MorganH

I watched this video from the YouTube channel Primitive Technology where a man named John Plant (a massive win for nominative determinism) silently gathered ochre slime from a creek and smelted it onto iron slag using a furnace he built out of local clay, then turned that slime-iron into a knife.

"That's just like Scavengers Reign," I thought.

I was right. In a Collider interview with the MAX show's co-creator Joe Bennett and supervising direct Benjy Brooke, they make the explicit comparison themselves:

BENNETT: A lot of it was sort of pulling from things that weren't so much science fiction. There was a YouTube channel called Primitive Technology that I was just glued to and I was so interested. It was this guy in New Zealand [sic] who every episode just builds a different thing. It'll be like a thatched hut, or whatever, that he will kind of go through every step building it. At a certain point, if he's got to make the roof for the hut, he has to build a kiln to make each tile. Seeing that process, there was something that was very kind of cathartic about it.

Both the animated television show Scavengers Reign and the YouTube channel Primitive Technology are approaching the same place from radically different directions, just like the characters themselves in the show. Considering Scavengers Reign alongside Primitive Technology offers a focus through which we can greater understand how the science fiction show conceptualizes the uses and limitations of technology as it exists within the natural world. While Primitive Technology is not a cipher for the show's ambiguity, it is a referent against which we might hold the show and perhaps better glimpse its shape and contours.

Long essay below the break.

Primitive Technology's videos have closed captions that offer the viewers a commentary that explains what Plant is doing and why. Without the captions, however, the viewer is shown footage of a man caught in perpetual montage, so reminiscent of so many scenes of survival from film that we might more easily imagine him, with his athletic shorts, as the survivor of a Hatchet-esque plane crash in the wilderness than the iron-age inventor the channel presents him as. Part of this is the loneliness of the project. Plant films himself by himself, using a mix of static camera placements and handheld shots, giving the impression of a combination of security footage and video diary. While Plant's decision never to speak to himself or the camera is a strong stylistic choice, part of the result is that he feels more isolated than Matt Damon's character in The Martian, that his daily life consists entirely of sifting through creeks for iron bacteria, baking bricks and clay pots, collecting kindling and making charcoal.

Despite the ambient wildlife noise and the backdrop of the Australian jungle, the accuracy of the channel's title is inescapable. Weaving baskets out of reeds, drying slime into an oxidized mud, even a task as simple as starting a fire in a pit -- these are all fundamentally technological processes. If "technology" is the application of knowledge, then we can see that the way characters interact with the flora and fauna of Vesta in Scavengers Reign.

Much of why I enjoy the show is it's attitude towards depicting "natural technology", the dispensing of metaphor in favor of striking literalization. These purposeful interactions with wildlife constitute technological processes, and the show depicts them thusly. Sam manipulates the innards of a beast, pulling on arterial wires and turning organic dials as if he was fixing an engine. In place of filtration masks, he and Ursula fix gilled creatures to their mouths and noses. The world of Vesta is populated by organisms whose biological processes are expressly technological.

Just like Primitive Technology, the characters here work in largely stoic silence, only infrequently expressing wonder at this alien planet. With two exceptions, they generally behave as John Plant does, working in an efficient manner commensurate with their survival conditions.

These two exceptions, of course, are Kamen and Levi, two opposites who are nonetheless drawn to one another. Kamen is one of the crashed survivors of the Demeter (and arguably responsible for the ship's destruction), but unlike the other survivors he was stuck in his escape pod for the first three months after landing: he can only view the outside world through a locked porthole, unable to make the same connections as the other survivors.

Kamen is rescued by Hollow, a small creature with telepathic abilities. Hollow's species has a symbiotic relationship with another small, tripedal arboreal species. Hollow's species psychically hypnotize these tripeds into retrieving fruit for them to eat, and in return are fed nourishing goop -- some type of nutritional waste -- that Hollow's species vomits up. When Hollow encounters Kamen, this psychic hypnotism is, from Kamen's perspective, bizarre and surreal as their alien minds first meet, though over time the hypnotism becomes less dominating and more like conditioning. Kamen is rewarded for behavior benefiting Hollow with pleasant memories of his past life with his ex-wife Fiona, and alternately punished for misbehaving by being forced to recall their separation, the egotistical decisions that led to the destruction of the Demeter and, eventually, Fiona's death as Kamen inadvertently left her on the decompressing ship while he himself escaped.

Unable to provide for himself and reliant on Hollow to survive, Kamen resorts to hunting the local fauna -- hitting animals with rocks and sticks and feeding them to Hollow. We see here the most human of the technological processes depicted on the show. None of the organic circuitry that the other survivors command, but in the prehistoric. There is no technology more fundamental than a big rock.

Kamen's success with hunting means that he cannot comprehend the world around him, the intricate ecologies of Vesta, as anything more than hierarchies of predator-prey relationships. There are the creatures that he is strong enough to kill and those that can kill him. Within this paradigm, however, his relationship with Hollow becomes complicated. Neither predator nor prey to the growing telepathic beast, Kamen is not merely the symbiotic companion to the creature, but is himself the technological object that Hollow uses to dominate the environment. To Hollow, Kamen is the rock. There is much more to be written about their relationship and the ways that Kamen changes Hollow both physically and emotionally, but this technological element is key to this understanding of the show.

At his lowest moment, Kamen is subsumed by Hollow, un-birthed into the enormous creature. Not separated from his host by a womb, Kamen curls among pumping organs and intestinal tracks, his new umbilical cord pumping him directly with nutrients. He has become vestigial, obsolete, as Hollow's telepathy now allows it to hunt on its own. Unable to connect with the rest of the world, he ends up where he began, trapped inside a pod.

In contrast to this we have Levi, Fiona's robotic creation (and speaking with her voice) and Azi's companion. Levi is the antithesis to the human characters' thesis. Where they succeed at (or fail, in Kamen's case) to connect with Vesta's environment in technological ways, Levi is a technological being that connects with the environment in non-technological ways, through art and expression. Not infected, but interfaced, with a ubiquitous native organism that slowly brings Levi to life, she begins to experiment with her own modes of self-expression in ways unrelated to human survival. Humming music, erecting geometric stacks and arches of stones, making gardens and art in the landscape, Levi inverts the relationship to nature as exhibited by the other humans. As she becomes more and more alive, she operates more on instinct, at first in strange and illogical ways, like burying Azi's tools, but increasingly in ways that allow her to express her growing sense of self, like through song and art.

When they first encounter one another, Hollow obliterates Levi, telekinetically dismantling her and scattering her remains into a gorge. This leads to her rebirth as part machine, part organic matter, and part avatar of the natural world. In this new form, Levi exists in a harmonic, almost fairy-tale-esque relationship with nature. The local fauna bring her stones, bits of metal, anything that can be made into art within Levi's garden. In a way, she has become Vesta itself, finally given voice and the opportunity to express herself, unconcerned with survival.

The second encounter between Levi and Hollow, however, is far more revelatory. At the climax of the final episode, Levi departs her garden to rescue Azi, who is being hunted by Hollow. Levi arrives right as Hollow is about to force its nutritional goop into Azi's mouth, searching for a symbiotic connection in the only way it knows how. When Levi interposes herself between Hollow and Azi, Hollow once more tries to infect, this time reaching the goop into Levi's empty eye socket and into her circuitry.

This backfires in one of the most spectacular scenes in television, and so is worth linking a video to here, just so we can all take a moment to rewatch this scene.

There is such pathos in Hollow's expression as it tries to feed Azi. This animal is not how it should be, and Hollow's expression knows this, but it is too possessed of Kamen's nihilism to act differently. It tries to make a connection, and failing that, to destroy.

Levi's defense against this is context, the fireworks of creation. To an impressive, sweeping score composed by Nicolas Snyder, we see the creation of the universe, the formation of the stars, the debris that formed Vesta, the formation of multicellular life, and all that follows: the strange, wondrous creatures we have seen throughout the show, Levi's birth into life, Kamen's memories and hallucinations. What Levi wields is the sublimity of life itself, contextualized within the world, within the universe. This dissolves Kamen's perspective of the purely hierarchical network he imagined and literally it dissolves Hollow of all of the excesses accumulated from Kamen's ego.

Crucially, understanding this natural context is not about Luddism -- the violence, destruction, and grief that Kamen / Hollow are able to inflict is initialized with the basic technological form of a big rock, not with any of the more "advanced" (though still thoroughly natural) technologies employed by the other characters. Rather, this empowered context is about understanding spaces and systems, ecologies and communities, organisms and relationships.

This is a spiritual confrontation, but an atheistic one. The awe and grandeur that sweep away Hollow's monstrosity is that of the scale of evolution, of plate tectonics and ecology. What connects all of these ideas together, for me, is the method and motive for understanding the world around us, what Scavengers Reign believes to be true about our relationship to nature and technology. Kamen's predatory nihilism is dangerous and destructive, but the pragmatic technological interactions the other survivors rely upon are also insufficient to repel him. Levi's reborn synthesis represents the power of connecting with the natural world through a technological apparatus, the same thing that Primitive Technology offers an incomplete glimpse into. While all of the ways we interact with fellow organisms, like Sam and Ursula powering their transmitter with an electric eel, or John Plant turning iron bacteria into a metal knife, are fundamentally technological processes, they are also insufficient to understanding the breadth of existence -- which is not a claim they purport to make, but it is one that Scavengers Reign believes is necessary to counteract the dangers of ego, the violence of innovation, the hunger of endless growth. Hollow could not be defeated by technological means, but by Levi's transcendent expression of the continuity between Kamen and Hollow's own lives and the formation of life itself.

Ultimately, I believe that Scavengers Reign has many more layers of meaning, symbolic structures, and complex themes and characters than this essay and myself are equipped to unpack. I haven't talked about Ursula and Sam, the lunar miners Kris, Terrence, and Barry, the heart parasite, or many of the show's other objects of fascinations. It's a show I'll be thinking about for a long time, especially whenever I see a video of a silent Australian man making geopolymer cement out of ash and clay. Hopefully this was essay was in some way illuminating, and if not, well... no takesies backsies. Thanks for reading!

This is first of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. We will be posting a new essay every Wednesday from now until March, but if you would like to read all the essays early and support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by @pillowkisser!

Alright, so what are we doing here? Who is this for and why does it exist in the first place? Answering that requires laying down a bit of groundwork first.

Porn games (which here I’m using to mean “pornographic games developed for English-speaking audiences outside of Japan”, since a lot of what I’m about to say doesn’t apply (or, at least, applies much less) to the Japanese porn game industry) are kind of bad.

Anyone with any familiarity with porn games who is being honest with themselves knows what I’m talking about. The vast, overwhelmingly majority of porn games are feature-poor visual novels developed with extremely inconsistent levels of competency in terms of writing, programming, and art (the ones that aren’t pure visual novels are typically extremely tiresome RPGs or extremely tiresome puzzle games). The vast, overwhelming majority of porn games languish in a state of incompleteness, and the rare few that DO get finished are very seldom finished to the level of polish one might reasonably expect from almost any other kind of game. Misogyny, both casual and extremely active, is rampant throughout many porn game narratives, as is racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. Narrative setups repeat ad nauseum - dozens upon dozens of smirking incestuous boymen porking their pliant (step)mothers and (step!)sisters, varying levels of “corruption”, and functionally-indistinguishable college fuckfests reigning supreme.

So, why is this the case? Why IS there such a pronounced quality gap between this entire subgenre and the rest of the medium? Well, in the larger video game industry, new projects and studios are most frequently spawned when someone who has worked for years at a large studio - Electronic Arts, Activision, etc - decides to strike out on their own. These devs often enjoy a high degree of financial stability due both to their previously-high salaries and their ability to leverage their prior experience into procuring outside investment. They can also typically rely on some level of name recognition when their projects are being covered - if not their own human names, then certainly the names of the studios and projects they’d worked on previously. These developers will have professional-level competency in at least one game development discipline (programming, art, design, etc), as well as a good understanding of what seeing a game development cycle from start to finish looks like. Very often they will have access to robust professional networks of contacts and collaborators which they can leverage for coverage and development support as needed.

Developers of adult games seldom enjoy any of these advantages. Porn games are very frequently their developers’ first-ever attempt at making any kind of a game, period (it’s very common to see games increase dramatically in quality from start to finish, as the developers learn what the hell they’re doing). Nobody is leaving Electronic Arts to make porn games, and as such, nobody with the kind of experience you get working at Electronic Arts is working in porn games. Very rarely can the developers of porn games afford to work on their projects full-time, and very rarely can they afford high-quality tools or resources (low-cost/free engines and tools such as Ren’Py, RPGMaker, Daz3D, etc abound within porn game development, as does the use of royalty-free music and art resources). If you’re developing porn games, chances are you’re doing so under a pseudonym (in order to avoid your day job/home life being negatively impacted), which precludes being able to convert popularity you might have accrued via other creative projects into anything that might help your game. And, as I’ll get to below, your chances of receiving any kind of outside help with promoting your game are next to nothing.

(Even porn game developers who DO have previous games industry experience don’t have THAT much of a leg up. Independent game development – ANY kind of independent game development – is expensive, risky, stressful, and difficult. Working professionally in the games industry typically means focusing on a single narrow aspect of development, whereas working on any kind of independent solo or small-team project requires multiple skillsets. A programmer is not an art director, a systems designer is not a community manager, an artist is not an accountant, and all these skills and more will often be needed to see an independent game project through to completion.)

Thus, porn games are almost exclusively the province of the enthusiastic amateur, and I employ that appellation with all the affection I can muster. It is, frankly, absurd that ANYONE makes, let alone FINISHES a porn game, and yet there are dozens, hundreds, spanning decades. Long before there was ANY pathway to fiscal viability for the subgenre, people were making porn games. Every single porn game you’ve played was the product of incredible dedication and passion, which is why I personally try not to rag too much on specific games, even those that I think are empirically bad - this shit is HARD, and I have nothing but empathy for porn game developers.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that porn games have gotten a lot BETTER in the past 5-10 years, there’s no denying this. Steam opening its doors to porn games plus developers being able to support themselves via crowdfunding solutions like Patreon or Kickstarter has led to a porn game ecosystem that is inarguably more varied and diverse than would have ever been conceivable back in, say, 2010.

One thing that HASN’T improved in that time, however, is the way that porn games are covered by video game journalists, critics, and commentators. Or, I should say, how they AREN’T covered. If you get most of your video game news from sites like Polygon or Kotaku, you could be forgiven for believing that the last important thing to happen in the adult game space was the Subverse Kickstarter. The last time Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra) acknowledged the existence of developers of adult games was in a brief article from January 2022 reporting GameJolt banning porn titles. Incomparable game criticism periodical Unwinnable features all of three articles mentioning porn games within the past five years, all of them by the same author.

Outside the hubs of traditional games coverage, it’s a mixed bag. Searching for “porn games” on YouTube WILL bring a smattering of “Best 5 Adult Games” and censored playthrough vids, but little in the way of discussion or criticism. Twitch, obviously, is a complete nonstarter. Steam curator reviews exist, for all the good they might do. There ARE porn-focused review sites such as LewdGamer, but these outfits often suffer from the exact same problems of inconsistency and lack of professionalism as adult games themselves. The same can be said for scraper hubs such as F95, which boasts a bustling community of porn game enthusiasts and possibly one of the most comprehensive porn game archival traditions outside of Japan, but also suffers from all the issues that a you might expect a board exclusively for rowdy cumbrains who don’t like to pay for things might suffer.

I’m not writing this to call the majority of the video game commentariat cowards, necessarily. It’s hardly inexplicable WHY porn games haven’t enjoyed the same level of critical scrutiny as their safe-for-work contemporaries. Outside of garden-variety snobbishness and prudery, writing earnestly about porn games requires the exposure of one’s honestly-held sexual desires, something that has never in all of recorded history been easy for someone to do, and which is especially difficult at a time of surging puritanical authoritarianism. Writing about porn is, by necessity, REVEALING - what porn you consume, what parts of it excite you, the ways in which bad porn disappoints you, all of these paint a much more intimate picture of the person discussing them than a discussion of, say, Call of Duty map design might. Further, nothing makes an advertising partner more skittish than proximity to too many porn features, greatly reducing the financial incentive outlets have to prioritize coverage of this type. And while it’s all well and good for me to say that I want more coverage of porn games, what I really want is more INFORMED coverage of porn games - coverage from commentators who understand porn games, their development, their audience, the environments they get released into. And people like that don’t grow on trees (porn games are, after all, a subgenre of a subgenre).

And yet! Things are HAPPENING in this space! Things have HAPPENED in this space! How much larger to porn games have to grow before game critics and commentators, people ostensibly tapped in to video game culture, are obliged to start paying attention?

We who make porn games NEED the same level of critical scrutiny and archival obsession that all other genres of game enjoy. We need people who can articulate long, complicated thoughts about our work in ways that make us reconsider how we approach our development processes. We need excited, invested people who want to elevate the genre who can seek out and place a spotlight on unique new projects, helping them find their fanbases. We need people who care enough about why porn games are the way they are that they investigate and document the games of yesteryear. We need resources, dev diaries, genre-specific tutorials for new devs so that every new project doesn’t have to continually reinvent the wheel. We need people to CARE about porn games and the people who make them rather than just quietly jacking off.

The reason I’m so invested in this, aside from being a porn game developer myself, is that I’m genuinely concerned about what’s going to become of the shared cultural memory of porn games over, like, the next 20 years. Call me a sentimentalist, but I’d like to be able to talk to people about, like, Tinklebell, or High Tail Hall, or Meet N Fuck, or* Super Deepthroat*, or Legend of Krystal, or The Romp, or any of these other formative, often times highly experimental pornographic experiences and be able to pass them on to others down the line for the purposes of study and discussion. Genuinely!

When a thing isn’t talked about - when knowledge of it is either implicitly or explicitly suppressed - it becomes very easy for that thing to be written off as irrelevant. Nobody talks about porn games, thus nobody cares about porn games, thus nobody cares about preserving porn games. Something like this has already happened now that Adobe has discontinued support for Flash - there’s been a lot of admirable work done in preserving Flash games in playable formats, but so many adult Flash games have slipped through the cracks of those archival efforts. Other genres of games might get inducted into dedicated physical archives or library initiatives but porn games really don’t enjoy that kind of status. As things stand right now, the archival framework for porn games is basically a network of pirate and scraper sites held together by dried cum and scotch tape.

I worry about a future where porn games don’t exist, where all the games that exist now and the experiences of the people who played them are easily memory-holed by a puritanical monoculture that despises erotic art and sexual exploration. In a way the culture of silent sneering ignorance towards porn games and porn game developers makes it feel like we’re already living in that future. I find this state of affairs repulsive as someone who enjoys porn games, and embarrassing as someone who enjoys critical writing about games. So, finding the body of critical works regarding porn games and porn game culture so thin, we must set out to nourish it.

This anthology features eight excellent pieces of writing by eight excellent writers spanning a broad range of subject matter relating to porn games. They include reviews, critical analysis, personal anecdotes, and observations of wider trends. In a way, this anthology seeks to represent in microcosm what a healthy body of critical works regarding porn games would look like. I hope you enjoy.

In addition to organizing, editing, formatting, and publishing this anthology, @Bigg is one half of the two-person adult game development studio BP Games. He can be found on Cohost and on Twitter. His other works include the sex-work-and-Millennial-ennui-focused erotic visual novel "Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story" (available for puchase on Itch, Steam, and GOG), the short erotic parody comic “Tits Detective #1 - Jugs And Justice!” (available on Itch), and the post-post-post-post-post-apocalyptic mecha-pilot-focused erotic visual novel demo “As Above/So Below” (available as a free download on Itch).

Note: This essay is adapted from a series of posts from September 2022.

Next Essay ->

If you'd like to support this kind of writing and read all the essays early, you can pick it up here! Shares very appreciated!

My essay "Fuck This Game: Intercorporeality, Erotic Cybernetics, and Becoming the Input" is in there, and I'm darn proud of that silly little paper. Hugely looking forward to reading every other entry as well!

Typically, what Star Wars fans want is when all of the links on a new movie or TV-show's Wookieepedia page are already purple -- familiar characters in familiar locations, the pleasurable spark of recognition whenever a character, a name, is referred to on screen. These, of course, are empty calories, but at this point the lack of nourishment seems to be by design. Keep the audience hungry, Disney might reason, and they'll eat gruel.

Long review below the break: