This is first of fifteen essays contained within the fourth 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: Kangoo

Overthinking solutions to mundane problems is one of my greatest joys in life. I love puzzles; I love untangling knots, metaphorical or otherwise; I have, on occasion, been accused of having a “Works Cited fetish”. It will come as no surprise then that, upon Morgan K’s essay on Game Overs for the first time, my brain immediately latched on to a single sentence:

“The experience of a lot of the [ryona] games I encountered didn’t really seem to work in practice. As games, they often left a lot to be desired.” (Emphasis mine)

This line felt like scratching the surface of a very interesting question, albeit one a little tangential to the main subject matter of her essay, that being: how do you make a ryona game (and I’m using that term in a very broad sense to include any adult game where defeat results in erotica) that works as a game? As in: how do you create an adult game that the player will want to fail and not have it feel like scrolling through porn gifs while having to press twice as many buttons as usual? How do you make a game that you can win, but don’t want to?

One of the biggest issues game developers have to contend with is that of failure. Failure drives players forward just as much as it holds them back, discourages them from taking risks out of fear of what they’ll lose if it doesn’t pan out. As Morgan points out, “the way a game frames your failures acts as an invitation, an opportunity to convince you to stay immersed”, and it’s not an easy negotiation to pull off; there’s a reason one of the first pieces of advice novice TTRPG Game Masters receive tends to be “you have to make failure fun”. It has to feel harsh but fair, punitive enough to encourage a certain kind of playing yet not so much that players will get frustrated and put the game down for good. It stands to reason that ryona games would have an easier time than most with this: ‘losing the game results in hot, dubcon erotica’ is as fun as you can make it, after all, and the frustrating and at times humiliating aspects of failure, those very same negative emotions that make failure so difficult to balance out in a game, would be both heightened and offset by the ensuing erotic scene(s).

It turns out you really can have too much of a good thing, however, because the core issue of ryona-type games is that failure is perhaps too much fun. Since the erotic content (which is likely to be your main motivator for playing) will only grace your eyes after you’ve lost, failure ceases to seem like an obstacle and the threat of a Game Over no longer drives the player forward, becoming instead an irresistible siren’s call luring players down a mechanical dead-end. The games tend to be difficult to play through as a result: the mechanics often seem like an afterthought, either so easy it barely feels like a game at all or so obtuse that it becomes “a sort of puzzle box of oft-boring and potentially frustrating gameplay with the porn locked inside” (as Morgan aptly puts it). Even when they hold their own, the player’s propensity to choose the path of no resistance prevents any progress, lessening the emotional impact of Game Overs and weakening the player’s ability to engage with the game as they become more of a spectator than an active participant in events that, by their own decision, they have made themselves powerless to change.

Does it really matter, though? Must you be able to finish a game for it to be good? Do adult games require in-depth or complex mechanics to be worthwhile?

Perhaps not, but their absence definitely weakens them. While the number of ways a player can fail is near infinite, games only truly fail one way: by losing the player’s attention. Capturing said attention (and keeping it once they have it) demands careful maintenance of the tension between what the player wants and their (in)ability to obtain it. Players who reach their goal effortlessly may grow bored and disengage, but throw too many hurdles in their path and they will grow frustrated instead—even if said obstacles are the game’s basic mechanics, getting in the way of the player’s unintended and self-appointed objective (such as counting every tree in the game, or experiencing the forced tentacle sex of their fantasy.) It’s a delicate balance to strike, but a game that successfully walks the line gains an influence over the player’s emotional state unlike any other. The closer players get to achieving their desired outcome, the more tension builds up and the more they care about it—until that tension breaks, eliciting profound relief or jaw-breaking frustration and occasionally both at once. That’s where making failure too much fun (or, in Morgan’s more thoughtful words, “intentionally setting the player’s motivation at odds with itself”) comes back to bite ryona games.

There are a million things you can do to fine-tune the level of friction in a game: difficulty levels, hints and handicaps, hiding the path to their goals or revealing juicy secrets to those who care enough to poke their nose into dark corners. One thing you can’t do is force someone to follow the intended path, nor can you stop them from pursuing (on purpose) the outcome you use to punish others. You can lead a gamer to water, but you can’t make them win. Does lacking that friction necessarily lead to a game’s death knell? Hardly. Intense emotional catharsis is far from a requirement—offering the maximum amount of fulfillment with as little friction possible is the core premise of many “cozy” games, for instance. But it’s more important in adult games than most. The less the player feels challenged in their pursuit of a given goal, the less tension builds up throughout the game, the weaker of an impact it’ll have when it eventually breaks—and where there’s no anticipation, there’s no release, of any kind.

This brings us back to the parallel Morgan K drew between video games and BDSM, which seems to me like at least one of many solutions to this specific problem. As she notes, “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”, and after all, thousands of people choose to be “defeated” on purpose: punished, whipped, tied up, ordered about… Yet while BDSM makes use of the same pattern of tension, from increase to release, as video games, the tacit consent of designing a fantasy meant to rob you of your agency doesn’t seem to undermine it the way choosing to fail does in ryona games. Why is that?

Say you wanted to roleplay a scene in which you “interrogate” someone until they break. Even though your scene partner’s purported goal is to resist you, the game is rigged against them from the start: the point of the scene is them breaking. The tension comes from pretending otherwise, the willing suspension of disbelief, the struggle. It’s kayfabe, basically. This isn’t so different from the failing-on-purpose of ryona games: both involve the management of tension and release while relying on a purported conflict of desires that doesn’t actually exist—your goals are, in fact, perfectly aligned: you both want the person in the chair to break, and to see where that leads you. The question is how it happens (it’s about the journey, etc.) In fact it can suffer from the same pitfalls as these games do, that is to say the premature defusal of the tension: you would probably find it rather unsatisfying if your scene partner spilled their secrets before you could so much as lock the handcuffs. But the intent to fail and the struggle obviously coexist in a way they often don’t in games. Why is that?

I think the problem comes from the Game Over itself, specifically the “over” part. Bonnie Ruberg says it best in her essay “Playing to Lose”: “The power of these games lies specifically in their combination of pain and pleasure, which scrambles our prescriptions for success and loss.” You can’t “fail” in BDSM, not in that way, at least; so if ryona games are so close to BDSM play, can a binary victory/failure approach really be the right one?

Take Trials in Tainted Space and Degrees of Lewdity, for instance—two ryona-adjacent games where failure (usually) results in an erotic scene (or several). Both games are fairly “chunky”, being more or less open world adventure games with countless narrative paths, side-stories, and objectives, and both reward success in fairly straightforward ways: your character gets richer, more powerful, more skilled, you discover more of the game’s world and advance in the narrative. But while they penalize failure, these games could never be said to discourage players from the outcome altogether.

There are few actual consequences to failing an encounter in Trials in Tainted Space: you may experience a setback in a quest or lose items, but the damage is rarely something you can’t sleep off and you’re even occasionally left with a new item for your troubles. The consequences of losing in Degrees of Lewdity are more severe: the game tracks your character’s level of trauma and sense of control, and getting them in the red will lead to you passing out in a city where it does you no good to be vulnerable. Yet the game barely separates failure from “regular” gameplay—the encounters have the same mechanic whether you initiate them or have them forced upon you, and you can often turn them to your advantage; you gradually gain points in skills that will make success easier in the future; and the game spits you back out in the same place afterwards, perhaps a little worse for wear but able to continue playing.

Failure in these games is a side street, not a dead end. Instead of having to choose between making progress in the game and their desired outcome (or “whether they’d rather beat the game, or just beat off”, as Morgan K delightfully puts it), players can do both, thus making failure fully enjoyable when they seek it out, and much more tense when it occurs “in the wild”. It’s difficult to create any form of challenge between the game and the player when their goals align even though they should not—but it’s comparatively much easier to let the player’s own conflicting objectives cause the friction. That friction, the tension between the player’s own contrary goals (success and erotic satisfaction), is often a source of pleasure in and on itself: the promise of reward and the siren’s call of an erotically-charged game over, the desire to win and the sweetness of falling short, struggling against your bonds even though you know you will eventually submit. This internal conflict is self-
sustaining as well, giving the game a lot of leeway regarding difficulty: a player who both to win and to be defeated will get something out of either outcome, and they’ll get to have their cake and eat it too as long as they get to keep going. To quote Ruberg again: “Any way we fail, we seem to be failing toward the game”.

Setting aside the game success/game over dichotomy underlines how little it fit ryona games in the first place. In a way, it’s less about failure in itself than it is about changing the definition of “success” in games so that it’s no longer an end point to reach or a goal to achieve, but instead is based on getting pleasure, satisfaction, fulfillment, or emotional catharsis out of the experience. Loss of control isn’t meant to be the end of the experience but an intrinsic part of it, the path taken rather than its end point. This definition is closer to the way you would approach a BDSM scene… Or a TTRPG session, which is as close to the former as you can usually get while keeping your clothes on.

Sex doesn’t have a ‘goal’, and if you’re doing it like it’s a race to the orgasm every single time then you’re probably not getting everything you could out of it. Games shouldn’t have to be a race to victory either, and falling short of that goal or failing to aim for it altogether shouldn’t have to mean the experience ends. Success is when you manage to maintain kayfabe well enough for everybody to enjoy themselves, even when things go off the rails—especially if things going off the rails is the most interesting option: you want to encourage that kind of behavior in your players and/or your subs. It’s what keeps them coming back for more.

Kangoo is a writer and translator based in Paris who likes to respond to people saying “it’s not that deep” with “let’s dig anyway”. One day he’s going to finish one of his numerous game WIPs, but in the meantime you can find him writing fanfictions under the same name on Archive Of Our Own (AO3).

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