Month: September 2024

(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” →

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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a minotaur chasing a young blue-haired witch through a labyrinth
PICTURED: Sasha and Diogenes celebrating Diogenes’s liberation

Happy September, everyone! After a few final days of heat, the rains have come to Vancouver and autumn has begun in earnest. Let’s get to the update. (This update is crossposted from the monthly BP Games newsletter.)

Monstrous Liberation Work

This month Pacha was mainly focused on finishing the art for the second of Diogenes’s sex scenes – it’s a long, detailed scene and required a decent amount of revision because I was being very picky about a few details. I think it’s one of the best scenes we’ve done so far and I can’t wait for you to see it. Pacha’s also been doing some minor tweaks to Sasha’s sprites.

As for me, my work on the game this month was pretty much exclusively writing. I finished the script for Diogenes’s section (it turned out to be a couple thousand words longer than Senza and Drizzle’s, I think I must have been having fun with it) and also plumped up a lot of the optional flavor text that appears in the Hospitality District before and after you liberate all the monsters. Right now the total wordcount of the game’s script stands at about 52,000 words.

I’ve also been in contact with our publisher about getting a proper trailer cut for the game now that we’ve got almost all of our content ready to go. That’s ongoing but fingers crossed that I have a nice slick video to show you next month! Also coming next month: Pacha will be finishing the remainder of the SFW cutscene art and perhaps starting in on the last major sex scene, while I’ll be implementing the script I just wrote and probably finishing up the rest of the script while I’m at it.

Continue reading “September 2024 Update: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back” →

1

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)” →

In spring of 2022, my friend Aidan approached me and asked if I’d like to become a beta user for a social media website she’d been working on called Cohost. I had been a regular Twitter user since 2009, but hadn’t enjoyed much of a public web presence for years, preferring the relative safety of my locked account and a few small Discord servers, so I was a bit leery. However, Cohost had a pretty attractive value proposition: no ads (ever), a chronological timeline, no visible counts for likes or shares, no notifications except for comments on your posts, a robust tagging system, and an even more robust system for silencing, muting, and blocking tags and users. And to top things off, porn of all stripes was welcome – a feature fast becoming a rarity among social networks.

It wasn’t long before I was fully and irreversibly hooked. Cohost proved to be the perfect home for my personal brand of longwinded self-important essay-writing – the Markdown-based post composer was easy enough to use, there was an active community of developers making fun tools and plugins to enhance the experience, and the site attracted the sort of person who actually ENJOYS seeking out and reading passionate longform writing about someone’s hyperfixation. And I got to write about PORN – something I’ve been fond of thinking about more or less my entire life – as much as I wanted! And people LIKED it!

I wrote goofy little spec scripts for theoretical Daz3D porn games. I wrote irritated screeds about the challenges of porn game development. I wrote gushingly about porn games that have inspired me throughout my career. I transcribed my extremely correct opinion that the only good genre of porn game is the visual novel. I wrote about Opportunity‘s complicated relationship with the strictures of coziness as a porn game. I maintained an alphabetized list of porn creators that had over 600 accounts listed, complete with digestible descriptions of their content. And I didn’t JUST write about porn – I wrote longform game reviews, I wrote cultural commentary, I wrote educational posts about pain science and massage, I wrote extremely long analyses of Forgotten Realms novels, and I even wrote a series of posts memorializing Flash-based comic creation engine BitStrips, which I miss keenly to this day. While I had always thought of myself as a writer (when I joined the site I was in the middle of writing a visual novel that would go on to be over 140,000 words by the time it was finished, after all), on Cohost I discovered a love for blogging I hadn’t realized I possessed.

And, as shown in the above image, Cohost was also the home of BP Games’s first-ever development and promotional blog. Although BP Games had existed as a concept since 2017 and as a company since 2021, Cohost was the first place where it felt like insight into what BP Games produced would be appreciated and celebrated. Cohost was the platform that made me suspect that there might be enough other people out there with interesting thoughts about porn games to populate some kind of zine – a project that wound up becoming the Adult Analysis Anthology. Cohost put me in contact with multiple creative collaborators, and proved to be an extremely consistent source of both emotional and financial support. Cohost is indelibly intertwined with the story of BP Games, and I had hoped that both myself and BP Games would have a permanent home there. Sadly, this was not to be.

Three days ago from the time of writing this, Cohost staff announced that the site will be ceasing operations – as of October 1st the site will go read-only, and on January 1st 2025 the servers will shut down. Flatly put, this news left me devastated. The past several days have been spent in a sort of depressive frenzy as I scramble to cobble together some kind of ramshackle solution that will allow me to preserve as much of the network and audience that I so carefully cultivated over the 2.5 years I was active on Cohost. Broadly speaking, it is a good thing that this website and attendant blog now exist – Monstrous Liberation will launch in a few short months (God willing, knock on wood, etc) and it was always my intention to put together a semi-professional website that could include a landing page, roadmap, and development diary for the game. However, this was a process I had anticipated luxuriating in; taking my sweet time comparing hosts and website builders, learning the tools, tweaking the design, and just generally having fun learning a new skill and having a shiny new website at the end of it. Instead, I have had to rush through the process as best I can so that I can get the site operational before Cohost goes read-only and my remaining window of time to communicate with fans of BP Games on there closes. Circumstances are less than ideal.

As mentioned, the website and blog are just one part of a multi-pronged approach to preserving as much of BP Games’s Cohost audience as possible. In addition to pushing the monthly BP Games newsletter, I will also be more regularly using my public-facing dev Twitter account and making accounts on both Tumblr and Bluesky (the degree to which I’ll make use of each of these platforms remains to be seen, but what’s certain is that there are precious few social media networks that allow even ASSOCIATION with pornography, and a longform blog is poorly-suited to shitposting and large-scale user acquisition). I’ve also spun up a Discord server, but I’m being careful to not treat that as a BP-Games-centric space – it’s more focused on preserving Cohost’s culture of discussion, curiosity, and discovery around porn (porn games in particular).

Here is the plan for this blog going forward:

  • Newsletter development updates will be crossposted here for those who don’t want to receive e-mails
  • I will be intermittently posting things that previously appeared on my personal Cohost account under the “Cohost Reruns” category, lightly adapting them as appropriate
  • I will also be working to re-publish all of the publicly-posted Adult Analysis Anthology essays that were previously published on the BP Games Cohost account
  • As appropriate, this blog will feature announcements about major project launches and sales (though not EVERY sale will be promoted here)
  • Once things have stabilized somewhat, I will start using this blog to write and publish new essays and other longform writing on subjects like porn, game development, media criticism, and dumbshit goofing
  • Lastly and most importantly: I want to maintain a robust blogroll/webring populated at first by people I want to keep in touch with from Cohost, and hopefully adding to that as time goes on. My vision for this is to regularly promote writing, art, and other projects by the people and teams on this blogroll, likely in the form of some kind of regular greatest-hits post.

Thanks for reading. Let’s keep going.

– Bigg

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