Librarianon

Hey there gamers! I've been lurking and rehosting here for almost a year now and, given the state of everything, I figure I'd rather talk bout myself and my experience with this little corner of the internet before I can't do so on here. Just a way to give back a little to this site that's given me so much. It's my first time doing one of these, and hopefully not the last if I can find another spot to blog or interact we peeps on. That said:

Hi! I'm Protean and I'm a queer Writer, User Experience Research, Game Dev, and Transformation / TF kinkster. I followed a lot of my fave artists here around the 2022 Twitter exodus and stayed cause the vibe here was exactly what I've been looking for in social media. I'm a pretty shy person online and didn't think I'd handle interacting w online peeps well, so I've been mostly lurking since then. I think I'd occasionally comment on posts and wanted to write stuff for the various prompt accounts on here but I never got around to it due to my hectic life schedule, job hunting, or a whole host of other interruptions.

I think the main thing that hooked me here, aside from the phenomenal cohosters, was the UI and UX. The cohost team really nailed the look of the place and the some of pro-social features were (for me at least) welcome. I figure I might've run into the friction and problems other cohosters have mentioned if I was a more frequent poster, but as a simple lurker the experience was amazing. I hope whatever comes next borrows a lot from the following page b/c that was just fucking perfect. Low key I'd love to see them try and streamline the process of making your own page without building an algorithm, but that's just me.

I'm repeating the words of hundreds of better posters than me but this site really was something special. I know it wasn't perfect and some of the features could have been implemented better, but the creators really did make something beautiful. The long blogs, NSFW posting, resource and advice sharing, and CSS crimes were super entertaining, and all the posters who made it should be proud. With Cohost gone gone, an experience I thought was lost in the death of the forum age fades too - and to my knowledge there's nothing on the current internet like it. I'm sure something will come up and I know everyone's sorta scattering to the winds with Bluesky, Twitter, Neocities, Pillowfort and More. I'm trying to do my best to follow where I can, but I'll be building myself up in the meantime.

Thank yall for taking the time to read this and Im sorry I didn't interact with yall more. If we're freinds or saw me rehost your stuff, feel free to hmu on discord @librarianon, on twitter @RowanVThatsMe, or on bluesky as @TheProtean. I'll hopefully have a Carrd or other link set up after this but till then, I hope to see you all somewhere nice. Farewell Eggbug. Rest well knowing that ya did the best you could.

1. This one's kind of difficult to answer without knowing what you mean by "design problem inherent to the genre". I've certainly seen porn games with interesting mechanics - one of my favorites is in Long Live The Princess, which employs a genuinely fun system of Ace Attorney-type investigation and interrogation in order to access new tiers of sex scenes with certain characters. I'd love to see more of that in porn games.
2. Really depends on how broad your definition of "noncon" is, I suppose. Like, even Fire Emblem Heroes has a mechanic where battle-damaged characters will shed clothing and display somewhat-sexualized distress - does that represent noncon? I suppose you could just have the combat not have a direct linear relationship with any sexual acts in the game, but that largely comes down to narrative framing. I'm not a big fan of combat in porn games in general, for my usual reasons - anything that I need to engage with on a sustained mechanical level is something that's taking time and focus away from engaging with the game's sexual content.
3. To paraphrase a John Mulaney bit: not unless a lot of people become really cool about a lot of stuff really quickly. The main thing that Subverse (which I haven't played yet - I've heard that it's fairly mid across the board) proved is that pornographic game projects CAN flourish in environments where they're permitted to flourish, and the fact is that there aren't very many places where that's the case. Geoff Keighley, under present circumstances, isn't ever going to put Subverse or any game like it in his big fun awards show. Subverse can't buy YouTube ad space, and Subverse isn't ever going to appear in a Nintendo Direct. Jerma couldn't stream Subverse, even if he wanted to. There's nothing at all stopping a porn game from having a high budget (there are rich people who like porn games, Kickstarter is still a thing, and there are financially-successful porn games that will have a lot more money to throw at their next projects) but the availability of "mainstream" success for porn games is tied up with still-dominant Puritan attitudes towards sex, sex work, and pornography writ large.

1. My bad! I was referring to the fact that most porn games struggle to make their game mechanics fun/engaging in a way that ties into the porn, at least in my experience. Do you have any other examples of porn games that managed to square that circle?

2. I was referring to how most porn games w combat frame their porn as the player forcing themselves on a defeated enemy or vice versa. I figure the answer to that depends on framing, or just implying that both parties are consenting prior to combat, but im sure there are other ways.

3. Yeah... that's an unfortunate part of our society. We might not ever get mainstream porn games but on the plus side it looks like devs and artists are trying to make better ones on their own through patreon and kickstarter, so thats dope. Hopefully some dev pitches a banger kickstarter and gets the budget to make something great in future.