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!
And we're back with two more pitch highlights! (Don't forget to scroll up and check out yesterday's which were posted very late!)
A recounting of four years as a VTuber/lewdtuber, sharing experiences with building a community that is centred around sharing sex/kink positivity and embracing porn gaming as a hobby, rather than as a shameful pastime, by LewdNeko
I was TREMENDOUSLY excited to receive LewdNeko's pitch. I've never been much of a stream-watching guy - I'll watch Jerma stream highlight compilations after they've been edited down to a manageable size, but actually sitting through a live stream has never appealed to me. And, as someone whose game-playing methodology includes frequent pauses to get up, stretch, use the bathroom, have a meal, scroll through 80 pages of a long-defunct blog, read an entire novel, or go for a long walk through my neighborhood, I was never destined to do any streaming of my own. But I digress. The perspective of someone with the experience of doing the EXTREMELY fraught work of carving out a presence as a lewdtuber is INVALUABLE. Streaming requires so many skills - the ability to maintain a unique, engaging persona for hours at a stretch, the knowledge & awareness necessary to curate your content in order to make it stand out, creation & maintenance of a whole host of art and sound assets, and community moderation, to name a few - and adding the complications inherent to structuring your presence around adult content is a daunting task! Can't wait to read this one!
An exploration of how porn/romance games help those with complex relationships to sex get back in touch with their sexuality in a controlled environment, drawing on the author's own experiences, by Laney Norman
It's almost a bit of a cliche at this point in discussions around any kind of adult content for someone to retort that a significant amount of people engage with adult content as a means of coping with previous sexual trauma. While I think the frequency with which this argument is advanced has somewhat blunted its impact - to the point of it being the punchline of jokes both from anti-porn and pro-porn camps - it remains that it is based on something which, factually, is true. Given the taboo nature of frankly discussing one's enjoyment of porn and the difficulty of revisiting potentially-upsetting moments in one's sexual history, it's perhaps no surprise that this topic doesn't see a lot of writing that attempts to do both. But there really OUGHT to be more, which is why I'm very glad Laney will be taking it on.
Check back tomorrow for our last two highlights! And, of course, make sure to contribute to the fundraiser!
Here we are with our very last two highlights!
A scrutinization of the pornographic character archetypes of the "futanari" and the "sissy", how these archetypes are articulated, how they are played against each other, and where their boundaries break down, using Tales of Androgyny as a lens, by Lynn "wintermute" Robinson
Now this one is EXCITING to me, folks. The inception, proliferation, and normalization of pornographic nomenclature is tremendously interesting to me, and I think the term "futanari" has had a really fascinating journey to its current home in the greater lexicon. It's a very contentious one - I've personally known trans women who full-throatedly use it as an identifier, and others who consider it a slur they'd rather not encounter at all, and still others who consider it basically a rather tasteless thing to address an actual human as that indicates that you perhaps spend too much time marinating in gooner communities, but otherwise unobjectionable beyond that. Without giving too much away, Lynn's essay will be looking at the ways in which "futanaris" and "sissies" are essentially treated as distinct (and, in many ways, opposed) SPECIES within a huge percentage of porn titles (and, it should be noted, this phenomenon isn't limited to games). Really really stoked on this one.
The very last highlight is from: Me! And there isn't a synopsis of what I'm going to write for the anthology because I technically don't know yet because what I'm writing is the minimum-1,500-word porn game review guaranteed to the person who claimed the $200 "Buy My Opinion" perk! I'm very curious to know what game the perk recipient will choose for me to play - will it be one of the big-name titles currently topping the Steam charts? A Japanese title from times of antiquity? A very small-scale indie release from the depths of Itch?
I won't have to wait very long to find out, because the fundraiser ends in two days! Which means that there's only two days remaining for you to contribute! Which you should!
That does it for the pitch highlights, I hope they were interesting and informative! I'll be doing my last promotional push tomorrow, so look out for that!
