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?
Tag: porn games
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.
(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.
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.
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”
Welcome to the blog post that will EVENTUALLY show you an excerpt of the final essay from the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology: an in-depth review of Studio FOW’s Subverse, written by yours truly. Before we get there, though, I’d like to spend some time talking about why it’s an excerpt and not the full thing.
Firstly, the review is a MONSTER. It is over 7,200 words long. The second issue of AAA is 70 pages long, and the review accounts for fully 20 of those pages. This not only means it’d be difficult-to-digest in web-based blog format, but it’d be a prohibitive amount of work plugging it in besides.
Second, I am pretty proud of the work I did on this review, to the point that I think it’s good enough to act as an enticement for people to purchase the full anthology! Just five dollars, or six if you’d like to get it as a bundle with the first issue! This is not something I’d feel comfortable doing with any other writer’s work, but since it’s my own I figure it’s okay.
Third, there’s the element of fairness to consider. My review is not a favorable one, and after playing over thirty hours of Subverse and reading back through four years of Kickstarter updates and developer diaries, I feel quite confident that the impression I formed of the game is as fair as I could possibly make it. However, the final release of Subverse is not out – I played the 0.9 version. In a developer diary post from 2022, then-incoming lead game designer Bangkok correctly identified a number of the same issues that I wound up having, and those changes are intended to be fixed as part of a full user-experience overhaul that will accompany the 1.0 release in Q4 of 2024. I’m no stranger to the Early Access model of game development, and I know that I would personally be pretty frustrated if some jagoff posted a long unfavorable review of one of my games before I’d had time to finish the fucking thing (and probably doubly pissed-off if I was a recent hire who’d been brought on specifically to address a game’s shortcomings). I’m not intending to play the 1.0 release (save files will be wiped, and there is simply no way that I’m playing ANOTHER thirty hours of that game), but I do stand by what I wrote about the 0.9 version. However, at the end of the day I’m simply more comfortable keeping the majority of the review confined to the PDF version of the anthology.
So, there you have it. Now, without further ado, let’s get to the excerpt!