Month: November 2024

This is first of ten essays contained within the second 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!

Written By: Davis G. See

The Dark Ages Of Western Gay Visual Novels

When I backed Coming Out on Top on Kickstarter at the tail end of 2012, I had only played one other gay adult visual novel. That game was Enzai, which, in 2006, was the first gay adult VN to receive an official English release, with only a very small number of others having even had English fan translations. I had no idea what I was getting into with Enzai, only that it was a video game featuring men having sex with each other. When I played it, I discovered that it was actually about a skinny young man being imprisoned and repeatedly, violently raped. This was not what I wanted.

In the time between the release of Enzai in 2006 and Coming Out on Top’s release in 2014, a handful of other gay adult VNs saw official or unofficial English releases. Some were fangames for properties like Death Note or Hetalia; some were small, amateur projects with low production values; and at least one was about old, heavyset men. But most were similar to Enzai, i.e. games about yaoi twinks being sexually assaulted. I’m sure some people felt well catered to during this time, but for those of us who could not understand Japanese1 or get off to depictions of rape, the pickings were slim.

I explain all this to stress that Obscura, the developer of Coming Out on Top, was doing something unique. At least as far as the English-speaking world was concerned, there was nothing else like Coming Out on Top.

Continue reading “Coming Out On Top: A Ten-Year Retrospective” →

PICTURED: Opportunity’s main menu screen.

INTRODUCTION

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write, at length, about the experience of making some form of creative project. This stems from a life misspent poring time and time again over such indispensable self-commentary works as The Art of Discworld, Steven Universe: Art and Origins, and, most treasured among them all, The Calvin & Hobbes 10th Anniversary Book. There’s something so seductive to me about holding forth on all the little decisions you made, the things that influenced you, the experiences that shaped your creation… while I wouldn’t necessarily say that this desire is my sole or even primary creative driving force, I also can’t deny that it’s a significant contributor.

The only inconvenient thing is that in order to indulge this long-held desire to write a bunch of preening autobiographical fluff where I talk about how clever and creative I am, I first had to actually MAKE something that I’m proud of and that could bear this kind of extended scrutiny. So I did! It’s called Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story!

Here’s some quick at-a-glance facts about Opportunity:

  • Opportunity is a pornographic kinetic novel about sex work, romance, parenting, and Millennial ennui. It released on Steam and Itch in February of 2023.
  • I did all of the writing, programming, and assorted managerial tasks, while all character sprites and sex scene artwork was created by the pseudonymous artist Pacha.
  • The first chapter of Opportunity released on Itch in late February of 2021. It was about 20,000 words, had only two sex scenes, and took about an hour to play if you read slow.
  • After catching the eye of boutique pornographic games publisher TinyHat, we released chapters 1-3 on Steam Early Access in March of 2022, with chapter 4 coming in August of that year.
  • The full, final, 5-chapter version of Opportunity is over 140,000 words long, takes 6-10 hours to read end-to-end, and features nearly 400 sex scene CGs.
  • Opportunity is the second project Pacha and I worked on together, the first being the as-yet-incomplete mecha-themed visual novel As Above/So Below. It will soon be followed by our third large-scale project, the mind-control-breaking isekai sandbox visual novel Monstrous Liberation.

This will be a series of essays exploring the themes, influences, characters, and philosophies contained within Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story. I hope that it proves interesting not only to fans of the game, but also to people who might want to know about my creative process and personal motivations for making Opportunity! (As this series will inevitably discuss plot spoilers, each one will consist of a short spoiler-free introduction followed by a read-more divider.)

To begin with, let’s take a look at some of the other creative works that shaped my approach to developing Opportunity.

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective: Part 1 (Intro & Inspirations)” →

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This is ninth 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!

Written By: MorganH

It is, at this point, a cliche to introduce any topic on videogames by describing their interactivity as a unique element of the medium. Fortunately, it is not yet a cliche to describe how it is this precise quality that transforms players from fucking themselves to fucking their games.

Adult videogames and pornographic community mods have a long and under-examined history in games, and while there is little criticism on the subject, there is even less that uses adult games to investigate the complicated interface between players and games. Players have had sexual interactions with their videogames long before haptic vibrations turned controllers into makeshift sex toys, but recently, the increasing popularity of porn games and the growing presence of digital connectivity between videogames and electronic toys make this relationship even more intimate and intertwined. Examining how adult games mechanize players’ own bodies reveals a particularly potent image of how videogame play is mediated through corporeal presence.

Continue reading “Fuck this Game: Intercorporeality, Erotic Cybernetics, and Becoming the Input” →

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This is eighth 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!

Written By: Mr. Hands

I had heard many good things about The Imperial Gatekeeper, a dark adult game about a fantasy country torn apart by war. You play an army bureaucrat tasked with checking people’s documentation before they’re allowed entry. But while it starts off easy, the list of rules keeps increasing in complexity as the story progresses. It sounded like the game could make for an interesting experience, although with some very dark undertones. What kind of harassment are the people at your desk willing to let you get away with if they are desperate for a stamp of approval on their paperwork? Unfortunately, I never saw these questions answered during my first playthrough. I was apparently playing the world’s most boring paperwork simulator, stamping people’s documents for no reward. That’s because the version I had bought on Steam was missing something important: a patch to add in the adult content that had been removed by the publisher.

But where did the frustrating practice of hiding adult content behind patches come from? And can we do anything about it?

Continue reading “Patching In Holes And Hogs In Adult Games” →

PICTURED: Nadia under duress. Also a tidy encapsulation of how November’s been so far.

Happy(?) November, everyone! Happy, of course, unless you happen to have many, many reasons to be anxious about what the future could hold for you and the people you love! Let’s get to the update.

Monstrous Liberation Work

Let’s start with some good news: as expected, aside from a small amount of optional side content that’s waiting on art, the launch version of Monstrous Liberation is fully-playable from end to end. All of the critical path story stuff has been implemented and all systems are working exactly as intended. All that remains to do on the game itself before launch is implementing that last bit of side content along with a bit of tweaking and polish. It’s been a huge amount of work to get it to this point, but I’m extremely proud of the work done by myself, Pacha, and Julian (Arden’s bit is coming up soon, now that they’ve finished their first playthrough of Veilguard.)

Continue reading “November 2024 Update: Soldiering On” →

PICTURED: Splash art from Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story showing main character Jacqueline coming upon her daughter Aster and Aster’s babysitter Shruthi engaged in a game involving cat ears and makeup.

The following is an essay that I wrote in June of 2023 on Cohost. It was intended to mainly function as a value-add for a plea I was making at the time for people to purchase and review Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story on the various platforms on which it retailed, but it wound up being one of my favorite pieces of writing I’d done on that site. The piece focuses on two core pillars of Opportunity’s narrative that tend to receive disproportionate amounts of attention: its queerness (which tends to get downplayed) and its wholesomeness (which tends to get overemphasized). What I’d like to do here is first reproduce the essay in its entirety, and then in a brand-new section talk about what, if anything, has changed since I wrote it, while also expanding on some points I only briefly touched on.

To begin with, a quick refresher on what Opportunity is about:

With two young children, a full-time job, two student loans, and rent due every month, it’s no wonder that millennial single mother Jacqueline is struggling! She’s exhausted, she’s stressed, she’s overworked, and worse: she hasn’t gotten laid in over two years! But things begin to change after she reconnects with an old friend, who makes her a surprising offer…

Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story is a warm, lighthearted erotic visual novel exploring what it means to rebuild and reinvent yourself against a backdrop of late-stage capitalism. What do you do when you realize you haven’t been really happy for a long time, and what does it mean to be REALLY happy, anyways?

Continue reading “Opportunity and the Bona Fides of Queerness & Coziness (Expanded)” →

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This is seventh 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!

Written By: Iyane Agossah

Content Warning: This is an essay about DoHna DoHna, an R18 game featuring kidnapping, sex trafficking, and assault. Moreover, please keep in mind that this is not a game review, so this is not a list of trigger warnings for DoHna DoHna itself. This essay also contains spoilers for one of the major themes of DoHna DoHna’s story, and minor spoilers regarding the game’s endings.

Continue reading “The Surprising Likeability of DoHna DoHna” →

This is sixth 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!

Written By: Callisto Jupiter-Four

None of my favorite erotic games are really queer. Most of them have girls fucking each other. Some of them have trans people. But none of them actually talk about queer experiences or depict queer life. At best, they’re a sort of generic chose-your-own-gender Everyone Is Bi procgen fuckscape. Usually, they’re male-centric, male-dominant narratives where trans people don’t exist and women only fuck each other to appeal to a male audience. A lot of the games I’ve spent hours jerking off to express a worldview that is roundly misogynistic in a way I struggle to square with my enjoyment of them as a queer woman.

There’s erotic games that are explicitly queer. There’s Hardcoded. There’s a solid majority of itch.io VNs. People on Twitter keep telling me to read Coquette Dragoon. I know these games exist; I have played several of them. And yet somehow I did not like them. I don’t intend to put any of them in particular on trial, here, because I think the devs still deserve to have more money, but I have played them and they haven’t done it for me.

Continue reading “Queer Porn Games Just Don’t Do It For Me” →