This is thirteenth 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: Liz Alfos

(This article is sort of a continuation of my previous article on Meet n’ Fuck. Reading it is not required but would help you get more quickly into the topic.)

Let me introduce myself: I am Liz Alfos, and for the past six years I’ve been managing the Museum of Screens, a project dedicated to research the History of games on the Internet, adult or otherwise. In the process, I have played a lot of adult Flash games, thousands of them in fact. My bar for appreciation is pretty low, I can find value and enjoyment in many of them, but most of the time I find myself more attracted to the short games than the longer ones.

In my previous article on Meet n’ Fuck, I described the games as “bite sized visual novels”. And I’ve made a case arguing those games did more than just providing sex scenes. Rereading it now, I realize I didn’t really get into why “bite sized” was a positive description for me. Today, I want to correct that. I want to talk about those “bite sized” adult games that can be finished in minutes, sometimes seconds. I want to tell you why I love them, and what makes them valuable in my eyes. But to do that, I have to go back to the very beginning of the internet. Please, indulge me in my hyperfixations.

In the late 90s, Flash games as a medium were just being born, and started developing their own style. They were designed as simple time wasters, more likely to be played in short playthroughs. Combined with the slowness of the internet at the time, the most popular games were the one most accessible for all: the short ones. And like I said in the first article, as soon as people started making games on the Internet, people also made adult games. It was more of a “naked lady delivery system” than an actual game; a genre that can be summarized as “interactive animation”. They were simple looping animations of one or many characters, and the player could tune the scene to their liking or simply appreciate the animation as long as they wanted – usually the time it took them to finish cranking one out.

The games were short because of technical limitations, but we shouldn’t forget that they were also deliberately made very quickly in order to make a lot of them to fill Flash websites and attract ad money. It might seem unbelievable today, but in the early 2000s there was real money to be made with Flash, and some lesser known websites were trying to get big with with a simple strategy: publish as many game as possible, each with their own page with advertisements all over, thus enticing users to click hundreds of pages.

Then, the internet got faster, file sizes were becoming less of an issue, and thus web games became more elaborate, with more people pooling resources, tutorials and ideas together to expand the range of possibilities. This is the time of long form adult games, RPGs, visual novels, etc… Of course, this is not a clear delineation. There have been long form adult games in the early years of Flash, like Frank’s Adventure (2003) by the late Felix Wiesner. But the most popular games should not occult the hundreds of other lesser known games released during that time.

But just because something was born out of limitation doesn’t mean it didn’t have values. In the previous article I argued that giving context to sex scenes in videogames made them more interesting and allowed the player to be more involved (otherwise we would just look at anonymous boobies online), but sex doesn’t have to be always impactful. It can be messy, it can be playful, casual, cruel… It is a human act, after all, it can be associated with every emotion. And short games can get straight to the point more effectively. If we suppose that adult games don’t have to always be mainly for sexual gratification, there are so many possibilities to explore.

So what are the advantages of short games? First off, the obvious: They are simpler to make. When you are a solo developer, having a clear vision and executing it from beginning to end is a valuable skill, and the first place to apply that is by scoping correctly. Even with a team, making short solid experiences is better than making lengthy uneven ones, sometimes that become apparent when you are participating in game jams. Take, for example, Help! I Need to Stretch Out For Valentines Day! by Pastrygames. It was made for the Strawberry Jam, a yearly game jam dedicated to games about sex (not always adult games, mind you). In this game, the premise is simple: Your character has a very important date coming up, and so, has to stretch their butthole. The game can be played in about half an hour, and it is delightful. It’s a point and click game where you have to find bigger and bigger things to put in your butthole, always expanding the capacity of what you can put
during a cute minigame. It is a game where sex is casual and playful, kinky but also very sweet. The ending is particularly nice, and I won’t spoil it to you because you deserve to play it.

That’s for the developers, what’s in it for the players? Everyone has their preferences, so I will talk for myself: eroticism is all about the details. The most arousing aspects of adult games is when they highlight some small aspect of intimacy in detail. It can be the folds of skins, the sweat drops, lewd thoughts going through someone’s head. Or sometimes all of this can be explored with minimal graphics and few words. You can see it in the games of Aria of Flowers. They are not for everyone as they are about masochism, and what it means to be in a masochistic relationship. I am not a masochist myself but those games really make you feel the appeal of masochism, in a playful manner. The best one, in my opinion, is not even that graphic: Masochistic Maiden Aria and the Cavern of Blissful Agony, a game making the connection between masochistic platformer and masochism as a kink. I cannot say anything more, it’s stupidly clever.

As a side note, I am afraid I might have given the impression I rag on adult games that are interactive animations, but those can be interesting too! There is a reason the games by ZONE are still fondly remembered (I would argue the Midna one is a stone pillar of Flash-era adult games). Characterization is not only made with dialogue – sometimes characters can be developed only through sex, and small touches of interactivity can make the action more “tactile”. I want to give as an example a lesser known one: fekfek’s Midnight Fireworks (2015), a game that checks all the “interactive animation” boxes, but provides so many details that the scene feels very intimate and real; the lights and sounds of the distant fireworks, the small touches of character animation reacting to your mouse movements.

My point is not that short adult web games are better or worse than long ones. There is no fundamental difference of values between the two. I just think that, in the current videogame-making landscape, both professional and hobbyist, there is an incentive for a game to be constantly updated and enriched with new content. We can see this particularly on websites such as Itch.io: So many games are updated constantly, some of them even on a weekly basis, promising a dizzying amount of features to come. Some of them are soulless genAI creations made for maximizing content, but not always. But not every game has to be everything, or being constantly in the work. We should appreciate experiences that are final, with a beginning and an end. And no better place to find them than in small games, short and sweets. You can find enjoyment in a long game with constantly new things to find. But there will always be thousands of small free games out there just for you to play.

Liz Alfos, aka ToulouToumou, is a French game developer and game researcher, with a hyperfixation on the history of Flash games. Since 2019 she has run the Museum of Screens, an online preservation project for Flash games and the history of the web.

Subscribe to the RSS feed