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.

While writing this essay, I’ve frequently been given pause to wonder if, rather than speaking on something inherent to Game Overs, I’m addressing what is merely a personal fetish. Perhaps the image of Woody the Cowboy on his hands and knees in a black void, pounding his fists into the ground with rage, acted as some sort of Freudian primal scene, shaping my psychosexual development ever since. Thinking back to my time spent locked within the psychic pressure cooker of puberty, I recall the odd feeling I’d get playing Tomb Raider, my frustration melting away as a chill went up my spine when, after a misjudged jump sent me into a fatal plummet, I’d hear My-Lara’s body snap and crumple upon impact. Though if that were “just me”, I’d question the impetus behind countless “Lara Croft Death Compilations” I’ve seen uploaded to Youtube over the years. I similarly think about how I’d squirm in my seat while playing Resident Evil 2, watching Me-Claire be pulled down and eaten alive by a horde of zombies while moaning with something that didn’t sound quite like agony, an experience I may have shared with whoever made ResidentEvilSex.mp3, a file that made the rounds on Napster circa-1999 featuring audio from RE1 edited together to form an elaborate orgy between the game’s main characters. Granted, what I took away from those experiences, as someone who most values games as a sort of improvisational performance space where I can inhabit simulations of other lives and explore how I would live them, may be different from someone who feels driven to depict Lara’s many deaths removed from their context as simulation or who uploads a roughly cut audio file to a file-sharing server ostensibly as a joke. Still, each of us took something away that was, at least tangentially, erotic, indicating to me that there is a latent eroticism there which each of us was responding to.

I vaguely orbited this idea for a long time, but it really shifted into focus in my early twenties when I got into the habit of deep diving doujin game sites, downloading at random while my limited grasp of Japanese provided only the most cursory guidance. This introduced me to the concept of “ryona” games, a term apparently much broader than I originally understood it, but which I associate primarily with games where the sexual content is tied to failure on the part of the player (e.g. taking damage, running out of health, etc.) Ryona games essentially bifurcate the player’s motivation, intentionally setting it at odds with itself. Engaged with as a game, the objective is to win, to defeat enemies and avoid taking damage, but as erotica, experiencing all the erotic content demands the failure of these objectives, with more robust entries tasking you to seek out novel combinations of enemies and conditions which you might never run across as part of normal gameplay. Here it was, what others colloquially referred to as the “Bad End”, the eroticism of Game Over made overt, one which doesn’t just seek to seduce the player into trying again, but to fail in the first place!

Early in my exploration of the genre, I could see this idea in theory, but the experience of a lot of the games I encountered didn’t really seem to work in practice. As games, they often left a lot to be desired. Lacking engaging stories, developed characters, or even functional controls, I frequently struggled to feel immersed in them, reducing the experience down to a sort of puzzle box of oft-boring and potentially frustrating gameplay with the porn locked inside. Frankly, I felt more of a rush from hearing Solid Snake’s echoing scream as his cohorts cry out his name than I did from throwing myself at the next tentacled hell-beast in hopes of getting a new CG out of it, but I kept seeking them out because I knew that all it would take to find the experience I was looking for was for the game part to actually feel like a game.

My persistence finally paid off when, in 2013, I played PIXEL FACTORY’s Parasite In City, a relatively brief, but tough, side-scrolling survival horror game that sees you trying to navigate a ruined cityscape overtaken by hordes of horny undead. You are an unnamed heroine equipped with a handgun, limited ammunition, and a weak kick that takes several hits to defeat most enemies, but can easily stunlock a single zombie. This is less useful against hordes and monsters like mutant flies that attack from angles other than directly in front or behind you though, forcing you to choose between sticking with it and risking taking excessive damage or relying on your gun and its limited ammo supply, assuming you engage the enemy at all and don’t just find a way to leg it past them. This juggling act of choosing how best to approach each encounter while having to conserve supplies like medkits and ammo so that you still have options later on when each tactical misstep will likely have even more severe consequences is the essence of survival horror. PiC didn’t just feel like a game, it undeniably was one.

This allowed me to settle deep into the simulation, embodying the nameless heroine, her struggles becoming mine and the consequences of my failures being meted out on her. It allowed me to perceive a sort of platonic ideal of the seductive game over, where one’s goals are no longer at cross purposes. Instead, the drive to progress against the friction of the game cultivates a building tension, where any misjudgment can have you pinned on the ground at your enemies’ mercy, and as these mistakes compound, the release of the inevitable Game Over feels less like heroic defeat than it does erotic humiliation. This creates what I would describe as ludo-erotic consonance¹, where the seamless integration of eroticism and gameplay allows each to work in service of the other, rather than merely offer the player the choice of whether they’d rather beat the game, or just beat off.

A couple times now, I’ve talked about gameplay and Game Overs in terms of tension and release, a concept borrowed from music, but that came to me through the culture of BDSM, another realm of various forms of ‘play’ which benefit when their participants are conscious of the interplay between the two. Experience teaches that a moment of pleasurable sensation can be stretched across an entire experience with the proper cultivation of tension. A strike from a flogger lasts a split-second, smarts for only a few more, and benefits little from repetition except at the highest levels of intensity, but by taking time to build anticipation, caressing the skin to awaken the nerves, teasing with false hits, whispering promises of what is to come, you can intensify this brief instant of sensation, turning it into a broader, more all-consuming sensual whole, and I believe understanding this way of guiding, enticing, and cultivating another person’s sensations is just as relevant to someone engaging in sadomasochism as it is to someone engaged in game design. Speaking for myself, I’m not certain whether my obsession with Game Overs is to thank for making me a better domme, but certainly a more mindful and attentive one!

Continuing this line of analysis, if I permit myself to be fully immersed in a game, then I am permitting myself to be puppeteered by it. I am embodying a version of myself stripped of my own ego, my movements, words, and choices all disciplined by the design of the game itself, a sort of automaton made up of the sum total of its creators’ creative and technical decisions. This is what forms the boundaries of possibility within a game, boundaries enforced on me, ultimately, by other people who I am relinquishing some measure of my own self-control and agency to. If analyzed through this BDSM lens, to play a game is to engage in a sort of power exchange with its developers which is where I believe the latent erotic potential of Game Over is derived from. I mean, let’s be real, the idea of potentially entire teams of artists and programmers working tirelessly for potentially years just to lovingly craft a simulation of your own brutal defeat for you to harmlessly experience is kinda hot, right?

Still, the question lingers in the back of my mind, am I just a particular stripe of pervert? Even if others are drawn to Game Overs as I am, are we all just merely indulging in a niche fetish for our own amusement? Despite the intensity of my experiences, have they given me any actual insight into what makes an effective failure state? Then I remind myself of the man whose creative direction gave us perhaps one of the most watershed moments in the art of the Game Over, Hidetaka Miyazaki, creator of the Soulsbourne series. It would be the task of an entire other essay to map all the influences this efficient yet deeply affective Game Over has had on things that have come after it, but I feel it is uncontroversial to say that it has left its mark in the form of countless imitations and homages, even beyond the realm of “soulslikes”. Whether you fall in combat, petrified by a curse, or succumb to deathblight, each plays out as a lovingly crafted protracted sequence teeming with melodrama and a further building of tension, with your health dropping to zero being only the beginning. Once you sustain a killing blow, the sound of a slashing blade is faintly heard, signalling that you’ve made a fatal error. You realize you can no longer control your character as they transition into a death animation, whisps of dust pouring from their skin as they fall to their knees, life palpably fading from their body. Each of these signifiers occur separately, but all clearly signify the same thing. The mechanical empyting of health, the sound cue, the loss of player control, each of them builds the tension further. Then, it hits you:

“YOU DIED”

Heralded by a cacophanous, ethereal sound combining an ominous drone with tinkling chimes to simulate the abstract sensual experience of death as you are finally allowed some sense of release. Frequently, your slayer’s AI will have disengaged by the time the words fade, treating you to one last image of them walking nonchalantly away from your body, seemingly disregarding your rapidly disintegrating corpse as if to grind in the impression that, in death, you are nothing, as everything fades to black. It is a masterpiece.

In an interview with the podcast Game no Shokutaku, Miyazaki would say of himself and his creative process:

“I’m a huge masochist, so when I make games like these… this is how I want to be treated! ‘I want to be killed this way!’ That’s how I make it!”

With these words I feel that, in Miyazaki, I have found my other half. Though we will likely never meet in person, I-as-player, who seeks out the erotic experience of failure states, still feels a certain tether to Miyazaki-as-developer, seeking to intentionally create for me, for all of us, that very experience. It is difficult to oversell the impact his work has had on the world of games, and regardless of how you feel about what he has helped create, you must admit they make defeat feel like something, whether it turns you off completely or leaves you begging for more. I believe it is in large part because Miyazaki is a self-proclaimed “huge masochist” who is open and enthusiastic about the libidinal investment he brings to his ideas that his work is able to have the impact that it does, inspiring intense feelings that lead to frequent adulation alongside musings and endless relitigation on foundational concepts like game difficulty and failure states generally. Just as my experiences with BDSM allow me to enjoy Game Overs in this particularly visceral and erotic way, Miyazaki’s allow him to create them.

It’s become a common refrain that the key to greater creativity lies in becoming more of a pervert, and there are few high profile figures in games who prove this to be true as much as Miyazaki. By demonstrating such an intimate knowledge of what makes pain, humiliation, and defeat feel good, he is able to craft a sublimely seductive failure state because he likely knows as well as I do, there really is something incredibly sexy about a well-made Game Over. I just hope more developers can grow to be as open and comfortable as people like Miyazaki, or any of the countless brave eroge developers out there, about how their own desires and perversions inform their creative decisions because nothing out there hits quite like games made by unashamed perverts.

Hi, I’m Mogs K, and I’ve had a lifelong, intense, visceral relationship with games such that, at some point, they became the center of my intellectual and artistic curiosity. I believe the role of the “player” is a fascinating and unique form of art experience that fuses the more traditional artistic roles of “observer” and “performer” into something wholly new, and my primary aim is to refine how I engage with it which I indulge in by doing such things as streaming twice a week for my friends, listening to my girlfriend explain all the technical minutiae of genres I don’t understand, and having long, late-night talks about the state of eroge with my sister. I can most easily be found, for the time being, at mogsk.bsky.social and twitch.tv/mogsk.

¹A term directly inspired by Clint Hocking’s concept of ludonarrative dissonance, the uncanny phenomenon that arises from fundamental disconnects between a game’s storytelling and its gameplay.

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