Bigg’s Blog

This is fifth of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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!

By: Bud Bear

TW: Mention of sexual assault as a game mechanic and consequence for mechanical failure, sexual horror, and transphobia and racism, untintential or otherwise. Stylized capitalization and improper punctuation for emphasis is also a thing here. I maintain a conversational, meandering tone that really is just the voice I speak with.

I’m gonna be real with these Trigger Warnings, I mean every word of them. Turn back now if you can’t handle those topics, and I do not think less of you. Sit down and help yourself to a nice cup of your favorite beverage, and just have a day for yourself. We could all use a little bit more of that. You’re one hundred and ten percent valid, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I think that Mainstream fantasy worldbuilding sucks. Full stop. It’s so… sterile. Every big author talks about removing yourself from the writing and letting the fiction speak for itself. It leads to the worlds themselves feeling very sterile and the story mostly ending up character focused. For example, The Stormlight Archive is one of my favorite series of all time.

But the world doesn’t feel alive. Sanderson removed himself from it as much as possible, by his own admission, and it feels very sterile until something pertinent comes up and there’s a lore dump. I think mainstream fantasy could take some really valuable lessons from porn games. Specifically the “Literary Porn RPG” genre. I know nothing about the people involved with Corruption of Champions 1 and 2 and Trials in Tainted Space. I am not a part of their communities and I have not spoken to their authors and writing contributors once in my life.

But goddamn, when you’re writing characters based around specific fetishes it’s hard to get more honest about yourself than that. The worlds of CoC2 and TiTs especially feel incredibly gross a lot of the time, and honestly they’re probably pretty sticky, but they are fundamentally, utterly and completely their author’s work. A work of fetish is by definition going to be a peek into the author’s soul, yeah?

Continue reading “Corruption of Champions & Honesty” →

This is fourth of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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!

By: Juniper Angel Theory

The modern era of media is defined by many things, but perhaps more than anything it’s defined by horrifying scale. Games are no exception to this; last year a whopping 12,529 games were released on steam. If you played one hour of each it’d take you almost a year and a half of 24/7 play to try every single one, and that’s JUST games released in 2022. With this much media coming out every day, we usually focus on the few we find value in to sift them out of the rough.

But what if we didn’t? What if instead of looking at only a few interesting games, we evaluated the whole medium to look for patterns? By observing games with similar engines, art styles, genres, or even publishers we can discover specific trends and answer some puzzling questions. It also allows us to find games we might have otherwise overlooked due to the sheer volume of media produced every day.

Continue reading “A Broad Overview Of Steam’s “Adult Only” Category (With New Editor Commentary)” →

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There’s a certain threshold that exists when critically considering any artistic work: namely, a certain standard of that must be achieved before the work can be expected to withstand any level of critical scrutiny. This is not merely a standard of quality, but also a standard of cohesive creative intent – is the creator of an artistic work offering some kind of identifiable vision, such that the steps they took to attempt to realize that vision can be evaluated for their effectiveness? Further, to what extent could the creator be expected to absorb, digest, and respond to critical feedback in their work? And, lastly, to what extent could critical examination be said to be of use or interest to a wider audience?

Continue reading “Good Enough To Criticize” →

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PICTURED: The most SFW crop I was able to acquire from ML’s final full-length sex scene.

Happy October, everyone! It’s been a beautiful month. I had my 36th birthday, the weather was gorgeous, and I made myself a chocolate cheesecake. Let’s get to the update!

Monstrous Liberation Work

It’s been a tough month with regard to health stuff for both Pacha and myself, but we’ve forged ahead! On Pacha’s end, she finished the art for the launch version’s final full-length sex scene, a tiny snippet of which you can see above! As much as I’d love to tell you more about the nature of this sex scene and who’s involved in it, that’s a secret! You’ll have to play the game when it launches!

As for me, I finished the script for ML’s launch version this month! That’s right! The whole thing! The writing I did was focused on the aforementioned sex scene (and surrounding narrative), as well as several short mini-scenes that will occur within the Hideout as the player liberates monsters. Some of these mini-scenes will include extra pieces of splash art! As of right now, the ML launch version script stands at 62,000 words (before edits).

In addition to all that writing, I also finished up the very last bit of 3D reference and asset list work so that Pacha will be able to go full steam ahead on the remainder of the artwork for the launch version. The trailer for the game that I mentioned in last month’s update has been finalized, but I won’t be able to show it to you until the game’s Steam page assets have been updated, so that’ll have to come next month. Also hopefully coming next month: our official launch date announcement!

For the next month I’ll be working on implementing on all the art and writing that hasn’t made it into the build yet, and Pacha will be focused on polishing up the remainder of our art asset list. All in all, it’s my hope that by the time I’m writing the November newsletter, Monstrous Liberation’s launch version should be mostly-if-not-completely sewn up, meaning that Pacha and I will be able to take a little break from development before getting a head start on the first update. Now’s as good a time as any to wishlist Monstrous Liberation on Steam!

Continue reading “October 2024 Update: We’re Getting Close, Folks” →

This is third of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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!

CONTENT WARNING: This essay contains discussions and descriptions of acts of explicit sexual violence, particularly within hentai game The Scarlet Demonslayer. Please read with discretion.

Continue reading “The Scarlet Demonslayer and the Anti-Kukkoro Kukkoro (With New Commentary)” →

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This is second of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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!

By: Yarrun

In 1982, a company named American Multiple Industries, in a bid to garner free publicity through controversy, got to work on a game designed to upset people. Custer’s Revenge, a simple, poorly-made game for the Atari 2600, focuses on the eponymous Custer’s attempts to sexually assault a bound Indigenous woman, named ‘Revenge’ in the game’s instruction manual. It was decried by feminist and Native American activist groups alike… and it quickly became AMI’s best-selling game, moving at least 75,000 copies at an inflated cost of 49 dollars a cartridge, netting a revenue of over three million dollars. The stunt worked like a charm, but the game would linger in infamy for its blatant bigotry, and for years after, it would be the most prominent example in the West of what an ‘erotic videogame’ is.

Sex sells. So goes the common adage. But when it comes to videogames, while selling normal games via scantily clad female character has consistently been a viable tactic, selling games about sex has generally been more fraught, with most companies unwilling to garner the same reputation that Custer’s Revenge earned. Admittedly, in the East, developers that started on erotic videogames could transfer over to making non-erotic videogames with relative ease. The Fate franchise, after all, went from a visual novel with sex scenes added to increase its value to one of the most profitable gacha games on the planet. But in the West, erotic games and the companies that developed them were kept in their own ghetto away from the rest of the industry, with most success being found in the computer game market with various strip poker titles.

Continue reading “On Patreon, and the Taming of Erotic Game Development (With New Editor Commentary)” →

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(The original title was something like “Reflections On Efforts To Foster Sex-Celebratory Community Within Niche Online Spaces”, which is SUCH a dickless piece of jargon-ridden flotsam even if it IS technically-accurate.)

When my friend Aidan contacted me back in March of 2022 & asked if I wanted to join Cohost, the new social media platform she was building along with two other people, she was simply inviting me as a friend who she thought would get along with the other friends and family who were being invited to kick the site’s tires during their months-long pre-launch beta. I immediately liked what I saw – the site’s functionality was limited and it ran like molasses, but the team had a bold vision for the platform that included no advertisements, ever, and an extremely progressive approach to pornography. Given the precarious state that porn existed in on the few social platforms where it was allowed, I was excited at the prospect of a social media website that was sympathetic to the web’s pornmongers, and decided I would do my best to get the word out.

After the site had its official public launch, I talked it up on my public Twitter account, hopped into the mentions of a number of my favorite artists (many of whom had been expressing distaste with Twitter as a platform as the Elon Musk takeover loomed), and evangelized the site in several porn-oriented Discord servers. Beyond porn being generally-permissible on Cohost, I also liked to emphasize its other strong selling points – no ads! A chronological timeline! Tagging on the way! I also had a number of more-or-less canned responses to common misgivings – yes, there aren’t many people yet, but there’s high engagement among them. Discoverability is an issue but search is on its way. There might not be video but there IS gif support. And so on.

This post is less to sing Cohost’s praises than to highlight that I personally worked pretty hard to bring in as many porn creators and porn-interested users as I could, and then worked harder to keep them there. I’m writing down my thoughts and experiences related to the work I did along those lines with the hope that it might be instructive for anyone trying to do similar community-building work in the future.

Continue reading “Building A House Of Cum” →

This is first of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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!

Alright, so what are we doing here? Who is this for and why does it exist in the first place? Answering that requires laying down a bit of groundwork first.

Porn games (which here I’m using to mean “pornographic games developed for English-speaking audiences outside of Japan”, since a lot of what I’m about to say doesn’t apply (or, at least, applies much less) to the Japanese porn game industry) are kind of bad.

Anyone with any familiarity with porn games who is being honest with themselves knows what I’m talking about. The vast, overwhelmingly majority of porn games are feature-poor visual novels developed with extremely inconsistent levels of competency in terms of writing, programming, and art (the ones that aren’t pure visual novels are typically extremely tiresome RPGs or extremely tiresome puzzle games). The vast, overwhelming majority of porn games languish in a state of incompleteness, and the rare few that DO get finished are very seldom finished to the level of polish one might reasonably expect from almost any other kind of game. Misogyny, both casual and extremely active, is rampant throughout many porn game narratives, as is racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. Narrative setups repeat ad nauseum – dozens upon dozens of smirking incestuous boymen porking their pliant (step)mothers and (step!)sisters, varying levels of “corruption”, and functionally-indistinguishable college fuckfests reigning supreme.

Continue reading “Porn Games And Writing About Porn Games” →

PICTURED: A screenshot from Ghost Hug Games’ Hardcoded.

Welcome to Cohost Re-Runs! The following is a lightly-edited & expanded version of an essay that first appeared on my personal Cohost page in March of 2023. One thing that’s important to remember: I’m still correct about this.

The first thing we need to do is lay down some definitions. When talking about “porn games”, I’m talking about interactive media wherein the primary goal is provoking a strong sexual response in the player. A porn game is not merely a game that features sexually-provocative imagery – Bayonetta, for example, features a lot of T&A along with a lot of playful references to BDSM, but it’d take a pretty advanced case of puritanical brainrot to argue earnestly that it’s a porn game – it’s a high-energy 3rd-person combo-based brawler with an aesthetic that includes a lot of sexualized imagery. A more digestible way of making the distinction might be to say that porn games expect you to masturbate while playing them. It’s important that we’re on the same page with this definition of porn games, because if we aren’t then nothing I say from here on out is going to hold water.

Addendum from Future Bigg: Following conversations I had after the initial version of this essay was published, I’d like to add that the utility of the above definition, which separates “porn games” from “games with porn in them”, is that of establishing design goals. In a porn game as defined in the above paragraph, the desired outcome (and, in a sense, the ludic “win state”) is to inspire sexual arousal in the player, and as such all design decisions need to be evaluated on the basis of how well they facilitate that outcome. In a game that has porn in it, where the intended outcome might be some combination of narrative fulfillment, a sense of discovery, or mechanical mastery, design decisions can be evaluated on how well they support THOSE outcomes. In the abstract I think that there’s TREMENDOUS value in having mechanically-rich games that feature hardcore pornography as part of their aesthetic makeup, as the normalizing influence of a very fun, very popular game featuring pornography like it’s not a big deal cannot be overstated. In practice, however, I think we’ve honestly yet to see very many games with porn in them that could honestly be said to be as mechanically-satisfying as their non-pornographic analogues.

Continue reading “It’s Time To Accept There Isn’t A Better Porn Game Format Than The Visual Novel” →

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a minotaur chasing a young blue-haired witch through a labyrinth
PICTURED: Sasha and Diogenes celebrating Diogenes’s liberation

Happy September, everyone! After a few final days of heat, the rains have come to Vancouver and autumn has begun in earnest. Let’s get to the update. (This update is crossposted from the monthly BP Games newsletter.)

Monstrous Liberation Work

This month Pacha was mainly focused on finishing the art for the second of Diogenes’s sex scenes – it’s a long, detailed scene and required a decent amount of revision because I was being very picky about a few details. I think it’s one of the best scenes we’ve done so far and I can’t wait for you to see it. Pacha’s also been doing some minor tweaks to Sasha’s sprites.

As for me, my work on the game this month was pretty much exclusively writing. I finished the script for Diogenes’s section (it turned out to be a couple thousand words longer than Senza and Drizzle’s, I think I must have been having fun with it) and also plumped up a lot of the optional flavor text that appears in the Hospitality District before and after you liberate all the monsters. Right now the total wordcount of the game’s script stands at about 52,000 words.

I’ve also been in contact with our publisher about getting a proper trailer cut for the game now that we’ve got almost all of our content ready to go. That’s ongoing but fingers crossed that I have a nice slick video to show you next month! Also coming next month: Pacha will be finishing the remainder of the SFW cutscene art and perhaps starting in on the last major sex scene, while I’ll be implementing the script I just wrote and probably finishing up the rest of the script while I’m at it.

Continue reading “September 2024 Update: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back” →

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