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.