This is second 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: Stanley Baxton

If you’re reading this, there’s a high chance you’ve played an adult game. There’s also a high chance you’ve played an adult game where losing might be, in many ways, desirable. Consider BDSM games where losing makes your master angry and subsequently punishes you, fantasy games with bondage monsters that tie you up when you fail a quicktime event, and PvE games where arousal is a status effect building to a disabling orgasm. It’s such a common thread in adult games that it almost feels disingenuous to hone in on one to do a specific case study.

Here’s a question I’d like to raise: How many times have you seen this done in a triple-A game? Not the porn aspect necessarily, but the fact that these are games where losing, opposed to winning, is designed explicitly as a state the player might want to achieve. Adult game designers aren’t stupid; they are fully aware that people are losing their games on purpose to reach them. Why are they designing for failure? Instead of dismissing this, I’d like to ask the opposite question. Why aren’t triple-A games designing for failure?

What’s “Good” Game Design, Anyway? 

The definition of “good” is slippery at best. And yet, in spite of this, triple-A games have settled themselves into a neat definition of what “good” game design is. One of the defining marks of it centres around one word: flow.

The concept of flow in game design was adapted, and subsequently beaten to death, from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1991, ch. 4).¹ Paraphrasing, it’s a proposed psychological state balanced between being challenged and using a high degree of skill, that puts someone in a state of engagement, concentration, and losing their sense of time. You’ve probably hit it yourself.

And in mainstream game design, flow is taken as a gold standard result of gameplay. If the player is in flow, that’s good. If the player leaves flow, that’s bad. An alarm bell should be ringing in your head at one state being elevated as the only “good” way to experience games. For the actual state itself, you can argue that constantly chasing flow creates experiences that pursue constant growth to keep flow going, prioritise action over critical thinking, and prime players to be passive recipients of a game’s ideology, for better and for worse (Soderman, 2021).

I find it’s better, instead, to place this version of “good” game design under what Dunne & Raby (2001, ch. 4) describe as “affirmative design”.² A manner of design where apparent “positives” of an experience are amplified for the sake of user comfort, control, and fun; at least how one person defines fun. We can go further into this, similar to critiques of flow, that triple-A game’s obsession with affirmative design reinforces docility, status quo, dominant moral values, and political and social hegemony. Which could mean nothing.

Subverting Subversion

When I was a bit too young, I was watching my brother play CoD. He played through, as far as I could tell, a standard mission ending with a rescue van. Then, as a teammate pulls him through the door, another shoots him in the face. His player character stumbles back, bleeding out as the van drives away. Cut to black, and after a silence punctuated by a single tongue click, my brother says: “I don’t think that was supposed to happen.”

Subversion is not a stranger to mainstream game design. Many games have played with outlining a set of rules and expectations, and then breaking them for narrative and mechanical shock. And yet, almost every time this happens in a triple-A game, it is only superficial. What makes this example in CoD, despite my brother’s reaction, not a true subversion of affirmative design?

After this mission, the next level has you back to full health. This next level, as every level after it, will be the same. You’re put in a location, shoot your way through, and make it to an exit. You aren’t suddenly unable to shoot guns, or have to consider alternative ways of navigating a level with disabilities. You must remain in flow. No matter how much the story tries to bend or break that mould, the levels must be fun, and those levels must be designed in an affirmative manner. Friction is sanded away.

Consider Rockstar games; it’s a running joke at this point that every Rockstar title has your “mandatory” level where your weapons are seized, your allies are unable to help, and you’re dropped onto a remote area of the map. It’s your job to claw your way out of this loss state and back to where you were previously. Even this, however, is not what I’m looking for. These don’t truly qualify as “loss” states. Note the joke’s wording: it’s a level, something to be overcome, and not a state achieved through a lack of dexterity or deliberate choice. This “loss” is couched in aesthetics—a cutscene; a level with definite end and return—and never one that’s truly mechanical.

What would happen if all their gear was lost when the player got back? What if they were permanently deskilled for the rest of the game? People would be mad it went against expectations. Going from gradual increases in power to a hard cut to zero is “bad” game design. Word would spread. Steam reviews would take a hit. Triple-A games are in a self-fulfilling cycle of making the same design choices over and over for the sake of money and player expectation. It cannot give its players anything else, and running against a ticking timebomb of budget, doesn’t even have the time to imagine alternatives.

Triple-A games aren’t designing around failure because a triple-A game is never allowed to fail. Neither economically, nor in letting the player out of that affirmative flow, no matter how much they might desire it. In industry freefall, economic stability gone, we’re only left with tired patterns and none of the apparent positives.

Going Beyond Affirmative Design

Adult games go against the mainstream grain in almost every capacity, which we hardly need to justify. And, if an adult game is commercial, their sales (simplifying to an admittedly great degree) are hinged on just showing sexual content. If the game promises three sex scenes, and the game has three sex scenes, a consumer is usually happy, contributing to every adult game being sidelined as “just porn” in a mainstream view.

Because of these reasons, adult games are rarely, if ever, included in the mainstream discourse on game design, making its tendency towards unexplored paradigms a natural pairing. It should then come as no surprise that adult games are one place where truly subversive game design has taken form, particularly in the form of loss states. In “good” game design, asking “what if a player wants to lose” usually isn’t even entertained. Players don’t want to lose, because this model says that players don’t want to lose. Adult games are an immediate counter to this assertion. Some players, obviously, play games where they want to lose.

Taking this seriously, rather than assuming player defects or writing them off as basic perverts, we can start to ask questions about these design methods in a more critical manner. If a player is going to strive for a loss state no matter what, why not design that as a “win”? Why not, in a game about escaping a monster at peril of being fucked by it, make the point of the game running straight into its den?

The answer is that, to be satisfying to the players who are seeking these states, the failure itself is half of the draw, and not just the result. Games are, in the most abstract sense, experiences created by a set of rules (Anthropy, 2012, p. 43). It should then come as no surprise that games become fertile ground for kink and sexual roleplay, and for adult games to play with states of desire in a fluid manner. Yes, of course, the higher objective here is for everyone to exit the experience sexually gratified, and you might consider this “winning”. Inside the experience, however? Someone’s personal way of “winning” might not be a win state as the experience defines. They might want to lose, on purpose, because gratification is gained in the act of losing. If someone’s kink is being caught and tied up, being put in a state of peril, it’s not all that satisfying if the peril doesn’t exist. Win and loss states must exist here in equilibrium; to feel like a loss is real, there must be a tangible way to win. Losses must be earned as much as wins are.

This is how many adult games create a subversion of affirmative design. Rather than looking at “win” states being the only desirable one, it takes a step back and asks itself two critical questions: what experience have we made, and what do people want from it? “Loss” and “win” are completely detached from affirmative design ideas, and might not even be considered in those terms. There’s a state where a player wants to struggle after being caught, knowing there’s an escape state that’s reachable, and always finds a way to get caught again. This is acknowledged, fully embraced, and designed for as much as a full escape would. Why is one way of playing, “losing” over and over, considered the “wrong” way to enjoy games, if this is exactly what the player wants?

What If It Wasn’t Horny?

Beyond development conditions, there’s another question on if the desire to lose is something that can only be designed for in games based around sexual gratification. The fortunate answer is that a few examples already exist.

A brilliant and decidedly non-sexual example³ is the Henry Stickmin games. Originally a humble point-and-click flash game, the objective is to guide the titular Henry through various heists and jailbreaks. To do this, Henry faces an obstacle, and the player picks from a selection of objects and tactics to overcome it. Incorrect choice, and the player watches Henry’s (often hilarious) failure. Correct, and Henry makes it through to the next obstacle. On a gameplay level, victory is effectively random. Every option is absurd; solutions bounce widely back and forth between logical cause and action to bending the rules of reality. The only strategy is subconsciously catching on to what the developers think the funniest correct choice would be, if you can even call that a strategy.

You can already see threads here that adult games have been pulling from for decades. Stickmin knows exactly what the experience is: comedic absurdity to make the player laugh. There’s incentive for the player to lose, over and over, just for the sake of seeing something funny, and knowing this Stickmin fully commits to it. Often, the slapstick-failure is what gets the laugh; this sequence as a success wouldn’t hit the same. If anything, winning eventually becomes something the player might even try to avoid. A lament: “What? That worked?! I wanted to see everything that goes wrong!”

Though, there is an argument to be made that Stickmin offloads its subversion into aesthetics (funny cutscenes), in a similar manner that affirmative-informed design might. But in counter to that, Stickmin has a full understanding of its limits, and plays into everything it can do in a point-and-click format. There’s even a few moments where it does play with mechanical expectations. Throughout the game, every obstacle pauses time, giving you as long as you want to decide what strategy to employ. Except for one, where taking too long, your partner speaks and suddenly alerts the guard you’re trying to sneak past. Nothing tells you this will happen until you’ve already failed.

In both cases of Stickmin and certain adult games, the design theory and ultimate result are the same. Commit to an experience, be fully aware of what it is, and design for every outcome that experience affords. In Stickmin, that creates a very funny game, but that doesn’t mean everyone will find slapstick and absurdist humour funny. Nor does it mean that everyone will enjoy bondage and submission.

Put like that, the logic feels obvious. Of course different people have different tastes, and a lack of engagement with losing as a player desire in the mainstream starts to go beyond a simple oversight. It’s why I don’t like “good” game design. I don’t like gameplay loops, in the same way that I don’t like the three act structure. Treating it as the One Good Method, at best, is creatively uninspired, and depending on how grouchy I am today, fascistic. The overreliance on “good” game design is one of the largest setbacks for the growth of games as art, and the childish refusal to take “icky” games seriously as design pioneers is just one head of that hydra.

Maybe, one day, there will be that one Good Commercial Game Studio that’s celebrated for breaking the mould, winning a thousand awards, in spite of what every sales projection tells them. To get there, why wouldn’t you study and take seriously the gamemakers who are already doing that? But even if this studio did, you know damn well they wouldn’t say with their full chest that they were inspired by porn.

Stanley Baxton is a Northern English narrative games dev and writer creating experiences that are satirical, horrifying, or queer, and sometimes all at once. He makes games for exactly three people to lose their minds. Currently, he’s a NWCDTP-funded PhD student at the University of Salford, researching the non-commercial game dev communities and how they can inform consumer attitudes on sustainability.

Bibliography

Anthropy, A. (2012). Rise of the videogame zinesters: How freaks, normals, amateurs, artists, dreamers, drop-outs, queers, housewives, and people like you are taking back an art form. Seven Stories Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper and Row.

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2001). Design noir: the secret life of electronic objects. Birkhäuser.

Flanagan, M., & Nissenbaum, H. (2014). Values at Play in Digital Games. The MIT Press.

Soderman, B. (2021). Against flow: video games and the flowing subject. MIT Press.

¹I cynically believe no-one in the pop-dev sphere quotes him as the source because they can’t be bothered to try spelling his name. Or pronouncing it.

²Also see Flanagan & Nissenbaum (2014) for how this can be applied to games as an analytical framework.

³R34 not withstanding.

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