This is ninth of fourteen essays contained within the third 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: Stanley Baxton

When you hear “adult games”, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? You might think of Steam, with dozens of hyper-specific fetish VNs released seemingly every minute. You might think of itch.io, with the top games feed flooded with asset flips and uncensored genitalia in thumbnails. To be brief, your first thought is probably not a harrowing deconstruction of sexual trauma, and instead Elf MILF Simulator 5000.

This isn’t to insult the elf MILFs, or the devs hard at work bringing them into the world, but is a demonstration of the current existence of a specific sub-genre of adult games. Games that take adult themes and topics, sometimes including on-screen sex, and use them as tools of artistic expression. A tighter description, that these are games that happen to contain explicit content, rather than sexual gratification being the main draw for players, and are often presented as serious experiences.

These games, however, often find themselves side-by-side with the thumbnails mentioned earlier. And often, someone looking for something to jerk off to is not also looking for a game that makes them contemplate their life choices. It begs the question: why are these games put next to ones that are apparently their antithesis, and is there a potential solution? Then, the next question from this arises: does that solution have consequences?

The Rise Of “Artistic” Adult Games

Defining some terms, I’m calling this sub-genre of games that seek to present a more serious experience an “artistic adult game” (AAG). For games where the intent is almost entirely sexual gratification, or more crassly defined as “just porn”, I’ll be referring to them as porn(ographic) games. Adult games will refer to both interchangeably. I’m someone who’s made games under the AAG umbrella, and for this essay I’ve also spoken to several developers who have as well. I want to discuss and pull apart this niche of adult games, and the categorisation they, for better and for worse, have found themselves in.

My first exposure to AAGs was through narrative interactive fiction on itch.io. As many were (and are), my preconception of adult games was entirely pornographic games, and I gave little consideration that anything outside it existed in games specifically. I was more than familiar with sex as not-porn being at home in the likes of movies and post-watershed TV, but the idea of this extending to games was a revelation. I was primarily inspired by games from members of DOMINO CLUB, many who have made games exploring queer identity and life through adult topics, which then inspired me to create AAGs around my own experiences of being a trans man.

Canvas “bighandinsky“, a generalist developer working full-time as a tech artist, describes a similar case of direct inspiration:

“Playing Robert Yang’s game ages ago I think left a seed of the idea in my head. Then his Zugzwang game hit at a good moment of me exploring my sexuality. Those and reading gay romance books left the inspiration in my head [so that] this all came together with a thought of “no, we can do more with characters in adult games, where sex isn’t just to wank off to but one where it feels genuinely nice (compersive?) to watch for the characters you’ve played thus far.”

Many AAG developers are queer, and use the space as a means to explore queer-focused narratives around sex and bodily autonomy, told through speculative fiction or autobiographical experiences. communistsister, developer of narrative-heavy web games and full-time AAA game designer, detailed her motivations for making AAGs:

“Glossing over a few quick ones – trans woman brain worms, unpleasant childhood experiences, something fundamentally wrong with my brain, etc – the first game I made with Serious Sex Themes was a scifi horror game about alien abduction. I like alien abduction stories, and unpleasant focus on sex is part of the standard alien abduction narrative, and as a few-years-out trans woman still dealing with some hangups, it felt like a good place to explore it.”

Perhaps in part from people being inspired by others at a distance, and some describing a vulnerability in posting such games publicly, the AAG scene is very individual. Many AAG developers are not in spaces built to discuss and share AAGs, with some notable exceptions, like DOMINO CLUB mentioned previously. Canvas, in fact, expressed a desire for such spaces:

“I think the actual act of managing it would be a good space for a curator or reviewer to fill in, to build a sense of ‘this game is like {other adult game}’; or bundles between like-minded developers, so that the word can be spread to form a community or something.”

Despite being disparate in a community sense, however, most AAG developers share similar goals in the games they produce. The want to depict mature topics through games, for a variety of personal, political, and artistic reasons, with the belief that this is a serious vehicle for art that should be analysed and respected critically, as is done so in other kinds of media beyond games.

The Forced Categorization Of Pornographic Content

Porn games, in their simplest form, are designed to arouse the player, and often have little critical depth beyond that. This is seemingly antithetical to what most AAGs set out to accomplish. And yet, AAGs find themselves tied at the hip to pornography by a simple fact: they both have explicit content. Due to a variety of legislation, all games that depict a specific level of explicit content are put under a blanket label of being “adult only”. To opt in to being able to play AAGs, you also expose yourself to every type of adult game, pornographic and non-pornographic, with little way to filter this content away to only see AAGs. For those who don’t want to engage with porn games, this can turn them away from seeking out or even knowing that AAGs exist in the first place.

This can be even more demoralising for queer creators, their work often miscategorised by the fact they include queer perspectives that would not be flagged if they were heteronormative. Also, many queer AAGs must place themselves next to games that are derogatory and offensive. As communistsister explains:

“Because a lot of my adult-themed games also feature transgender characters, this combination of tags places them alongside stuff like sissy/futa pornography, which doesn’t always feel great. Some of my work is about that kind of assumed-sexual gaze that trans people are seen in, so it’s kind of a fun demonstration of The Point.”

The reason AAGs find themselves here, is a simple fact of how capitalism operates. Capitalism flattens artistic expression into marketable categories as a means to extract value. It does not care for intent or expression, and instead reduces media down to a checklist of content it does or does not include. If a game depicts sex, it goes in the adult category. It doesn’t consider why or how the sex is depicted, and if the player is or isn’t invited to jerk off to it. All that matters is that reputable marketers are not running their ads next to “female-presenting nipples”, or that four old white men aren’t reminded the money they move around was touched by a trans woman at some point.

No matter how an AAG may depict its mature elements, or going in with open intent and subtext that its content is not intended to be pornographic, the simple act of depicting them immediately puts them under this labelling. In any attempt to elevate adult games to new artistic heights, AAGs find themselves, by marketer definition, “just porn” no matter how groundbreaking they could be, and in the direct company of pornographic games.

What Would A Distinction Accomplish?

The desire for AAGs to be made distinct from porn games, and seeing wider respect as an art, however, is one that can only be applied as a double-edged sword. This will be intimately familiar to anyone who’s been on a platform that has undergone “porn bans” or attempted to restrict adult content. Often, these are supported by certain members of the userbase, usually under laws and rulings quoting the safety of children online. But, as is almost always the case, these categories don’t actually care about “protecting children”, only that marketers—arteries of capital—are not angered by arbitrary puritanical checkboxes that are in constant flux.

Queer games in particular, adult or not, have been under constant pressure from all sides for the simple act of depicting queer experiences. The existence of queer bodies, particularly trans ones, are immediately classified as sexual by the ruling class of capital. To them, it doesn’t matter how the body is used, or even if the body is shown in an explicit manner, everything is “just porn” if it ticks the right boxes. By letting AAGs be defined solely by market categories, it risks handing over autonomy of what is and isn’t pornographic without questioning why those categories exist in the first place, as they only do for ever-changing standards of “marketability”.

This even brings into question the social distinction. This essay differentiates AAGs and porn games, but these are fluid in of themselves. An AAG may include scenes and content that are purely for sexual gratification, rather than serious reflection, and a porn game might veer into topics that are intended to be analysed critically. It may be the desire (and even the artistic point) for an AAG developer to have their game standing side-by-side with pornographic games, supporting the scene it originated from, and not shying away from and perhaps even being proud of the classification.

Despite what labels they might find themselves under, AAGs will continue to be developed in response to, because of, or in spite of pornographic games, as well as in conversation with the systems that force them into the same category. “Forced” carries particular weight here, implying a complete negative, but AAGs have, by definition, been forced into a category where they might not belong. Being a supposed negative, however, is something that can be reframed by AAG developers.

Why People Make Artistic Adult Games

In some cases, being categorised as pornography can actually be used to an AAG developer’s benefit. As communistsister notes:

“[B]eing in the NSFW/Adult Games category gives you way more traffic. Sorry! I like exposure! And let’s all be honest – most of that traffic is not coming from people visiting the NSFW tag specifically to play a game in which trans women complain about their feelings for half an hour, you know? They’re there to jill off or whatever, “okay google, 15 minute futa obliteration daz3d game -paid -ai -fbi”. But catching strays from those users is how I get a lot of the traffic on my games, and I love the “I came here to jack off but now i’m crying” kind of comments it results in. So it’s kind of a beneficial situation, and for all I would maybe feel more comfortable strictly delineating between “contains adult content” and “is porn”, I’d probably lose out in measurable, material ways.”

These benefits, however, are considered a side effect of developing AAGs rather than a desired outcome. But even when branded as “just porn” by a handful of credit card companies to undesired effect, AAGs are made and released regardless, for a variety of reasons and motivations. In most cases, the motivation is quite simple, and something we touched on earlier. The desire to push games into new forms of artistic expression, with the belief that mature topics have been explicitly ignored by the mainstream under fear of being associated with pornographic games. One developer, who wished to remain anonymous quoted influence from Audre Lorde’s essay “The Erotic as Power”, and detailed their perspective further:

“I do not totally subscribe to the idea, nor am I here to argue, that “just” pornography is inherently less valuable than creative, artsy works based in long-suffering desire. However, at the risk of sounding arrogant, I *am* steel-focused on the idea that following on my vision to create a highly erotic *and* story-rich game that can be analysed for its themes will separate me from Hentai Dungeon 2 and slowly but surely move the needle towards freer sexual expression in games – that our form of art will be taken as seriously as other games.”

This idea of “moving the needle” also motivates other developers, who feel like there’s great potential in AAGs to push games into new creative directions, particularly in bringing more personal angles into what sex in a game means. Canvas writes:

“I feel like for me, sex is used as this gross slimy thing to degrade or fetishise the people/acts involved. Whereas in my real life experience it’s this new layer of being emotionally intertwined with someone. And in games, it seems to me like there’s this potential philosophy of “if we make a game with sex or adult topics in it, and treat it maturely, then we can explore the characters with a lot more depth than otherwise”. In this wishful sense of ‘i want to show how a character can/can’t be vulnerable, but not in a schlocky way.’”

And I can also speak to my own experience creating AAGs and exploring characters in more depth. One of my first AAGs introduced on-screen sex as a natural progression of a character dynamic. Despite sex only being in two scenes in a 6 hour experience, this condemned the entire game as “adult only”, and to my surprise, I did not feel myself restricted as a creator by this. There’s a liberation going across that invisible threshold, suddenly becoming “just porn”, that let me express ideas and personal angles in future games with raw and unfiltered accuracy. This resulted in a game that was deeply affecting to a specific group of transmasc people, and violently rejected an audience of anyone else. It creates a space where I was able to fully indulge a trans narrative, because, we already have someone getting sucked off, how much worse of a reputation can this get? The previous anonymous developer goes further into this:

“Sex and sex appeal in today’s media landscape are simultaneously indispensable and deeply stigmatized. Characters must be attractive, but if they or the actors who portray them act in ways deemed too sexual, the backlash is swift. If a story includes sex, no matter how narratively justified, it often faces an automatic penalty from modern audiences—something few other storytelling elements suffer to the same degree. As RS Benedict puts it: “Everyone is beautiful, and no one is horny.” […] I’m part of Gen Z, the generation of change, yet even in more tolerant circles, I’ve felt the grip of a resurgent purity culture. On the other end, full-blown conservatism continues to seduce more young people every day, promising a return to stability if all the sinful ideology is simply snuffed out. For people like myself that do not want to forget the roots of my community—to be dirty, to be weird, to be a little freaky—it means I believe the torch is being passed down to me and others. […] The answer, I think, is to double down. I believe only counterculture, an authentic and vulnerable piece, can respond to today’s cultural nihilism, even at the risk of being called kitsch, amateurish, edgy, and just plain bad.”

Only under a complete re-invention of capitalism will AAGs be able to find themselves the category freedom they do (or do not) seek. As much as a distinction between AAGs and porn games may be self-evident, and may exist socially, a material line can only be drawn in a potential future, where “marketability” is no longer defined by a puritanical ruling class. Until then, we must embrace Elf MILF Simulator 5000 hand-in-hand, as we are all degenerates under the eyes of Visa.

Stanley Baxton is a writer and narrative games dev making experiences that are satirical, horrifying, or queer, and sometimes all at once. He makes games for exactly 3 people to lose their minds.

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