Happy September, all! Is anyone actually stoked that it’s September? It always feels like a real anticlimax of a month. Ah, well. To the update!
Continue reading “September 2026: I Hope You’re Ready For Dryad!”
Bigg’s Blog
I’ve made brief reference to it both on my Bluesky and in my previous writing about Tourney of Tyranny on this blog, but this series of light novels really, truly contains some of the writing I’m most proud of so far in my career as a longform writer. I’ll prove it later on with a lengthy excerpt from the recently-released second book in the series (Tourney of Tyranny Part 2: A Conquest Claimed), but before I get to that I thought it’d be nice to write a little about how enjoyable the process of working on ToT is for me.
When you’re working on games with a lot of writing in them (like ours have), not only are you DOING a lot of writing, you’re REVISITING that writing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and so on, again and again, until everything you’ve written, no matter how clever or funny or hot it might’ve been when you first wrote it, starts to look like grey mush. You stare at what you’ve gotten down on an unfinished script while you’re attempting to cudgel your brain into producing the remainder of it. You read it over and over while doing your own edit pass, and then over and over again after your editor gets back to you with notes. You read the whole thing through while you’re implementing every single sentence in the game’s code, and you’d BETTER read every single sentence over again while you’re testing, lest you made a mistake or twenty. By the time a game gets in front of an audience, reading what I’ve written makes me want to puke.
This is not to say there isn’t quite a lot of re-reading for me to do in the process of creating Tourney of Tyranny – quite the opposite, in fact. There’s plenty of going over paragraphs during the writing process, and plenty of re-reading during the edits, and then plenty more when I’m planning out a given book’s illustrations for Blueparikeet, and then even more still when all the illustrations are completed and it’s time to format everything together. But the really crazy thing is that in spite of all that necessary re-reading, I’ve nevertheless found myself rereading both books… for fun? As in, I genuinely enjoy it? I find myself reading through them and smiling and laughing and even thinking “man, I can’t wait until there’s another one of these”. I know that this likely sounds nauseatingly self-congratulatory, but it’s the truth!
The process of writing them has also been straight-up Fun, too. Another thing about making games is that it takes FOREVER for the things you write to appear in their proper context, so working in a medium where you can just have something On The Page is so quick and easy that it basically feels like cheating. What’s interesting is that I had no great ambitions towards literary excellence when I started the Tourney of Tyranny project. It all began as a way of scratching a certain itch, kink-wise, and giving myself an excuse to contract the services of one of my favorite artists. The quality of the writing was always meant as an afterthought. However, something strange happened when I was working on the draft for Tourney of Tyranny Part 1: A Champion Chosen, and it basically hasn’t stopped happening since: I was surprising myself with how good I thought it was. I wasn’t even TRYING and yet this stupid goofy completely-unserious erotic kinky science-fiction dreck was making me feel as though I was Becky Chambers or Terry Pratchett (I’d never dream of going so far as to favorably compare myself to Sir Terry, but (as I mention in the Opportunity Retrospective), his is the ghost I’m most obsessed with chasing in my work. Sidenote: direct comparison like this is another privilege of the novel format. In games, which so often have writers’ distinct authorial voices sanded down flat by multiple revisions and notes from a dozen different stakeholders, it can be tough (not to mention unproductive) to try to compare one’s writing to well-known works).
However, I know that all of this is just me talking. If you’d like me to back up my words with, uh, words, you can go ahead and download the free safe-for-work PDF previews of Part 1 and Part 2 on Itch. But maybe you’re in a bit of a hurry, or you’re on a work device, or you just don’t want to make any extra clicks. I get you. Below is a nice chunky excerpt from Tourney of Tyranny Part 2: A Conquest Claimed. Here’s everything you need to know going in:
- Our protagonist, Lilith Lacrimosa, was plucked from her dead-end system administrator job by Goblinoid aliens and made their Champion in a proxy tournament in which she is tasked with fucking crazy-style with more frequency and creativity than a number of far more attractive and charismatic humans. Lilith thinks they’re crazy but went along with it because the consolation prize for losing is more money than she’s ever seen in her life.
- As part of her induction as Champion, Lilith was injected with a tiny tracking implant.
- Unbeknownst to Lilith, the Goblinoids are cheating and have modified Lilith’s implant so that it makes her hornier, more sexually-proficient, and most crucially, makes it so that whenever Lilith makes eye contact with someone while she’s sexually-aroused, that person will become overwhelmingly sexually-attracted to Lilith.
- Again, this is important: Lilith DOES NOT KNOW that she has been fitted with a mind-whammy sex implant.
That’s it! Happy reading!
Continue reading “Tourney of Tyranny Is Some Of My Best Writing Yet”
This is fifteenth 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: Gwyndolyn Marchant
My girlfriend Juniper lives in Seattle, and I live in Toronto. Despite over three-thousand (3000) kilometers of land between us, we have a very active, healthy, and supportive relationship. We are, in the parlance of my mother, both “techie” people: we use computers and smart devices thoroughly in our lives, and are almost always online in one way or another. We are both computer scientists academically; professionally I am a pixel artist and she is a streamer. We have a weekly date, we often stream together, and we have a couple social clubs we both attend remotely. We say good morning every day with chat roleplay about physical intimacy, and we admire and tease each other for our fursonas’ – our emotive-identity avatars. We have sex once or twice every couple weeks, which is mostly metered by logistical overhead.
How exactly we “have sex” varies, but it generally involves calling over Discord and playing porn games together. This isn’t exactly a novel concept; partners have been enjoying voyeuristic sexual escapades for about as long as orgies have been a concept, which if other primates are to be believed probably predates history. [1] Watching two hot people have sex, and getting horny enough that you engage with your partner sexually as well, seems to be a normal concept among many species; even dolphins get in on the fun. [2] I can’t imagine I’d surprise anybody by describing our own behavior.
I don’t remember which of us was the first to remark upon it, but I remember a particular conversation I had between Juniper, another of her girlfriends, Zoe; and I. Our corner of our polycule has long been interested in both erotica and video games as serious art forms. We were discussing Corruption of Champions 2: a large collaborative fiction with many different authors’ writing blending together. [3][4] They observed that when making decisions, they consistently spoke in the inclusive “we” or “us”: “What should we do”, “what will happen to us next”, “isn’t it hot that this is happening to us.” I thought about it and realized quite immediately that this was how I often talked when playing games with my partners. Not just during Juniper and I’s remote play sessions, but even beyond erotica. When my wife and I play a game like Pentiment, the narrative pulls us in and we enter that same grammatical space. “We” becomes the protagonist Andreas. [5] But once we finished the game, once it was over, he became “Andreas”, and “we” became my wife and I. Something specific happens when we enter the play space. Some theorists would call this the Magic Circle.
This is fourteenth 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: Croomfolk
From Sex in Video Games (2007) by Brenda Brathwaite:
At the “Sexuality in Games: What’s Appropriate?” roundtable at the 2005 Game Developers Conference, one developer noted that he had no real problem with sexual content in games provided that it wasn’t “just sex for sex’s sake.”
“What’s wrong with sex for sex’s sake?” asked another developer. “Why else have sex?” she continued. “That’s the best use of sex.”
This essay is a look at a moral panic that took place around late 1993 – a panic surrounding, among other things, the release of Night Trap, a non-adult videogame that nonetheless sparked a massive public discussion on the place of adult games within the industry that still has effects to this day, having directly led to the creation of the ESRB, the content rating association still in use by the North American video games industry. Through it, I hope to offer some insight on specific brands of puritanism and their impacts on the games industry.
Continue reading “Culture Carnage: Night Trap & Witch Hunts”
Happy August, all! I was awoken at 7AM this morning by the loudest thundercrash I’ve ever heard, seemingly coming from directly above my house. This was accompanied by a short, violent hailstorm of similar volume. August! Let’s get into the update!
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.
Continue reading “Small Touches: A Case For (Very Short) Porn Games”
This is twelfth 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: Fsyco
A 2007 article about BioShock saw Clint Hocking coin the term “ludonarrative dissonance” to describe the disconnect in video games between the story being told by the gameplay elements and the story being told by the actual narrative. A commonly-cited example of this phenomenon is Nathan Drake in the Uncharted series. In the narrative, Nathan is a lovable thief with a heart of gold, but in gameplay, he guns down his fellow man without a second thought. It produces an uncanny effect where Nathan comes off like some kind of psychopath, and it feels weird to many players that these two elements never seem to address each other.
Pornographic media has its own version of this, a sort of “pornonarrative dissonance” if you will. Porn media with a plot focus often treat its writing and story as wholly separate elements. The writer comes up with things like plot, characters, and setting, and then comes up with “the sex that will happen” (assuming someone else doesn’t do that). And yet, an often overlooked element is how the narrative should inform the sex scenes, and vice versa.
When these two elements are not in agreement, the project as a whole suffers. It leads to cheesy writing and indistinct characters. It might be serviceable as porn, or the kind of “fine” you italicize or put in air quotes, but it holds the work back as a whole and prevents it from becoming truly special. To illustrate my point, I’d like to look at a few porn video games. Some of them handle this well, and others not so well. By doing so, I’d like to demonstrate how this disconnect manifests in a given work.
Continue reading “Never The Two Shall Meet: The Separation Of Story & Sex Scenes In Porn Games”
This is eleventh 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: Talon T
I picked up my first otome game at Cybird’s booth at Anime Expo 2015. Before this, I was already into anime and its horny fandoms, so I was excited for this opportunity to gameify my thirst for 2D characters. I would have been perfectly content with indulgent trashy tropes – little did I know, Ikemen Sengoku would immediately set a high standard for me for otome. Unbelievably, it reconnected me with my sexual and romantic needs, leading me to finally leave my dirtbag ex. It would reconnect me with tumblr communities, where we continued to be able to explore responsive desire and erotica in written form, even long after tumblr’s nsfw ban.
Continue reading “Responsive Desire & The Eroticism Of Tumblr Longposts About 2D Boyfriends”
This is tenth 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: A. J. Malachite
In July 2025, itch.io mass delisted hundreds of adult games and other erotic media with no warning due to pressure from payment processor Stripe. There has been widespread outrage and concern over this censorship, with many organizing community action and support for the creators affected. Most of the anti-censorship backlash has focused, deservedly so, on how proponents of censorship define queer content as inherently pornographic – making a ban on “adult content” the first stop on a slippery slope to banning visible queer existence in media. A closer look at the policies of platforms like itch.io and Patreon reveals one of the key mechanisms in the slippery slope designed to harm and isolate queer people: vagueness that allows for open interpretation.
The itch.io content crackdown was just another action in a long line of governments, corporations, and platforms enforcing increasingly severe sexual repression. Only a few weeks prior, Steam had implemented their own crackdown, also in response to pressure from payment processors. In January 2022, the platform Game Jolt banned porn games in preparation for the launch of its mobile app. And in the past few years, over a third of U.S. states have introduced privacy-violating ID verification laws and other restrictions for online adult content, resulting in sites like PornHub blocking access to users in those states and a surge in the popularity of VPNs.
Happy July all! Last month I mentioned that it was starting to get really hot here in Vancouver, but in truth the summer’s been shockingly reasonable so far. We’ve spent most of the past month with temperatures in the mid-20s, a far cry from the low-to-mid 30s I was worried about (and that are being exceeded further east). I’d be more stoked about this if I hadn’t tweaked my back getting my air conditioner installed. Ah well. Let’s get into the update!