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.
Gameplay Features (And Their Relationship To Jacking Off)
So, if we agree that the single most important priority of a porn game is to provoke a sexual response that might lead to masturbation in its player, I think it naturally follows to state that gameplay features that enhance/enable that provocation of sexual response make for better porn games and, conversely, that gameplay features that do not enhance or, worse, detract from the provocation of sexual response make for worse porn games. After making those two seemingly-very-obvious statements, let’s drill down on some examples.
Gameplay features that enhance/enable provocation of sexual response in porn games:
- Ability to pause gameplay in order to masturbate
- Ability to play game with one hand (so that the other can be used for masturbation)
- Ability to easily revisit favorite portions of gameplay (in order to masturbate to them)
- Narrative that enhances impact of sexual content
Gameplay features that detract from provocation of sexual response in porn games:
- Gameplay modes that require sustaining high levels of concentration and mechanical investment over long periods (turn-based combat, puzzle minigames, etc)
- Requiring players to revisit content they’ve seen before over and over
- Requiring players to navigate large environments (or large menu trees) in order to access sexual content
So What’s The Big Deal, Asshole
Listen, I don’t know how you personally jack off, but for me it typically helps when the thing I’m jacking off to is:
- A representation of a kind of sexual content that I enjoy while still being novel enough that I’m not bored by it
- Not something that regularly demands that I release my cock & balls in order to complete a shooting gallery or racing minigame or tower defense segment etc etc etc
- Not something that can only be accessed by grinding for stats or running back and forth across a map or doing any kind of boring busywork that ensures that I’m fully flaccid by the time the next titty is onscreen
Now, I’m definitely NOT saying that porn games shouldn’t have their pornographic content broken up by periods of not-pornographic content. As with any other kind of action, the impact of pornographic action is greatly enhanced by work done outside the action to establish relationships, stakes, etc. Plus, I’ve PLAYED porn games that are essentially just collections of pornographic scenes with little-to-nothing connecting them, and I tend to find them quite boring and not even really “games” at all – I might as well be navigating a porno DVD menu at that point, y’know? However, saying “pornographic content should be broken up by other stuff” is absolutely NOT the same as saying “your straight-out-of-the-tutorial RPGMaker turn-based combat mechanic is definitely what’s going to put your titty game over the top”.
The Best Game Genre In Which To Make Porn Games Is Visual Novels And It’s Not Even Close To Being A Contest
When reading the “Gameplay features that enhance/enable provocation of sexual response in porn games” list, you probably noticed that all of the listed features are things that are either core features of visual novels or things that are trivially easy to implement within the structure of a visual novel. How about that! Visual novels are narrative-based experiences that need little if any tweaking to be turned into efficient, attractive vehicles for delivering pornography to an end user. They support high-quality artwork, animations, replay features and galleries, and can be spruced up to your heart’s content with sound, music, and pleasing visual aesthetics. What more do you need?
Well, there’s a not-insignificant portion of adult game devs who seem to think they know better, and who will pour an often staggering amount of time and resources into making porn games built around tactical combat, or match-3 puzzlers, or kart racing, and so on. A lot of these games get to be pretty popular, but I’d argue this doesn’t make them good porn games – it makes them mediocre tactical combat sims, match-3 puzzlers, or kart racers that happen to also deliver pornography rather clumsily.
I’ve remarked in the past that due to being effectively shut out from mass marketplaces until 2018, the adult game dev community is in a state of arrested development, lagging something like 20 years behind the rest of the industry in a number of regards. This preoccupation with making mechanics-heavy porn games strikes me as being very similar to the enduring preoccupation among AAA games with being “cinematic”. There’s a level of insecurity visible there, a certain embarrassment – the implication being that porn games won’t be perceived as “real” games unless they feature twitch gameplay or skill trees. To offer up a scrap of good faith, I think there’s also an understandable desire to innovate behind it – surely, there MUST be a way to marry, say, the slick overland traversal of the Assassin’s Creed series with hardcore pornography! Unfortunately, undergirding this desire to innovate is that same embarrassment in porn games as they are, that idea that porn games as they stand are in some way insufficient.
Whatever the motivation, there are a couple of major problems with adult game developers taking this approach to their projects. The first is that in order to even APPROACH executing successfully on the concept of a mechanically-rich porn game, they would have to, well, successfully MAKE a mechanically-rich game, which is frankly beyond rather a lot of adult game developers. I don’t want to come across as unkind, but honestly there are a lot of adult game developers who struggle with making feature-POOR porn games. I don’t just mean that they struggle with the technical aspects of programming, either – a lot of adult game devs don’t know how to DESIGN games, full stop. They don’t know how to create engaging encounters for a tactical combat sim. They don’t know how to balance different characters in a kart racer so that they feel both mechanically distinct and fun to play. They don’t know how to tune progression in a life simulator to avoid long stretches of nothing happening.
All of these are skills that can be acquired and grown, of course. But even IF a developer can overcome the immense technical and design challenges inherent to making ANY kind of mechanically-rich video game, they STILL would run into the second major problem, which is that by requiring your players to interface with a demanding, engaging set of game mechanics distinct from your pornographic content, you have MASSIVELY reduced the impact and enjoyability of said content! This is bad! This is very stupid and bad! I’ve written in the past about how porn games require a FUCKLOAD of pornographic content in order to viably maintain player interest, and if the design of your game compromises the value of that content, you’ve fucked up! Worse, you’ve invested an IMMENSE amount of your development resources into fucking up! For no reason!
Visual novels are very friendly to developers without a lot of experience making games but can ALSO be imbued with a lot of mechanical and narrative complexity – Ace Attorney is a visual novel. Dangan Ronpa is a visual novel. 999 and Umineko: When They Cry are visual novels. I’ve actually PLAYED a porn game – Long Live The Princess – that adapts Ace Attorney‘s interrogation mechanic for pornographic purposes, and it’s fucking great! It works really well! Porn games can HAVE interesting gameplay mechanics, but they need to work FOR the medium, FOR the purposes of enhancing that sexual stimulation – you can’t just make a bad version of a completely disparate genre of game, put some cum in it, and hope for the best!
Another Addendum From Future Bigg: One thing I’m not terribly interested in litigating is the precise definition of what constitutes a “visual novel”. In contemporary gamer parlance, it’s become a much broader umbrella that encompasses a much greater breadth of experiences than the term originally described. In addition to staightforward narrative experiences, you could also use the term to describe dating simulators, life simulators, business simulators, and many different puzzle games. And that’s not even touching on hybridization – to what extent is Disco Elysium a visual novel? How about Persona 5? Or Hades? I’m including this paragraph to indicate that I’m aware of the fuzziness of the term, but also that it doesn’t really make much difference to me how it’s precisely defined as I see that discussion as an unnavigable sinkhole with no positive outcomes.
Wrapping Up, Jorking Off
Look, I’m open to being proven wrong about this. A lot of this is theoretical – as I say above, we’ve yet to really see any game from an adult game developer that I would consider to be empirically good on the merits of its non-pornographic game mechanics while fumbling the delivery of its pornographic content. Rather, as things stand right now, what we’ve got are a handful of projects, typically well-monied on the strength of their art/animation, limping towards the completion of ambitious-but-perpetually-half-baked gameplay systems laced with porn. It’s entirely possible that somewhere out there is a developer with the technical & design chops to shut my big fucking mouth by making a non-visual-novel porn game that delivers strong moment-to-moment gameplay AND a satsifying jacking-off experience. All I’m saying is that SAME theoretical developer would STILL probably have a much easier time making their game a visual novel.
Final Addendum From Future Bigg: Just wanting to underscore that I am 100% fine with being proven wrong here. I’m NOT wrong, but I acknowledge that being wrong would be very exciting and cool. It would not make my life any worse for someone to invent a way of making mechanically-rich porn games make sense. I would love to play the Skyrim of jacking off or the Mario Kart: Double Dash of yanking your shit to completion. I think what I’m really begging prospective porn game developers to think about with this essay is this: what are your goals with this game? What do you want to make the player feel? What format gives you the best set of tools to accomplish that? And also, have you considered that I’m right all the time?
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By the standards published here, visual novels also aren’t particularly good game format. You pointed out the “Win Fight” button of Third Crisis, but how many visual novels have some Auto Advance or Auto Skip mechanic? Wouldn’t some sort of non-interactive slideshow be even better then?
Back in the day I played a bunch of erotic Flash games (non-visual novel ones), and there were some aspects of them that made them more appealing than just looking pictures and clicking through text. I remember some sort of erotic Xonix clone, where a part of the picture would always stay covered, which made it somehow more appealing. I remember a lot of “dating sims” that were about getting wealthy and fit and only then you’d be able to get women. While that is a whole can of worms in terms of how men can see romantic or sexual relationships, something about the whole “working hard and getting rewarded for it” worked on me at the time. And what about strip poker? Though it is true that these sorts of games are not really present in the space right now.
The dev of Long Live the Princess seems to also have made some erotic card game? I think that could be interesting.
Ah, now we’re getting into the question of “why play a porn game at all”, which I think is super fascinating. Because, frankly, games are kind of nonsensical as a porn delivery vector! Almost every other creative medium, whether that’s video, or comics, or writing, or audio, will deliver a greater amount of porn concentrated into a shorter amount of time, and will in all cases be easier and cheaper to produce than a porn game. And yet… people DO play porn games, and have for pretty much as long as video games have been a thing. This implies that ludic interactivity – the one unique feature porn games can claim over competing delivery vectors – IS desirable to the audience. Putting my argument in those terms, I’d say that whether or not you think visual novels are an empirically “good” genre of game, I’d argue that they offer the optimal BALANCE of ludic interaction with porn delivery.
I just stumbled upon your article there (from the awaited releases on Steam, to Hardcoded and its twitter account, to the RT of this article).
This is an interesting take, as i’d define myself as someone waiting for good adult games that aren’t VNs, mainly because i… sadly don’t like reading much. I still do obviously, as i still read many articles and such, but i’d never read a novel. So the title instantly intrigued me. Though, while i’d ask at first glance “better for who?”, you end up making this statement that i can only agree with:
While as you said in another article you linked there, expectations are high, and you need an absurd amount of CGs in your game to not feel too short in content, VNs are still on the side of the easier game genres to do.
While i keep checking a bit the releases in the field, i’ve yet to really play a single adult game yet. On Steam, it’s like 90% of them are the +/- same 3d models being used. Not saying they’re not good, but they sure lack a bit of identity imo. Still, there’s some good stuff coming out too, even some trying stuff outside of juste being a VNs and being successful at it.
I really think there’s a place where we can tie together good gameplay with adult content. It’s just that it requires a lot of efforts, and a willingness to do so from the very beginning. Because that’s the issue i feel like: if your game is that good, you might be better off just avoiding putting adult content in it to make it sellable to a bigger audience. There’s a few very popular games having adult content, but sure, that’s a very tiny part of them. I’m thinking about Baldur’s Gate 3 as a recent example, or Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3. We can only wish that we’ll see at some point such quality in real adult games. And i’m sure there can be easy ways to match the sexual arousal of the player with what the game is providing at a given moment. Be it a single button you can press when you so desire to enter a specific mode allowing you to feed your needs, or more diegetic ways to fulfill these.
To conclude, i think i want to note 2 totally opposite points. One is that i’m happy to see a recent game like Stellar Blade. Where we let sexualization occurs. It caused a lot of polemics, for good and bad reasons i guess. My pov on these polemics will reflect on what i wanted to make as my second point. Sexualization there (a 18+ game) is a non issue, even if it’s towards a single sex in a game, as long as the whole picture, aka all the games put together are relatively balanced regarding both sexes sexualization. And from there my second point was that we’ve a huge amount of work to do there, especially in adult games which are heavily made for the male gaze / for males in general. Only recently did i learn with the term “otome”, and i’m happy to see them grow. While i don’t think most are adult(?), it’s still “nice” (well it’s still gachas so eh…) to see a game like Love & Deepspace being high in the charts.
Keep it up with your game projects!
I find it interesting that you mentioned life sims, as I’ve found The Sims 4 modded with WickedWhims (plus other supplementary mods) to be entertaining and at least somewhat erotic. The genre obviously doesn’t have the narrative ability that VNs provide, but there is something compelling about being able to design the characters (and, depending on your skills and patience, settings) yourself, and then let them semi-autonomously determine how things progress themselves.
But then maybe that’s because I have that creative itch, but without the artistic or writing talents to truly back it up.
Modifying/extending the functionality of a work (non-pornographic or otherwise) so that it delivers something more closely approximating your preferred brand of eroticism is a pretty interesting topic! One aspect of it (modifying games like Skyrim to be compatible with Lovense vibes) gets explored pretty thoroughly in MorganH’s essay in the first issue of AAA, which will be going up on the blog in a few weeks. For me personally, I think a fascinating (if unanswerable) question about the whole thing is to ask at what specific point does one of these mods stop being a mod and start being considered a majority-original creation?
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