This is third 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: MorganH

I started playing pornographic games shortly before I realized I was some kind of asexual, in that chaotic summer of 2020. There was an unmitigated global pandemic, the United States was rioting, I recently moved across the entire continent, from Connecticut to Los Angeles for grad school in the hopes that classes would be in-person by the fall (a laughable idea, in hindsight). And to occupy myself in my empty rented room during those empty weeks, I partitioned my time between two primary activities: playing porn games and moping.

I’ve always enjoyed erotica and pornography — I have a distinct memory of stumbling across those early chapters Alexis Flowers’ fantasy-porn masterpiece I Roved Out in Search of Truth and Love in 2015 and being stunned that smut could also be so skillful. Since then, I’d developed a taste for what I liked and what I didn’t, and discovery of those adult games opened up a new dimension, an entire medium to explore. My first forays, like so many others who discover adult games for themselves, were with some of the most recognizable, the games that had substantial online audiences that would recommend them, or the ones that appeared at the top of the itch.io store in the “Adult” or “Erotic” categories: Third Crisis, Treasure of Nadia, Harem Hotel, and Summertime Saga and its ilk, the endless procession of games seemingly built around a core memory of finding a VHS copy of Taboo II, in which the performance of Kay Parker is a load-bearing structure of pornographic videogames. But the taboo whose violation first enthralled me was itself the intrusion of porn games into my previously un-sexualized digital space.

During those same weeks, I would lay awake at night in bed, wondering why I was so bad at being straight. Compulsory sexuality, not yet a term I was familiar with, insisted upon me that having some kind of sexual relationship was virtuous, and that failing to establish one was some kind of flaw indicative of a deficiency in character. To truncate my journey of asexual discovery into a single instant, there was a night in which I couldn’t sleep, wondering what was wrong with me. I distinctly remember the sudden jolt with which I realized that if I was heterosexual, why had I never made an effort to actually form any kind of sexual relationship? Why should I feel guilty about failing to achieve something that I never pursued? That insight instantly clarified for me that the discomfort I felt throughout my life did not stem from failure to establish sexual connections, but from the tension of trying to contort myself into meeting the expectations of an allosexual society.

It would be a great exaggeration to say that playing adult games were in any way causal to my identification as ace, but they did force a certain amount of introspection. I had to somehow reconcile my new understanding of myself as asexual with my authentic interest in pornography. In particular, the fictional contexts for the vast majority of adult games feature the player character as the incarnated avatar for the player themself, the vehicle through which the game’s sexual encounters are translate corporeally onto the player’s own body. While this is not a novel complication for the ace community in general, it was new to me. My resolution came in the form of comparison to the other games I was playing, the non-erotic games that otherwise filled my time.

Nearly every videogame entices the player into desiring the completion of goals that they would otherwise not want for themselves — I enjoy Hitman even though I have very little wish to be a murderer (though sometimes I do fantasize about placing the banana peel that would cause some technocratic billionaire to slip and fall facedown into a puddle and drown). Porn games eroticize the existing motivational systems that predicate all player behavior. Ultimately, there was no contradiction: I can enjoy the erotic interactions within the game without desiring them for myself, just as I desire many aspects of action games without desiring the experience of violence.

Once the tension resolved between my enjoyment of sex in games and my lacking desire of it for myself, I started to think about porn games not as merely audio-visual representations of sexuality, but as ludic simulations of it. And the more comfortable I became with my asexuality, the more I was interested in exploring it through the art I consumed — which is challenging, in that ace representation is truly sparse, and ace characters in adult games are, not unsurprisingly, practically absent. There are a few games that I am aware of that have erotic content with an asexual perspective: All In by Storysinger Presents is one, a short visual novel that explores asexuality and kink. But in general, this combination is underdeveloped.

The game that, to me, most interestingly explores the themes of sexual activity, asexuality, and desire is Course of Temptation by developer anarchothaumaturgist, an HTML, text-based life simulator set in a hyper-sexual college campus, sort of a less extreme take on Degrees of Lewdity. In the game, you play as an incoming freshman that explores a wide variety of sexual situations as you manage your classes. As you raise your “Disinhibition” and “Exhibitionist” skills (among others), you can participate in more and more exaggerated sexual situations, such as joining the university’s cheer squad that services the football team as a reward for winning games, or wagering sexual punishments at the local arcade.

Course of Temptation is the rare erotic game that allows you to choose your character’s sexual preferences with full respect to asexual and aromantic preferences — though not without complication. When making your character at the start of a new game, the player is offered the choice of name, nickname, a selection from various gender identities or the ability to customize to your preference, and then a “sexual preference” option that gives the choice between “Straight,” “Gay,” or “Bi.” Asexuality is not among the sexual preferences, but is instead relegated to being one choice of the list of “Character Inclinations” you can select. This means that your character’s asexuality is far more integral to their personality than any other sexual orientation — and far more prohibitive. Not in the sense that playing as an asexual limits the actions that you can take within the game: the “Asexual” trait doesn’t lock the player out of any sexual content, it merely has the game effect of a debuff and a buff, giving decreased “Satisfaction” after completing sex acts, but your “Release” bar depletes slower, meaning that you can go longer between orgasms without getting frustrated. But selecting the asexual trait prohibits the player from starting with any other inclinations, most of which are not related to orientation. A player that selects “Straight” can choose to have their character also be asexual, with the sexual preference indicating the gender of prospective partners your character is interested in (you cannot pick “none,” incidentally), but you cannot choose to both be asexual and have another starting inclination, like “Dated a Lot,” “Uninterested,” “Just Exhibitionist,” or “Polyamorous.” In this instance within Course of Temptation’s character creation, asexuality is prescriptive of your character in ways that other orientations are not.

Additionally, the “asexual,” “aromantic,” and “demisexual” traits are described with uncertainty and confusion — “It may sound strange to some,” to be demisexual, and built in to the description of asexuality is the assertion that “few people understand you.” Ace identities are described with a sense of unease that is not at all present with other sexual orientations. At least at the start of the game during character creation, Course of Temptation is hesitant and feels a little dubious of the inclusion of asexuality within its pornotopia.

For all that these quirks of sexuality-as-game-mechanics present an imperfect representation of asexuality at the point of character creation, the game itself is rather generous in its depiction of the possibility space for asexual characters in pornography. Rather than being driven by sexual desire, your character’s measured libido is more affected by contexts and circumstances. Exhibitionism, consensual-non-consent, and power exchange are examples of kinks that can be fully explored through an asexual perspective, not tied to an allosexual model of attraction. The eroticism of getting jerked off by a gloved school nurse as part of a “medical demonstration” done for extra credit is meaningfully distinct than pursuing a sexual encounter with a desirable character encountered randomly out in the world. Similarly, despite being extremely hyper-sexual, the fantasy of signing up to be the “prize” of an arcade game tournament in which you agree to orally service every player that ranks higher than you is not necessarily an allosexual one. This is demonstrative of what makes Course of Temptation so compelling as a game about sexual exploration, its descriptivist rather than prescriptivist model of sexual behavior. A player can make a straight, cis-gender male character and still enthusiastically engage in sexual situations with other male characters: the fluidity of sexuality is represented in the affordances of the game.

I’ve made three or four save files in Course of Temptation, each one playing a different type of character, though each generally ends up focusing on exhibitionism, since that is one of the main themes of the game. I played a chubby trans girl with a huge dick visible beneath her micro-skirt, a slutty bisexual boy in the shortest shorts imaginable, and, most-recently, an asexual learning to enjoy being an exhibitionist. (Side note: Course of Temptation has certainly thrown into relief that female or femme characters have a far wider variety of sexy costume options than masc characters, who are limited to micro-shorts and similar apparel, though perhaps this is a failure of imagination on my part.) As might be expected, it was watching this last character, the ace one, arrive in a variety of sexual or fetish situations that felt the most interesting to me. Beyond the basic level of pornographic titillation, every event prompted a reflection in myself. I was not imagining myself in these situations, but simply knowing that my character was asexual and still putting them in the context of an erotic game forced me to reckon with the bounds of both my comfort and my understanding of asexuality. Since I was performing the same actions as my previous characters, both in terms of category and in terms of specific events, the most meaningful distinction was the knowledge of my character’s identity, not the demonstrations of their behavior. Because I was playing an asexual character, something that I purposefully selected, every interaction, even – perhaps especially – the sexual interactions were done asexually.

I follow a lot of sex workers, erotic artists, and adult performers on social media, and a favorite type of composition for their posts is a suggestive or erotic image accompanied by a rhetorical question. When I am alone and scrolling through my feed, I derive a lot of personal enjoyment from answering the rhetorical questions as an asexual: “What would you do to this ass if you saw it?” asked some femboy. “Nothing,” I say out loud as I continue to scroll. “Would you fuck this pussy if you caught me masturbating?” “No.” “Could you resist tasting this hole?” “Easily.” And so forth.

In Course of Temptation, I feel similarly, but the text-based interface and the intermediary of my player-character allow me to explore alternative answers to some of those questions. Perhaps this character would enjoy this stranger’s propositions, or dressing provocatively in public, or willingly signing up to be the cumdump prize at an arcade tournament. There is no danger of me adopting any of this character’s behavior as my own, but what games like Course of Temptation do with their representations of asexual characters in erotic circumstances is allow me to cast out a line into unexplored waters of imagination, and slowly reel back in the great distance towards a comfortable shore. Perhaps I catch nothing, or perhaps my line snags onto something, some model of experience or interaction or relationship that when brought out of the distorted refraction of the hyper-sexual, pornotopian setting of the game, shapes my own conception of what it means to be ace. It is strange to find such affirmation of my own asexuality within a work of pornography. Rarely do games offer any sort of perspective on asexuality within erotic contexts at all, but in Course of Temptation, playing with sexuality is an overt, fundamental theme of the game. My entire relationship with sexuality is mediated through art and fiction, and games like Course of Temptation allow for exploration of topics that are otherwise impersonal.

MorganH is an erotica writer and media scholar with a long academic interest in videogames, interactivity, pornography, and instances where the symbolic becomes the literal. As a fiction writer, Morgan is currently working on Acolyte of the Pleasure Goddess, an “Epicurean fantasy novel” that is the start of what will hopefully be a long series. Currently, chapters 1-9 (about 110,000 words) are available free on Literotica. Delighting in online anonymity, Morgan uses any pronouns.

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