This is sixth 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: Faye

One Mouse In A Bondage Club

Late at night on a crudely coded chat-based website, I was a girl.

Everyone was – Bondage Club was designed by a cis, straight man, and adding male characters was side-tabled for years citing player interest. So cis men, sissy, cis women, and trans women players abounded on the site. We sought to put our sexed-up femme paper doll avatars into bondage scenes and have everyday conversations on the side.

We would chat in small rooms of up to 10 people, some public and private. In them, we’d dress up and tie up our 2-D characters with clothes, bindings, and accessories made by contributors. Using clickable emotes, we’d pet heads, spank asses, and cuddle against each other. Some were happy to just chat and have eye candy to go with it. For others, we’d play a character and role-play scenarios that used chat, the dress-up mechanics, and the emotes to write our own erotica.

Over time, I experienced more and more of what I called “RP Bleed” – that I myself was being inhabited by that character rather than the other way. I liked being that woman, especially once she tried a potion in a scene and was permanently turned into a mousegirl. Then even later one night, I bought an outfit for $7 that matched one my character wore.

As my character might say: “Ah, squeak.”

An Informal, Qualitative Survey

Before I continue, I have a confession to make. This article started as an exercise in self-justification. I found my gender not terribly long ago in a place that, really, isn’t somewhere I’d talk about in mixed company. And despite good advice, because of its source I still struggle to tell myself that my gender is valid. But I knew of friends from Bondage Club who had experienced the same gender exploration and journey as I had. And I knew of plenty of other lewd games that took gender and presentation head-on. A bigger question arose as I asked around. What makes a game good at providing this kind of gender exploration?

Equipped with a set of open-ended survey questions, I reached out to a number of NSFW and lewd gaming communities:

• A Tumblr post on my personal writing account,
• Bondage Club via the game Discord and two in-game public rooms,
• Two Empty Spaces Discords, a sometimes-erotic writing community of mostly trans folk,
• A NSFW transfem exhibitionist Discord server,
• The Torei server, a latex kink Discord server for RP and updates on a set of games including Lost in Laminate,
• Fenoxo’s Discord server for their games Corruption of Champions and Trials in Tainted Space,
• The Discord for the game Wrapturous Adventure,
• The Discord for the game Secretary,
• The TFGames.site Discord,
• The /r/LewdGames Discord, and
• The Shame Games Discord for TrapQuest, TFQuest, and DiaperQuest.

These choices of communities limited the range of response the survey might have received with a broader dissemination. This is most apparent in the games referenced by the respondents. Corruption of Champions, Secretary, Bondage Club, and Trials in Tainted Space are all the most-referenced. In the top five, the only game not directly reached out to is Degrees of Lewdity.

The survey itself also limited respondents. People in the communities were unsure about some of the wording of questions, entirely rejected the thesis that lewd games could help people explore their gender, or felt like as a cis person they wouldn’t have much to add to the conversation. The audience also over-represented trans women compared to the overall trans community. Both a transmasc respondent and a trans masc person I spoke to about the survey played games featuring trans women rather than trans men. That said, we received responses from people who self-described across the gender spectrum, including “aaaaaaaaaaaa,” “questioning,” “transmasc femboy,” “bigender,” “what are you a cop?” and “male.”

Ultimately, we received 24 responses – certainly not enough to be a representative sample but enough to hint at what game designers can do to foster players finding a real-world identity from the virtual counterparts.

Character Customization

Clothes and customization are often at the heart of many lewd games. Bondage Club is largely a multiplayer dress-up game, Degrees of Lewdity balances encounter stats with the clothes that you wear, and Secretary enables events in-game based on your clothes.

Non-lewd games also provide this to a degree. One response from a trans woman mentioned Animal Crossing making her “able to wear whatever clothes I wanted, and especially have a magic wand that let me save outfits and swap them at will,” which “did a lot to let me explore my feelings in a low-stakes way.” But there’s something lacking when you can’t show explicit body parts like you can in lewd games. As one person exploring their gender put it, “I am more connected to my characters in lewd games at a personal level. This may be because I’ve ‘seen them naked….’”

Gender presentation in reality is often tied to what clothes we wear. Giving a wide range of options that work without having to be a certain body type can allow experimentation that isn’t possible quite yet on this side of the screen.

Representation

In both the story and graphics of a lewd game, the way that bodies are represented beyond just clothes is critical. For one woman, she “really appreciated Hardcoded for a game that so clearly represents trans bodies in a way that doesn’t try to hide them or make them seen as weird but instead beautiful.” The trans representation in the game goes so much farther than the corporate sexualization of Cyberpunk 2077. And it would be wonderful to be so tidy: realism is the right path to representation in lewd games that will help players explore their gender.

But much like wintermute found in her article “Femboys, Futanari, And Finding Myself In The Space Between Their Bodies“, cruder archetypes that may even be verging on offensive can be just as validating. The same woman who praised Hardcoded also found the world of FutaDomWorld validating because she found relatively few other games “putting women in a dominant position.”

Men, especially those actively questioning or exploring their gender, often play gender transformation games that de-stigmatizes gender transition rather than directly representing it. One male doesn’t “care about my gender identity as much as I wish I were something ‘better’ then what I am.” While he “would rather play with feminine qualities” he preferred having male genitals.

Ultimately, there’s no one right way for a game developer to handle representation that covers all the paths to gender exploration. Like many questions of authenticity in creation, it comes down to how the person playing reads the text. Fenoxo’s worlds of buff animal-men validate just as much as the chubby transfems of Hardcoded. Trans women see themselves in the cis bodies of Didnapper as much as the sissified males of Secretary. The guidance is clear: a developer should create the world that they are interested in seeing.

Gameplay Loops

One trans femme summed up the lewd gaming experience for many players so perfectly: “Clit in hand and another hand on the mouse, clicking away while imagining how things would feel.” Respondents were often playing at times of day that defy playing a complex game. Some played “between classes or before work” – both situations that are time-constrained. Others played “later in the evening or throughout the night” and often “in bed… when no one was awake.”

People tended to talk about the content or stories of game rather than the mechanics. Many respondents mentioned the challenge of quality in lewd games. One transfem referenced the “lack of better games with the same realistic feel or character lead.” A male respondent suggested not to “delve too deeply lest you find the tedium Balrog.” In their eyes, lewd games tend to be of lesser quality but make up for it in the obvious way. Lewd games are often made by enthusiast developers. Simple yet sophisticated tools like RPG Maker and Twine don’t stop a first-time game designer from making questionable gameplay choices. And developers that work on the same project for a long time learn as they go, starting with a core gameplay loop that may be beloved for reasons other than gameplay.

Game developers should focus on the story first, especially on the sexualized and kinky elements in the story. This gives gender-exploring players something to hold onto during sessions.

Multiplayer And Community

Respondents were split on the role of community in lewd games. Many said they “didn’t participate in any communities” or “never really looked at the community unless I needed a guide.” Even for communities that are active and generally positive, it seems that people generally take their lewd gaming as a solo enterprise, with few actually interacting with Discords or forums. But a second kind of community was critical for multiple respondents. A trans woman was first exposed to real trans people in a lewd Neverwinter Nights persistent world server. These worlds allowed her explore elements more intentionally than single-player games, which were more about playing a version of herself and putting herself in that position. Another woman found Garry’s Mod lewd roleplay games, which provided her “a change to act as a female character in a setting with adult themes.” She felt that “the sexual aspect allows… a more complete form of self expression.”

Multiplayer roleplay gives the player real-time, real feedback on their gender performance in a safe space. While the largely sexual atmosphere can limit the performance, one respondent viewed traditional MMOs as lacking “even the veneer of being perceived as a woman.”

For lewd game developers, multiplayer is a large investment and can bring with it structural and other challenges. But that human interaction can be invaluable for people exploring beyond what reality can provide.

Game Design That Enables Gender Expression

Based on the responses, this informal survey gives four strong game design challenges to a developer who wants to entice more people to explore their gender expression:

First, let your players customize their character and dress them up in various clothes and accessories. This lets people try on a persona for a game.

Then, create a game world that authentically reflects your interests as a lewd artist. People will find themselves in the cracks between the text of the game.

Write this world’s story more than you develop arcane game mechanics. Your players will remember the situations you put their characters into more than they’ll remember stat blocks and wiki pages of strategy.

Finally, consider how multiplayer could be incorporated into the gameplay. Can two people interact in this lewd world, forcing them to be treated in a way that is new for them in a social and sexual environment?

People find validation and exploration everywhere, especially in the media they consume. Lewd games are just one path and are not played in a vacuum where other places to explore don’t exist. But the stories told by the respondents make it so, so clear: There’s great power in the potential for a lewd game to leave us “clit in hand and another hand on the mouse, clicking away while imagining how things would feel.”

Faye is a 30-something nonbinary transfem mousegirl writing fiction, creating narrative games, and streaming on Twitch under a few different names. Their website has links to their works.

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