Happy October, everyone! The month’s been beautiful so far here, plus I managed to sneak in a quick 37th birthday this week. I had a slice of cheesecake and several people bought me video games. Let’s get into the update!
Month: October 2025
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)”