That means if you haven't already, you can still contribute to this collection of longform writing about adult games and adult game culture! We don't have any fancy stretch goals or anything; the only thing you receive for your contribution is the anthology when it's finished and the satisfaction that you helped its writers receive better pay for their hard work! As we're now in the final few days of the fundraiser, I thought it'd be nice to spend these days focusing on the planned essays and talking a little about why I find them exciting! I'll be doing a couple every day for the next few days!
A ten-year retrospective on the 2014 gay visual novel Coming Out on Top and how the landscape of Western gay visual novels has changed since its release, by Davis G. See
Due to an unfortunate quirk of personal sexuality, the world of gay pornographic visual novels has remained more or less a closed book to me (despite all that I might carry on in a broadly-authoritative manner) and represents a pretty significant gap in my understanding of the adult game landscape. This made Davis's pitch - synthesizing a look back at a wildly-popular gay VN release with a look back at the culture it inhabits and shaped - pretty much a no-brainer for inclusion in issue 2. I can't wait to read it!
An examination of the Rance eroge series and its employment of nonconsensual sexual relationships, and how entries like Rance VI and Sengoku Rance subvert this pattern, by Eithi
Another fairly significant gap in my overall awareness of the world of adult games are those made in Japan - I've played my share and I do have thoughts, but I'd never try to pass myself as being deeply knowledgeable about that long, rich history. Essays about Japanese eroge have appeared in the previous issue of AAA, of course (Iyana Agossah's "The Surprising Likeability of DoHna DoHna" and Josh Tolentino's "The Scarlet Demonslayer and the Anti-Kukkoro Kukkoro"), but we've only scratched the surface. Rance, with its total of 17 distinct releases between 1989 and 2018, is about as venerable and storied as it's possible for a game franchise of any genre to be, and I'm very much looking forward to the kinds of insights revealed by an examination of such.
See you tomorrow for a look at another pair of pitches from the upcoming issue! Don't forget to support the fundraiser if you can!
We're back again with our pitch highlights!
A discussion of what makes platforms like Steam and Itch hostile to developers of NSFW games, what an NSFW-friendly platform might look like, and how such a platform could service NSFW game developers, publishers, and, most of all, players. Told from the perspective of the developer of the upcoming Benefitship game, by MadCreativity
There are a lot of pervasive and enduring myths about adult content, but the most obnoxious one in my books is the idea that making porn is somehow a cheat code for making Mucho Dollars. It super isn't! It's precarious as fuck and even the places where you CAN sell your work suck a lot! I talk about this a bit in my recent IOC interview! AND it's difficult to talk about the ways in which the places you can sell your work suck without your words being co-opted for anti-porn messaging!
However, what is obvious to someone embedded in a particular culture is so frequently NOT obvious to an outsider. That's why I appreciated having essays like @mrhands's "Patching in holes and hogs in adult games" or Yarrun's "On Patreon, and the Taming of Erotic Game Development", which to a Porn Game Aficionado might seem very 101-level at first blush - until you consider that an average-joe gamer has likely never thought about these issues for even one second. This pitch is very much along those same lines in my mind, and I appreciate too that it's coming from the perspective of another porn game developer.
A critique of the marketing copy for many adult games (which often neglect to discuss the kinks and fantasies the games appeal to), why it's a problem, and how to write copy that attracts the people who want to play your game, by RagingHadron
Now this one I'm EXCITED for. Writing marketing copy has got to be my LEAST favorite part of the whole game-development process, so I am hungry for someone with marketing experience (as RagingHadron has) to weigh in on the subject. I also think adult games represent a pretty interesting marketing challenge - how to entice and inform while not out-and-out spoiling the entirety of the game's content?
That does it for today! See you again tomorrow, and please support the fundraiser if you can!
Okay so I'm doing this VERY late on account of being wiped-out after attending VanCAF (great show! lots of great artists! I'm very tired!), but here we are again with the pitch highlights nevertheless!
An interrogation of the ways that inflated, unrealistic expectations for the amount of content that ought to be in an adult game are being addressed by art thieves and AI-generated slop, by Leo G.
I've written myself about the immense content expectations placed on porn game creators, but there really can't be enough said on the topic. Contemporary porn games suffer under the yoke of needing A Song Of Ice And Fire-esque wordcounts featuring dozens of sex scenes just to be viewed as viable - quality of a porn game's content is, in many cases, wholly irrelevant when compared to the quantity thereof. This makes the twinned (and definitely not unrelated) epidemics of art theft and AI-generated art assets both very understandable and extremely distressing and I'm glad that we're going to get it laid out in more detail.
A personal essay about the author's attraction to erotic games wherein everything works out and everyone has sex, using Project Horseshoe's report "Coziness in Games: An Exploration of Safety, Softness, and Satisfied Needs" as a framework, by Blit
If you like to keep up on indie game discussion topics, you'll likely recognize the title of the report Blit intends to build this essay around. It's a doozy and well worth a read all on its own! The "cozy" aspects of adult games are maybe their LEAST-examined aspects - so much focus is placed on whether This Game is overly tawdry or That Game is tasteless that nobody ever thinks to look at what about these experiences is comforting, reassuring. (And, as is the case with non-pornographic "cozy" games, these comforting aspects are themselves perfectly valid targets of criticism.) This one's gonna be good, I feel it in my bones.
That's it for now! Join me tomorrow (well, later today. Sorry again) for the next pair, and don't forget to support the fundraiser in our final few days!