This is eleventh of fourteen essays contained within the third issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. 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:Morgan K
I have a vivid memory from my childhood. I’m sitting in my parents’ living room playing 1995’s Toy Story for the SNES. I would have been around 7 years old, too young to experience it as anything more than stimulus, impulse, input, response, but old enough to know I loved the feeling of the cycle. I was pretty good at video games for my age, at least by my older brother’s assessment, so up ’til then I’d never really confronted a game that seemed an insurmountable wall until I encountered “A Buzz Clip”. Piloting an RC car, you must attack Buzz Lightyear before your battery runs out, collecting powerups along the way to extend its rapidly diminishing energy. A simple driving segment, must have played plenty like it before, but try after try, I just could not finish. Then, after one particularly well-executed run where I timed out mere pixels away from the next time extension, I flipped out.
The room spun as my vision became blurry. I wanted to scream, I probably did, but sound had ceased to reach me as an alien impulse took over my body, compelling me to thrash and strike the floor as the tension that had been building in me with each failure snapped, flooding me with an emotion more intense than any I had experienced before. I woke up later in bed to my mother scolding me, but I didn’t care. I’d breached a new horizon of emotional experience, my first full blown tilt. How did a video game do that to me?
As someone whose life very much centers around games, I’ve thought back to that experience a lot over the years. It’s given me a deep appreciation for the art of the “Game Over”, an element with vastly more opportunities to inform the moment-to-moment experience of a game than its prestigious “A Winner Is You” counterpart. They both represent a release from the tension of gameplay, briefly ushering you out of the simulation and back into reality, or at least the abstract mid-point of the title screen. However, while a well-executed ending can make or break a game, potentially redeeming an otherwise lackluster journey, the way a game frames your failures acts as an invitation, an opportunity to convince you to stay immersed, to remind you that you’re having fun, or at least something like it. It’s bargaining, it’s persuasion, at times it is even seduction, and it’s this form which I am most intrigued by.
