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”