Bigg

The tall man who posts

I'm a writer and indie game dev of indie games with cum in them. One half of @BPGames. Most recent project - Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story.

Other Accounts

@zippity - goofy porn game screenshots
@BiggHoggDogg - this is where I do most of my porn following & sharing
@BiggBlast - high-volume shitpost/screencap posting

Current avatar by @julian!


(I'm finally returning to this post concept I cam up with months ago now that Opportunity is done and I finally have time and energy to blast out longposts without feeling like I'm wasting time and energy that could be going towards working on Opportunity!)

This is a collection of thoughts that rattle around my head with embarrassing frequency, so I'm finally organizing them into post format in hopes to tidy things up in my brain a little bit. WARNING!!! This essay features frank discussions of porn games and masturbation.

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.

Gameplay Features (And Their Relationship To Jacking Off)

So, if we agree that the single most important priority of a porn game is to provoke a sexual response that might lead to masturbation in its player, I think it naturally follows to state that gameplay features that enhance/enable that provocation of sexual response make for better porn games and, conversely, that gameplay features that do not enhance or, worse, detract from the provocation of sexual response make for worse porn games. After making those two seemingly-very-obvious statements, let's drill down on some examples.

Gameplay features that enhance/enable provocation of sexual response in porn games:

  • Ability to pause gameplay in order to masturbate
  • Ability to play game with one hand (so that the other can be used for masturbation)
  • Ability to easily revisit favorite portions of gameplay (in order to masturbate to them)
  • Narrative that enhances impact of sexual content

Gameplay features that detract from provocation of sexual response in porn games:

  • Gameplay modes that require sustaining high levels of concentration and mechanical investment over long periods (turn-based combat, puzzle minigames, etc)
  • Requiring players to revisit content they've seen before over and over
  • Requiring players to navigate large environments (or large menu trees) in order to access sexual content

So What's The Big Deal, Asshole

Listen, I don't know how you personally jack off, but for me it typically helps when the thing I'm jacking off to is:

  1. A representation of a kind of sexual content that I enjoy while still being novel enough that I'm not bored by it
  2. Not something that regularly demands that I release my cock & balls in order to complete a shooting gallery or racing minigame or tower defense segment etc etc etc
  3. Not something that can only be accessed by grinding for stats or running back and forth across a map or doing any kind of boring busywork that ensures that I'm fully flaccid by the time the next titty is onscreen

Now, I'm definitely NOT saying that porn games shouldn't have their pornographic content broken up by periods of not-pornographic content. As with any other kind of action, the impact of pornographic action is greatly enhanced by work done outside the action to establish relationships, stakes, etc. Plus, I've PLAYED porn games that are essentially just collections of pornographic scenes with little-to-nothing connecting them, and I tend to find them quite boring and not even really "games" at all - I might as well be navigating a porno DVD menu at that point, y'know? However, saying "pornographic content should be broken up by other stuff" is absolutely NOT the same as saying "your straight-out-of-the-tutorial RPGMaker turn-based combat mechanic is definitely what's going to put your titty game over the top".

The Best Game Genre In Which To Make Porn Games Is Visual Novels And It's Not Even Close To Being A Contest

When reading the "Gameplay features that enhance/enable provocation of sexual response in porn games" list, you probably noticed that all of the listed features are things that are either core features of visual novels or things that are trivially easy to implement within the structure of a visual novel. How about that! Visual novels are narrative-based experiences that need little if any tweaking to be turned into efficient, attractive vehicles for delivering pornography to an end user. They support high-quality artwork, animations, replay features and galleries, and can be spruced up to your heart's content with sound, music, and pleasing visual aesthetics. What more do you need?

Well, there's a not-insignificant portion of adult game devs who seem to think they know better, and who will pour an often staggering amount of time and resources into making porn games built around tactical combat, or match-3 puzzlers, or kart racing, and so on. A lot of these games get to be pretty popular, but I'd argue this doesn't make them good porn games - it makes them mediocre tactical combat sims, match-3 puzzlers, or kart racers that happen to also deliver pornography rather clumsily.

I've remarked in the past that due to being effectively shut out from mass marketplaces until 2018, the adult game dev community is in a state of arrested development, lagging something like 20 years behind the rest of the industry in a number of regards. This preoccupation with making mechanics-heavy porn games strikes me as being very similar to the enduring preoccupation among AAA games with being "cinematic". There's a level of insecurity visible there, a certain embarrassment - the implication being that porn games won't be perceived as "real" games unless they feature twitch gameplay or skill trees. To offer up a scrap of good faith, I think there's also an understandable desire to innovate behind it - surely, there MUST be a way to marry, say, the slick overland traversal of the Assassin's Creed series with hardcore pornography! Unfortunately, undergirding this desire to innovate is that same embarrassment in porn games as they are, that idea that porn games as they stand are in some way insufficient.

Whatever the motivation, there are a couple of major problems with adult game developers taking this approach to their projects. The first is that in order to even APPROACH executing successfully on the concept of a mechanically-rich porn game, they would have to, well, successfully MAKE a mechanically-rich game, which is frankly beyond rather a lot of adult game developers. I don't want to come across as unkind, but honestly there are a lot of adult game developers who struggle with making feature-POOR porn games. I don't just mean that they struggle with the technical aspects of programming, either - a lot of adult game devs don't know how to DESIGN games, full stop. They don't know how to create engaging encounters for a tactical combat sim. They don't know how to balance different characters in a kart racer so that they feel both mechanically distinct and fun to play. They don't know how to tune progression in a life simulator to avoid long stretches of nothing happening.

All of these are skills that can be acquired and grown, of course. But even IF a developer can overcome the immense technical and design challenges inherent to making ANY kind of mechanically-rich video game, they STILL would run into the second major problem, which is that by requiring your players to interface with a demanding, engaging set of game mechanics distinct from your pornographic content, you have MASSIVELY reduced the impact and enjoyability of said content! This is bad! This is very stupid and bad! I've written in the past about how porn games require a FUCKLOAD of pornographic content in order to viably maintain player interest, and if the design of your game compromises the value of that content, you've fucked up! Worse, you've invested an IMMENSE amount of your development resources into fucking up! For no reason!

Visual novels are very friendly to developers without a lot of experience making games but can ALSO be imbued with a lot of mechanical and narrative complexity - Ace Attorney is a visual novel. Dangan Ronpa is a visual novel. 999 and Umineko: When They Cry are visual novels. I've actually PLAYED a porn game - Long Live The Princess - that adapts Ace Attorney's interrogation mechanic for pornographic purposes, and it's fucking great! It works really well! Porn games can HAVE interesting gameplay mechanics, but they need to work FOR the medium, FOR the purposes of enhancing that sexual stimulation - you can't just make a bad version of a completely disparate genre of game, put some cum in it, and hope for the best!

Wrapping Up, Jorking Off

Look, I'm open to being proven wrong about this. A lot of this is theoretical - as I say above, we've yet to really see any game from an adult game developer that I would consider to be empirically good on the merits of its non-pornographic game mechanics while fumbling the delivery of its pornographic content. Rather, as things stand right now, what we've got are a handful of projects, typically well-monied on the strength of their art/animation, limping towards the completion of ambitious-but-perpetually-half-baked gameplay systems laced with porn. It's entirely possible that somewhere out there is a developer with the technical & design chops to shut my big fucking mouth by making a non-visual-novel porn game that delivers strong moment-to-moment gameplay AND a satsifying jacking-off experience. All I'm saying is that SAME theoretical developer would STILL probably have a much easier time making their game a visual novel.


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in reply to @Bigg's post:

Not something that regularly demands that I release my cock & balls in order to complete a shooting gallery or racing minigame or tower defense segment etc etc etc

What an incredible and true sentence. Nothing deflates the ol' balloon animal faster than a two-handed timed minigame in the middle of the action. However, I think some games do manage to thread the needle, so I'll see if I can make time for a "yes, and" post.

Sidenote: Since I'm always looking to innovate new ways to be lazy, I would love to host this screed in my newsletter! Would you be up for that?

i think i agree with a lot of what you've said but from a very different perspective.

im sort of interested in interrogating this concept that a game designed to provoke a strong sexual response is also intending for the player to be directly stimulating themselves in some way outside of the game.

I agree with a number of things you say detracts from such a game, but I think that the medium very much allows for games that expect you to be fully involved with them, and specifically don't expect you to be doing something else. This can be understood in the context of kinks that don't inherently involve any level of direct physical stimulation and focus instead around power dynamics, altered states of mind, bureaucracy, rhythm, and so on.

all of these can certainly be explored through the medium of a visual novel quite well, just as they can be explored through written text. and many people would rather enjoy them in that way, with or without any physical stimulation accompanying it- in this case, the player gets to choose how they want to interact with it, which I think is neat.

but it's also not the only way I think.

These ideas can be worked into game mechanics in really interesting ways. You can have platformers that play heavily with the predator/prey dynamic (you get a bit of this in Rain World, not that that game is inherently trying to be horny). You've got games like Thumper, which is gameplay wise basically just rhythm heaven with more polyrhythms, but the presentation of it I find deeply hhhhh, especially in VR. Now that's a game that can be horny.

There's a game I played where the goal of the game is to try to click the A-button at precisely one-second intervals with no outside guidance, the idea being that you the player are the clockwork of a working clock and you must perform the role of a clock: keep perfect time. the less perfect you are, the more health you lose, until you're cast aside, not capable of performing the task. I fuck with that.

Personally speaking I've been more turned on playing beatsaber or osu! along with sexually charged music than I have by most sex games I've encountered, and I've never felt compelled to pause in the middle to stimulate myself in other ways because it's the gameplay itself I'm there for. Especially if the map is clued into the nature of the song and designs for it.

But like the key bit here is just like you've said, I'm not interested in horny games with game mechanics tacked on so much as I'm interested in game mechanics that are being directly used in horny ways, to good effect.

You said

I've remarked in the past that due to being effectively shut out from mass marketplaces until 2018, the adult game dev community is in a state of arrested development, lagging something like 20 years behind the rest of the industry in a number of regards

And I strongly agree with this, but I don't think Visual Novels are the be-all end-all, nor do I think jacking-off is the be-all end-all (it may be for you, that's chill! it's not for me, and for a lot of folks I know). I'm personally rather bored of all the games that are essentially just visual novels, though I support people making them if it's the medium that's best accessible to them to convey the ideas they want to convey.

But also while writing this I was having trouble coming up with good examples of the kind of harmony between gameplay and horny vibes that I like. Most of the games I'm thinking about weren't even designed to be horny! They're just games that happened to be close enough I can latch onto them that way in certain mindstates.

I bet they're out there! Lots of indie folk doing cool things in the shadows. eevee's strawberry jam gets at sort of some of the same ideas I'm thinking about. I'd need someone to wade through a lot of games to find the ones for me though because I don't have the energy to do that. I've seen it done on accident enough that I know it could be done even better on purpose, I'm just too tired to try and find them.

And then there's the VR space, where there is just so much opportunity for direct interaction between the game and the player.

Which, tangentially, I think a lot of VR porn games get is wrong when they try to make the player just Do Physical Sex Things in the game, because that's like one of the fastest ways to break immersion IMO, because you don't have the tactile response. and while people are trying to build tech to provide that tactile response, I think that there's way more that can be done with the set and setting of the game to make the game horny without involving immersion-breaking interactions. You can do size-play or drug-play or TF in VR to a degree that you just can't outside of it for example, because the game has full control over the player's field of view.

Anyways this is a bit rambly at this point.

I will never forget the porn game I played that was a cookie clicker clone and had really short hot sexy sequences unlocked by advancing in the clicker with like fifteen minutes of just monitors clicking a button in-between each one. And each sexy sequence ended with the sexy character being like "if you want more, buy my abstract upgrades in the in-game shop ;)" completely ruining the mood while you go farm in game points through the clicker game to get to the next sequence .

I think the CYOA text adventure with the occasional illustration can be good but that's basically reading an erotica novel too, even if there's stats you farm by sucking cocks at the tavern so you can successfully pass a stat check in a sub-plotline.

Maybe this is just proof that books > video games >:3

I think about this a fair bit, because trying to marry non-VN gameplay to porn is such a tantalizing challenge from a design perspective. I think you're absolutely right about how a lot of porn games would be better as VNs, but I also enjoy seeing porn games fail at doing either side right. There is no other kind of game where design failures have active physiological effects on my body (except maybe devil may cry 2).

Like, there are some blindingly obvious design decisions that you should make when making a porn game that a lot of developers get wrong. As you mentioned, one-handed controls are one of these, and yet most RPG maker porn games don't support WASD controls, only arrow keys and bad pathfinding mouse controls. It's endlessly fascinating to me that we've stumbled into a world where left-handed people have a slight advantage (confirm and cancel are usually still x and z, so not a complete win).

I agree with most of what you've said here, but I do actually think there's some value in trying to make a combination porn game + RPG or whatever other genre you're trying to mash together. Or, at least, I can understand why people would want to make something like that. A lot of the best porn gaming experiences I've ever had have actually just been non-porn video games with sex mods. You play a good-ass video game, you get horny, you do porn game stuff, then, when you're done, you get to go back to playing a good-ass video game until you get horny again. It rules. It's, like, a dangerously good combo.

Now, is this what everyone wants from a porn game? Absolutely not. A lot of people will just want to get right to what they came for and go. But I kind of get the impression that this sort of back-and-forth between a great porn game and even just a solid regular game is what some of these adult game devs are going for. The problem is that that's very much outside the realm of what they're capable of, and it's incredibly unrealistic to ask what is almost always a very small team of relatively-inexperienced devs to be able to pull off a project of that scope. Because, again, I've pretty much only ever seen it pulled off by big teams of modders building off the work of well-funded, seasoned AAA devs.

You're absolutely right that visual novels are extremely well-suited to adult games, and especially to adult game developers who might not have much experience or resources, but if that's not the type of game they want to make, then it can't really be helped. A lot of them probably just have different tastes, and a different idea of what an adult game should be. I think the biggest problem is just that their goals are way too unrealistic.

This is a really good post, and interesting to think about as someone who often does enjoy porn games which are not visual novels (as well as ones which are). I don't remember the name of the adventure game series featuring a wandering photographer getting pulled into horny (and frequently juvenile) antics that I played as a teen (Frank's Adventure, or something like that?) but I've played things in that lineage that I like today. And while I have lots of problems with Trials in Tainted Space, Lilith's Throne and other CoC-likes, it's not about the way the gameplay interacts with the porn. Drifting back and forth between fun, light rpg (easy mode is kind of essential, I'll grant) and erotic scenes as I find characters who catch my interest has been some of my best experiences with porn games. The dress-up and transformation elements are also essential to the experience there (IMO) in ways that are harder to implement in a visual novel. If I ever find one of those that draws its lines closer to where I do (please stop with slavery systems, why would you think that was a good idea), I can assure I'll be hooked.

I know it's a bit old by this point, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on games like Tales of Androgyny where the sex is part of the turn base combat.

It's difficult for me to agree with your position just because I can't really focus on VN long enough to get to the sex scenes 🤭 even then half the time the scenes feel so removed from everything else that I was doing that I don't really get turned on by the time they come around.

That being said! Text adventure games that have been merged with porn are really effective for me! Games like "Fort of Chains" and "Degrees of Lewdity" offer a lot more player freedom, which I enjoy from any game. They might also just be a self-insert with the player customizability making it more accessible to the imagination and offloading game assets onto the player's own mind.