(I'm finally returning to this post concept I cam up with months ago now that Opportunity is done and I finally have time and energy to blast out longposts without feeling like I'm wasting time and energy that could be going towards working on Opportunity!)

This is a collection of thoughts that rattle around my head with embarrassing frequency, so I'm finally organizing them into post format in hopes to tidy things up in my brain a little bit. WARNING!!! This essay features frank discussions of porn games and masturbation.

The first thing we need to do is lay down some definitions. When talking about "porn games", I'm talking about interactive media wherein the primary goal is provoking a strong sexual response in the player. A porn game is not merely a game that features sexually-provocative imagery - Bayonetta, for example, features a lot of T&A along with a lot of playful references to BDSM, but it'd take a pretty advanced case of puritanical brainrot to argue earnestly that it's a porn game - it's a high-energy 3rd-person combo-based brawler with an aesthetic that includes a lot of sexualized imagery. A more digestible way of making the distinction might be to say that porn games expect you to masturbate while playing them. It's important that we're on the same page with this definition of porn games, because if we aren't then nothing I say from here on out is going to hold water.

Gameplay Features (And Their Relationship To Jacking Off)

So, if we agree that the single most important priority of a porn game is to provoke a sexual response that might lead to masturbation in its player, I think it naturally follows to state that gameplay features that enhance/enable that provocation of sexual response make for better porn games and, conversely, that gameplay features that do not enhance or, worse, detract from the provocation of sexual response make for worse porn games. After making those two seemingly-very-obvious statements, let's drill down on some examples.

Gameplay features that enhance/enable provocation of sexual response in porn games:

• Ability to pause gameplay in order to masturbate
• Ability to play game with one hand (so that the other can be used for masturbation)
• Ability to easily revisit favorite portions of gameplay (in order to masturbate to them)
• Narrative that enhances impact of sexual content

Gameplay features that detract from provocation of sexual response in porn games:

• Gameplay modes that require sustaining high levels of concentration and mechanical investment over long periods (turn-based combat, puzzle minigames, etc)
• Requiring players to revisit content they've seen before over and over
• Requiring players to navigate large environments (or large menu trees) in order to access sexual content

So What's The Big Deal, Asshole

Listen, I don't know how you personally jack off, but for me it typically helps when the thing I'm jacking off to is:

1. A representation of a kind of sexual content that I enjoy while still being novel enough that I'm not bored by it
2. Not something that regularly demands that I release my cock & balls in order to complete a shooting gallery or racing minigame or tower defense segment etc etc etc
3. Not something that can only be accessed by grinding for stats or running back and forth across a map or doing any kind of boring busywork that ensures that I'm fully flaccid by the time the next titty is onscreen

Now, I'm definitely NOT saying that porn games shouldn't have their pornographic content broken up by periods of not-pornographic content. As with any other kind of action, the impact of pornographic action is greatly enhanced by work done outside the action to establish relationships, stakes, etc. Plus, I've PLAYED porn games that are essentially just collections of pornographic scenes with little-to-nothing connecting them, and I tend to find them quite boring and not even really "games" at all - I might as well be navigating a porno DVD menu at that point, y'know? However, saying "pornographic content should be broken up by other stuff" is absolutely NOT the same as saying "your straight-out-of-the-tutorial RPGMaker turn-based combat mechanic is definitely what's going to put your titty game over the top".

The Best Game Genre In Which To Make Porn Games Is Visual Novels And It's Not Even Close To Being A Contest

When reading the "Gameplay features that enhance/enable provocation of sexual response in porn games" list, you probably noticed that all of the listed features are things that are either core features of visual novels or things that are trivially easy to implement within the structure of a visual novel. How about that! Visual novels are narrative-based experiences that need little if any tweaking to be turned into efficient, attractive vehicles for delivering pornography to an end user. They support high-quality artwork, animations, replay features and galleries, and can be spruced up to your heart's content with sound, music, and pleasing visual aesthetics. What more do you need?

Well, there's a not-insignificant portion of adult game devs who seem to think they know better, and who will pour an often staggering amount of time and resources into making porn games built around tactical combat, or match-3 puzzlers, or kart racing, and so on. A lot of these games get to be pretty popular, but I'd argue this doesn't make them good porn games - it makes them mediocre tactical combat sims, match-3 puzzlers, or kart racers that happen to also deliver pornography rather clumsily.

I've remarked in the past that due to being effectively shut out from mass marketplaces until 2018, the adult game dev community is in a state of arrested development, lagging something like 20 years behind the rest of the industry in a number of regards. This preoccupation with making mechanics-heavy porn games strikes me as being very similar to the enduring preoccupation among AAA games with being "cinematic". There's a level of insecurity visible there, a certain embarrassment - the implication being that porn games won't be perceived as "real" games unless they feature twitch gameplay or skill trees. To offer up a scrap of good faith, I think there's also an understandable desire to innovate behind it - surely, there MUST be a way to marry, say, the slick overland traversal of the Assassin's Creed series with hardcore pornography! Unfortunately, undergirding this desire to innovate is that same embarrassment in porn games as they are, that idea that porn games as they stand are in some way insufficient.

Whatever the motivation, there are a couple of major problems with adult game developers taking this approach to their projects. The first is that in order to even APPROACH executing successfully on the concept of a mechanically-rich porn game, they would have to, well, successfully MAKE a mechanically-rich game, which is frankly beyond rather a lot of adult game developers. I don't want to come across as unkind, but honestly there are a lot of adult game developers who struggle with making feature-POOR porn games. I don't just mean that they struggle with the technical aspects of programming, either - a lot of adult game devs don't know how to DESIGN games, full stop. They don't know how to create engaging encounters for a tactical combat sim. They don't know how to balance different characters in a kart racer so that they feel both mechanically distinct and fun to play. They don't know how to tune progression in a life simulator to avoid long stretches of nothing happening.

All of these are skills that can be acquired and grown, of course. But even IF a developer can overcome the immense technical and design challenges inherent to making ANY kind of mechanically-rich video game, they STILL would run into the second major problem, which is that by requiring your players to interface with a demanding, engaging set of game mechanics distinct from your pornographic content, you have MASSIVELY reduced the impact and enjoyability of said content! This is bad! This is very stupid and bad! I've written in the past about how porn games require a FUCKLOAD of pornographic content in order to viably maintain player interest, and if the design of your game compromises the value of that content, you've fucked up! Worse, you've invested an IMMENSE amount of your development resources into fucking up! For no reason!

Visual novels are very friendly to developers without a lot of experience making games but can ALSO be imbued with a lot of mechanical and narrative complexity - Ace Attorney is a visual novel. Dangan Ronpa is a visual novel. 999 and Umineko: When They Cry are visual novels. I've actually PLAYED a porn game - Long Live The Princess - that adapts Ace Attorney's interrogation mechanic for pornographic purposes, and it's fucking great! It works really well! Porn games can HAVE interesting gameplay mechanics, but they need to work FOR the medium, FOR the purposes of enhancing that sexual stimulation - you can't just make a bad version of a completely disparate genre of game, put some cum in it, and hope for the best!

Wrapping Up, Jorking Off

Look, I'm open to being proven wrong about this. A lot of this is theoretical - as I say above, we've yet to really see any game from an adult game developer that I would consider to be empirically good on the merits of its non-pornographic game mechanics while fumbling the delivery of its pornographic content. Rather, as things stand right now, what we've got are a handful of projects, typically well-monied on the strength of their art/animation, limping towards the completion of ambitious-but-perpetually-half-baked gameplay systems laced with porn. It's entirely possible that somewhere out there is a developer with the technical & design chops to shut my big fucking mouth by making a non-visual-novel porn game that delivers strong moment-to-moment gameplay AND a satsifying jacking-off experience. All I'm saying is that SAME theoretical developer would STILL probably have a much easier time making their game a visual novel.

Please share and contribute to support our next collection of longform writing on adult games (and possibly even force me personally to write a game review for you)

Below the cut is the full text of the campaign:

Give us money to write about adult games for you! If you can't give us money, sharing this post is massively appreciated! Sorry in advance for how many times I'm going to write some variation of these words over the next month!

Pitch submissions for issue 2 have closed! Thank you to everyone who submitted! I'll be contacting people whose submissions are chosen over the next couple days!

The Adult Analysis Anthology is a collection of longform essays that seek to increase the
overall supply of high-quality writing about porn games and porn game
culture. Pitches are open to EVERYBODY, regardless of prior writing experience! If you enjoyed the first issue and have a great idea for an essay to be included in the next one, I'd love to hear it! Also, this isn't just limited to Cohost users - absolutely feel free to share this post with friends or communities who might be interested in pitching! And yes, as with the first issue, contributors will be paid for their final essays (see below for more on that).

A few notes about pitches:

• Please keep pitches SHORT. Try to keep it to 2-3 sentences per pitch!
• Multiple pitches are welcome, but only one pitch per person will be accepted.
• When choosing subjects for pitches, keep in mind that the wordcount for the final essay should be around 1000-2000 words.
• Pitches from previous contributors are welcome. Also, if you submitted a pitch to a previous issue and it wasn't accepted, feel free to pitch it again!
• 8-12 pitches will be accepted.

Regarding payment:

• Once the selected pitches have been finalized, a flexible-funding Indiegogo campaign will be launched, with the goal set such that each contributor will be paid at least $75 USD should it meet the goal.
• So, for example: if 10 pitches are accepted, the goal would be set at $750 USD plus tax, platform fee, and an additional $75 USD for my own work compiling & editing the anthology.
• If the campaign exceeds its goal, the excess will be evenly divided among all contributors.
• On the other hand, if the campaign does not meet its goal, whatever it does take in will be split evenly between all contributors. Contributors will be given the option of backing out of the anthology should the campaign not meet its goal.

Ideas for pitches:

• First off, I recommend at least skimming the contents of the first issue to make sure your idea isn't too similar to something that's already been covered.
• Reviews of individual porn games, or series of porn games!
• Personal accounts of experiences playing porn games, or your own relationship to porn games
• If you're a porn game developer, accounts of your experience are welcome!
• Similarly, if you're interested in interviewing someone related to porn games, I'd love to hear your idea!
• Observations of trends in the development, evolution, or business of porn games!
• Everything is on the table, so long as it pertains to porn games! Surprise me!