Vixie Foxpaw-Moondew

As a kinky ace who's into vore and TF, thank you for bringing up the game over thing. Because holy hell I have lost count of the number of vore games (and mods, for that matter) where the objective is basically to make it through the game without doing any vore, and then my gamer brain takes over because I don't want to reload my last save.

It's also kinda hilarious how quickly a skyrim devourment or fallout 4 voremod run turns into HMMM SO I HAVE AN INSTANT MELEE TIMEOUT ABILITY THAT REMOVES A SINGLE TARGET FROM COMBAT TEMPORARILY thanks to my chronic inability to turn off said gamerbrain.

soooooo true!

“unpredictability” is sort of an inherently sexy concept, and one that video games are uniquely positioned to play with. like you say, there’s a sweet spot: if the porn is doled out at predictable intervals, then the game part of the equation isn’t contributing much to the experience. i feel like a key element here is “trepidation”: when the porn is dispensed in direct response to something the player does, but which they don’t know for sure going into it will result in porn. maybe the player has a suspicion what they’re about to do might be sexy, but maybe they’re unsure if the game will acknowledge it at all, let alone that it will respond at length. done well, a game can kind of replicate in miniature the way it feels to cautiously broach the subject of something you’re into with someone, as well as the thrill of getting rewarded for doing so!!! in my opinon

i don't have anything to add but i rly enjoyed reading this! also "Being unwell, I never let this go." will remain in my heart forever

I've just started developing a porn game. So this post really showed up on my feed at the right time.

My methodology behind it is pretty simple.
Write interesting characters that people care about first. Then make em fuck.

I feel like that's the problem with a lot of porn games is that the characters are either non existant or are so threadbare that no one cares.

The best porn game I've played for actually making it hot was the forest of love.
https://carrotscritters.itch.io/the-forest-of-love

Its not even really my jam art wise (too animal not anthro enough) but the writing is good and the characters are fun so it makes the sex exciting.

Omfg I'm so glad someone has put this into words, the "reward for losing" thing has bugged me for so long. Especially in games where the only time you'll get gratification only for losing. Where it becomes a game you go to for The Kink but the gameplay revolves around not interacting with the main draw for as long as possible for some reason

this really puts into words and elaborates on some of the thoughts i had when i was working on my first porn game (a game jam game im not entirely happy with). ive been extremely slowly chipping away at a second and all these same questions are cropping up again.

I mean the big reason game over porn exists is because Bad Ends are a major part of online kink bullshit- the nature of the failstate is in itself a sort of masochism, you could replicate the experience from Dark Souls. The issue is specifically more that most porn games aren’t dark souls and there’s a resistance to making that sort of uphill climb of struggling against impossible odds, so you basically have to make the player willingly throw themselves into danger rather than risk real frustration by giving them the unavoidable consequences they’re looking for. They don’t want to earn the porn they want the porn to be thurst upon them no matter what

I've been thinking about game design of porn games for the past decade so THANK YOU for actually talking about it!

I do think that there is a certain source of reward to be found in some of the more "game over" style games in that you gain more access to things and thus can find more things that you personally find to be hot/enjoyable, though this is probably still better-delivered when it is at least not primarily a consequence of losing. But there are definitely some games that I played through repeatedly specifically for the reward of being able to checkpoint a save right before some very hot bad-end style things.

this is really fun to read! i've been wanting to learn how to create games, and all to often i've seen porn games fall into the boring trap of "lose so you get sex" and its frustrating playing as someone who likes being good at the game woiefj anyways. thanks for tips on how to make a porn game interesting!

your extrinsic/intrinsic reward distinction confuses me a little, because intrinsic and extrinsic seem to me like relational properties, so it's not that the piece of lore or puzzle solving satisfaction is nakedly an intrinsic reward, but rather that when thinking about the relation between the puzzle game and its lore, the lore is extrinsic to the game, and the puzzle satisfaction is intrinsic to the game.

Separately there's the question of whether the reward is good or not, so the number go up kind of rewards are extrinsic to the game, and they're lame rewards, but they can rely on the effect they have on the game to be a useful part of the game, like rewarding a player with ammo or health or some stat. But then casinos noticed that people release dopamine just from number go up and uncertainty, and they hijack the mechanism to make people want the number go up without adding anything interesting like a good game or story, it's just number go up, like gacha games or idle games.

I think that notion of extrinsic/intrinsic is clearer because we not only want to show good porn to the player, but that the actual game is good too, so we don't just want the porn to act as an extrinsic reward relative to the game, but for the game to be its own intrinsic reward, because then the player might be doing something boring just because of the motivation that the porn gives, and the same is true of any extrinsic reward like story, we want all the parts to be valuable, not to have one reward to motivate the player, and then they have to do busywork to get it. The notion of autotelic is basically saying the same thing, we want the player to play because of the game itself, otherwise what role does the game have in the piece of art as a whole. I guess a tedious game can sometimes have a role of friction, but it's a bit self-defeating, because people just won't want to do it.

Going further we can also think about how the porn is related to the game, we probably want some relationship between the different mediums we're putting together that elevates the whole, otherwise why mix them... maybe the mix can just be a way to structure it, like to pace the delivery of the story and porn or something, but it can probably go further. Also wanting the game to have an important role is why what you mentioned of every encounter having an option to watch a scene to skip it would suck, because it eliminates the role of the game, and it becomes just a series of cutscenes... which can probably work if they're made and structured for that purpose, but not if they're meant to be part of a game. I think the idea of ludonarrative dissonance relates to this, like having a clash between game and story makes a nonsense mix... similarly there can probably be a closer relation between porn and game, so we're not just thinking about having a way to deliver porn in some fashion, but that the game itself... is... porn? like horniness being more tightly coupled to the way the game is played, instead of it just being rewards, which is more the extrinsic reward way of thinking, which is probably very hard to do, but that's what makes art interesting

I can't remember what porn game it was cause its been a long time, but there was this one game system that stuck in my head.
The way it works is, if you stagger an enemy then you can fuck them for EXP, and if the enemy staggers you then you can allow them to fuck you and get back some HP. So it made this interesting system where after taking damage you have to choose whether or not to allow the enemy to fuck you based on whether you need health or EXP.
I thought it was a really good system that added variety to scenes, while also making the sex a reward

Really nice write up here about the flawed design of kukkoro games, but I think an important bit of context that was left out was that cishet games featuring cis male protagonists largely get to enjoy the privilege of not being subjected to noncon sex, unless that or NTR, humiliation, and similar kinks are the core focus of the game. For folks of all other genders, noncon sex and porn on failure/game over is too often the default.

I'll cite some examples of porn RPGs with cis male protagonists where player noncon is not the primary kink: Renryuu: Ascension, Harem in Another World, MIST (technically part VN, part survival resource sim, part RPG)
As for porn RPGs where a cis woman protagonist willingly participates in the majority of sex (I'm putting this down as at least 90% of encounters)... I can't name any off the top of my head.