This is first 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: Kangoo
Overthinking solutions to mundane problems is one of my greatest joys in life. I love puzzles; I love untangling knots, metaphorical or otherwise; I have, on occasion, been accused of having a “Works Cited fetish”. It will come as no surprise then that, upon Morgan K’s essay on Game Overs for the first time, my brain immediately latched on to a single sentence:
“The experience of a lot of the [ryona] games I encountered didn’t really seem to work in practice. As games, they often left a lot to be desired.” (Emphasis mine)
This line felt like scratching the surface of a very interesting question, albeit one a little tangential to the main subject matter of her essay, that being: how do you make a ryona game (and I’m using that term in a very broad sense to include any adult game where defeat results in erotica) that works as a game? As in: how do you create an adult game that the player will want to fail and not have it feel like scrolling through porn gifs while having to press twice as many buttons as usual? How do you make a game that you can win, but don’t want to?