and I’m not ready to die yet.

However, we’ve built up enough of a body of work at this point that I do think it’s worth looking at how our games approach sexual consent, along with some of my personal thoughts on how consent is deployed in stories like ours. Fair warning: in addition to frank discussions of explicit depictions of all manner of sex act, this post will also feature a decent amount of kimono-parting that might possibly lay bare our secret mix of herbs & spices. Consider yourself warned!

Continue reading “BP-Games-Brand Consent-Like Products (TM)” →

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PICTURED: A stock photo of a king penning some manner of proclamation on a scroll.

Three days ago, I posted an image to my Bluesky account. This image stated that for the meagre price of a single “Like” given to the post to which the picture was attached, I would provide my followers with One Thing I Would Change If I Was The Undisputed And Tyrannical King Of Porn. I scarcely expected the Like counter to reach double digits, but apparently the masses cry out for strong, confident, and above all REGAL guidance, because the Likes poured in so quickly that I gave up all hope of keeping up with them. I wound up topping out at fifty-three pieces of monarchical wisdom, which feels reasonably auspicious to me. That’s enough for one per week, plus one extra as a bonus. As heartening as it is to realize that I apparently have a large pool of potential subjects eager to submit themselves to my rule, social media is nothing if not ephemeral, and I decided it would be best if I collected said wisdom here for posterity. Thus, here is said wisdom (lightly edited and reorganized for greater digestibility).

Continue reading “Fifty-Three Changes To Come When I Am The King Of Porn” →

PICTURED: The official “PlayOverwatch” Twitter account imploring users to drop a foot emoji in the replies of a tweet about Kiriko’s “grippers”.

Ever since Overwatch‘s closed beta splashed onto the scene in 2015, the web has been inundated with Overwatch porn. It’s not hard to see why – beyond the game’s massive popularity, it boasts a cast overflowing with unchallengingly-attractive caricatures and broad ethnic stereotypes, each carrying JUST enough backstory to serve as the jumping-off point for a million million sexual scenarios but not so much as to bog anyone down in too many details. Add into that the fact that its character models are extremely easy to manipulate with software such as Source FilmMaker or Blender and a constantly supply of new costumes for said character models, and you’ve got all the ingredients you need for a seemingly-bottomless pot of sexual content gumbo that’s sure to keep your highly-derivative hero shooter relevant long past its sell-by date!

Things have changed. Yes, the Overwatch porn spigot is still flowing fast and strong, but the property on which it’s based isn’t doing too hot. Overwatch has, technically, given way to Overwatch 2, but by all accounts the supposed successor to one of Activision-Blizzard’s biggest blockbusters hasn’t been performing like it should. This isn’t that surprising, as the competitive gaming landscape has changed a lot in the near-decade that the game’s been active – no game remains popular forever. Some players will move on to new, similar titles like Riot’s Valorant or Respawn’s Apex Legends. Others might find their tastes drifting to other genres entirely, perhaps becoming engrossed in a roguelike such as Hades or a massive single-player experience like Elden Ring. Others still will simply melt away, becoming fed up with a toxic online player base, running short of time to play between obligations like work, school, or child care, or falling out of touch with their regular gaming group. All of this is perfectly normal, but unfortunately also represents a state of affairs completely unacceptable to Activision-Blizzard’s stakeholders, who demand infinite growth and infinite returns.

Hence, “grippers” – an unsubtle overture to the gooner wing of the player base, cloaked in a wincing reference to a long-running community in-joke about Sigma’s exposed feet. Cringe! Not because it’s somehow Not Done to sexualize the game’s characters (more on that in a moment), but because porn has carried Overwatch‘s Caligulan carcass atop its back year after year, and deserves better than a self-conscious joke from some underpaid intern who, statistically, was verbally and possibly physically chastised both before and after hitting Post.

Continue reading “Grippers, or, If Overwatch Wants Goon Dollars They Need To Hire Some Professionals” →

There’s a certain threshold that exists when critically considering any artistic work: namely, a certain standard of that must be achieved before the work can be expected to withstand any level of critical scrutiny. This is not merely a standard of quality, but also a standard of cohesive creative intent – is the creator of an artistic work offering some kind of identifiable vision, such that the steps they took to attempt to realize that vision can be evaluated for their effectiveness? Further, to what extent could the creator be expected to absorb, digest, and respond to critical feedback in their work? And, lastly, to what extent could critical examination be said to be of use or interest to a wider audience?

Continue reading “Good Enough To Criticize” →

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(The original title was something like “Reflections On Efforts To Foster Sex-Celebratory Community Within Niche Online Spaces”, which is SUCH a dickless piece of jargon-ridden flotsam even if it IS technically-accurate.)

When my friend Aidan contacted me back in March of 2022 & asked if I wanted to join Cohost, the new social media platform she was building along with two other people, she was simply inviting me as a friend who she thought would get along with the other friends and family who were being invited to kick the site’s tires during their months-long pre-launch beta. I immediately liked what I saw – the site’s functionality was limited and it ran like molasses, but the team had a bold vision for the platform that included no advertisements, ever, and an extremely progressive approach to pornography. Given the precarious state that porn existed in on the few social platforms where it was allowed, I was excited at the prospect of a social media website that was sympathetic to the web’s pornmongers, and decided I would do my best to get the word out.

After the site had its official public launch, I talked it up on my public Twitter account, hopped into the mentions of a number of my favorite artists (many of whom had been expressing distaste with Twitter as a platform as the Elon Musk takeover loomed), and evangelized the site in several porn-oriented Discord servers. Beyond porn being generally-permissible on Cohost, I also liked to emphasize its other strong selling points – no ads! A chronological timeline! Tagging on the way! I also had a number of more-or-less canned responses to common misgivings – yes, there aren’t many people yet, but there’s high engagement among them. Discoverability is an issue but search is on its way. There might not be video but there IS gif support. And so on.

This post is less to sing Cohost’s praises than to highlight that I personally worked pretty hard to bring in as many porn creators and porn-interested users as I could, and then worked harder to keep them there. I’m writing down my thoughts and experiences related to the work I did along those lines with the hope that it might be instructive for anyone trying to do similar community-building work in the future.

Continue reading “Building A House Of Cum” →

This is first of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but if you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Alright, so what are we doing here? Who is this for and why does it exist in the first place? Answering that requires laying down a bit of groundwork first.

Porn games (which here I’m using to mean “pornographic games developed for English-speaking audiences outside of Japan”, since a lot of what I’m about to say doesn’t apply (or, at least, applies much less) to the Japanese porn game industry) are kind of bad.

Anyone with any familiarity with porn games who is being honest with themselves knows what I’m talking about. The vast, overwhelmingly majority of porn games are feature-poor visual novels developed with extremely inconsistent levels of competency in terms of writing, programming, and art (the ones that aren’t pure visual novels are typically extremely tiresome RPGs or extremely tiresome puzzle games). The vast, overwhelming majority of porn games languish in a state of incompleteness, and the rare few that DO get finished are very seldom finished to the level of polish one might reasonably expect from almost any other kind of game. Misogyny, both casual and extremely active, is rampant throughout many porn game narratives, as is racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. Narrative setups repeat ad nauseum – dozens upon dozens of smirking incestuous boymen porking their pliant (step)mothers and (step!)sisters, varying levels of “corruption”, and functionally-indistinguishable college fuckfests reigning supreme.

Continue reading “Porn Games And Writing About Porn Games” →

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PICTURED: A screenshot from Ghost Hug Games’ Hardcoded.

Welcome to Cohost Re-Runs! The following is a lightly-edited & expanded version of an essay that first appeared on my personal Cohost page in March of 2023. One thing that’s important to remember: I’m still correct about this.

The first thing we need to do is lay down some definitions. When talking about “porn games”, I’m talking about interactive media wherein the primary goal is provoking a strong sexual response in the player. A porn game is not merely a game that features sexually-provocative imagery – Bayonetta, for example, features a lot of T&A along with a lot of playful references to BDSM, but it’d take a pretty advanced case of puritanical brainrot to argue earnestly that it’s a porn game – it’s a high-energy 3rd-person combo-based brawler with an aesthetic that includes a lot of sexualized imagery. A more digestible way of making the distinction might be to say that porn games expect you to masturbate while playing them. It’s important that we’re on the same page with this definition of porn games, because if we aren’t then nothing I say from here on out is going to hold water.

Addendum from Future Bigg: Following conversations I had after the initial version of this essay was published, I’d like to add that the utility of the above definition, which separates “porn games” from “games with porn in them”, is that of establishing design goals. In a porn game as defined in the above paragraph, the desired outcome (and, in a sense, the ludic “win state”) is to inspire sexual arousal in the player, and as such all design decisions need to be evaluated on the basis of how well they facilitate that outcome. In a game that has porn in it, where the intended outcome might be some combination of narrative fulfillment, a sense of discovery, or mechanical mastery, design decisions can be evaluated on how well they support THOSE outcomes. In the abstract I think that there’s TREMENDOUS value in having mechanically-rich games that feature hardcore pornography as part of their aesthetic makeup, as the normalizing influence of a very fun, very popular game featuring pornography like it’s not a big deal cannot be overstated. In practice, however, I think we’ve honestly yet to see very many games with porn in them that could honestly be said to be as mechanically-satisfying as their non-pornographic analogues.

Continue reading “It’s Time To Accept There Isn’t A Better Porn Game Format Than The Visual Novel” →

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Welcome to the blog post that will EVENTUALLY show you an excerpt of the final essay from the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology: an in-depth review of Studio FOW’s Subverse, written by yours truly. Before we get there, though, I’d like to spend some time talking about why it’s an excerpt and not the full thing.

Firstly, the review is a MONSTER. It is over 7,200 words long. The second issue of AAA is 70 pages long, and the review accounts for fully 20 of those pages. This not only means it’d be difficult-to-digest in web-based blog format, but it’d be a prohibitive amount of work plugging it in besides.

Second, I am pretty proud of the work I did on this review, to the point that I think it’s good enough to act as an enticement for people to purchase the full anthology! Just five dollars, or six if you’d like to get it as a bundle with the first issue! This is not something I’d feel comfortable doing with any other writer’s work, but since it’s my own I figure it’s okay.

Third, there’s the element of fairness to consider. My review is not a favorable one, and after playing over thirty hours of Subverse and reading back through four years of Kickstarter updates and developer diaries, I feel quite confident that the impression I formed of the game is as fair as I could possibly make it. However, the final release of Subverse is not out – I played the 0.9 version. In a developer diary post from 2022, then-incoming lead game designer Bangkok correctly identified a number of the same issues that I wound up having, and those changes are intended to be fixed as part of a full user-experience overhaul that will accompany the 1.0 release in Q4 of 2024. I’m no stranger to the Early Access model of game development, and I know that I would personally be pretty frustrated if some jagoff posted a long unfavorable review of one of my games before I’d had time to finish the fucking thing (and probably doubly pissed-off if I was a recent hire who’d been brought on specifically to address a game’s shortcomings). I’m not intending to play the 1.0 release (save files will be wiped, and there is simply no way that I’m playing ANOTHER thirty hours of that game), but I do stand by what I wrote about the 0.9 version. However, at the end of the day I’m simply more comfortable keeping the majority of the review confined to the PDF version of the anthology.

So, there you have it. Now, without further ado, let’s get to the excerpt!

Continue reading “AAA2 – What If It Had Been Good: The Subverse Review (Excerpted)” →