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.
