This is eighth 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!
by: @mrhands
I had heard many good things about The Imperial Gatekeeper, a dark adult game
about a fantasy country torn apart by war. You play an army bureaucrat tasked with
checking people’s documentation before they’re allowed entry. But while it starts off
easy, the list of rules keeps increasing in complexity as the story progresses.
It sounded like the game could make for an interesting experience, although with
some very dark undertones. What kind of harassment are the people at your desk
willing to let you get away with if they are desperate for a stamp of approval on their
paperwork? Unfortunately, I never saw these questions answered during my first
playthrough. I was apparently playing the world’s most boring paperwork simulator,
stamping people’s documents for no reward. That’s because the version I had
bought on Steam was missing something important: a patch to add in the adult
content that had been removed by the publisher.
But where did the frustrating practice of hiding adult content behind patches come
from? And can we do anything about it?
Why do I need an adult patch?
Even though Imperial Gatekeeper is clearly marked as having adult content on the storefront, you won’t see any of it in the game by default. This seems counter to Steam’s mission to be your hassle-free one-stop shop for PC gaming but directly results from their ever-shifting policies on adult games.
Initially, things were easy for adult games on Steam because they were not allowed at all. But after Valve decided to open their storefront in early 2018 to any game developer with $100 USD burning in their pocket, they did not set up explicit rules for the type of games they would now allow on their platform. This resulted in a flood of
independent games, low-quality cash grabs, and adult games, which have always operated somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
Then, in May 2018, adult game developer HuniePot Studios received a cryptic email from Valve stating that their game HuniePop “violates the rules [and] guidelines for
pornographic content on Steam” and would be removed from the storefront unless
they removed said content from the game.
Other developers received similar emails from Valve. Online publication GameRant wrote on May 18th, 2018, that the game makers for Mutiny!! and NEKOPARA were also told to remove adult content from their game or face removal from the store. Notably, GameRant wrote that Valve did not warn AAA game developer CD Projekt Red about the nudity in their The Witcher series of games.
On June 6th, 2018, or just under four weeks after the mysterious emails were sent out, Valve announced that they would be taking a more hands-off approach to moderation of the products on their storefront, writing in part:
Valve shouldn’t be the ones deciding [what deserves to be on the Store]. […] Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable.
This official communication appeared to suggest that adult content was now explicitly
allowed on the Steam Store unless Valve deemed the products “illegal or straight-up
trolling.” But this would not be the final word on whether adult games were allowed
on Steam.
Stamping docs and grabbing ass
At the start of The Imperial Gatekeeper, you only need to verify that the name on their passport matches the name on their travel documents. But more complex rules are introduced as the story progresses. Later in the game, you also need to check for hidden weapons on people’s bodies, if they have the right documentation for their arms, and if those papers haven’t expired.
All of this is done against a ticking clock at the behest of an impatient administrator. The more people you can admit without making mistakes, the more money you make, and the faster you progress through the story. Do your work quickly and correctly, and you’ll make a name for yourself as an effective bureaucrat and work your way up the ranks.
To be clear, this is a game about sexual violence. You play a corrupt bureaucrat, an unapologetic rapist, who sees nothing wrong with accepting sex as a bribe. After all, he reasons, if you’re patting down a young woman for hidden weapons, she doesn’t mind if you also happen to cop a feel. The desperate people before your desk will offer their bodies freely if you could turn a blind eye to their falsified or missing documentation.
But again, all of that intriguing sexual action was missing in the version I bought from Steam. The game never even gave me the option to pat people down, and I kept playing in the hope that, surely, the sexy content was just around the corner. I’m ashamed to admit it took me ten hours to finally look up what the heck was going on with this game. And it turns out I was missing an adult patch I could only get from the publisher’s website, not Steam itself.
Official unofficial patches
After adult games were threatened to be pulled from Steam, game makers
understandably became a bit skittish about the content in their games. Perhaps even
a little bit paranoid. Some responded by moving the adult content for their games
behind a free DLC on Steam like Monstrous Lovers does. Others moved the patches
outside the Steam ecosystem like publisher Kagura Games did by posting the adult
patch for The Imperial Gatekeeper on their own website.
It’s unclear which of these methods is actually officially condoned by Steam. As video game buyers, we’re left with a maddening patchwork of rules and regulations on the storefront that means that adult games with full frontal nudity are placed right next to games that are marked “adult only” but can only allude to their adult content instead of showing it.
Yet some adult games are still too hot for Steam, patch or not.
Roommates and landlords
Like any other art form, adult games often deal with controversial or taboo topics. For example, a very popular genre in adult visual novels is incest. Whether that means doing the hanky-panky with your stepmother or having intimate relations with your blood relatives, people eat these stories up. Unfortunately for the brotherly love content enjoyers, the topic is banned from platforms like Steam and Patreon. Luckily, some clever wordplay has been employed by game makers to get around these restrictions.
That woman you live with? She’s not your mother but your “landlord.” And those are not your siblings but your “roommates.” While this gets around the restrictions for incest content, it makes for some incredibly awkward dialog.
Even more controversial than incest is content that deals with underage participants. That’s because the vast majority of people consider the topic of sex with children to be so abhorrent as to be literally unspeakable.
Some content creators try to get around this inherent “ick” factor by artificially aging up their characters. It’s a common trope in Japanese anime and manga to have a character in a skimpy outfit presented as having an underage body, but it’s okay because they’re really a 1000-year-old vampire. Unfortunately, while people enjoy this type of content for a variety of reasons, the trope of the adult mind stuck in an underage body also plays right into the hands of actual pedophiles. The criminals who act on their urges to assault children often convince themselves that their underage victims can consent because they “act above their age.”
But there’s still an underground market for this type of content, which is where the underage or “loli” patch comes in. As the name implies, these patches restore sexual content with underage characters. These types of patches are deeply controversial even within adult game enthusiast circles. Perhaps for this reason, one of the few restrictions on adult content that Steam explicitly outlines is that characters cannot have an underage body, immortal demon or not. Similarly, Valve does not allow high school settings in adult games, even if the characters are stated to be over eighteen.
The final category of adult content patches is truly bizarre: hypnosis. In 2019, the Daily Dot reported that adult content creators on Patreon were told to remove hypno content from their pages because it goes against the website’s “zero tolerance” policy for “the glorification of sexual violence.” This umbrella term for banned adult content includes anything that depicts blackmail, hypnosis, drugging, or “consent obtained through deceit.” Of course, adult game makers on Patreon get around these policies in the same ways we’ve already discussed, with a patch on an external website.
Conclusion
If all of this patching business starts to sound like a free speech issue, that’s because it is. Adult game makers are forced to walk a tightrope set up by platform holders and payment processors. Making a wrong move could mean getting banned from the platforms they make their money on. I’m no free speech absolutist, but these restrictions are overbearing. Sane adults can be trusted to separate fiction from reality, and platform holders should not have so much power over artists that they can dictate the type of art they produce.
We already do not allow anyone under eighteen to view adult content, which is for good reason. Adult games are generally designed to titillate the player, not educate them about sexual health. Instead of banning taboo topics outright, a better way to avoid putting players into uncomfortable situations is to warn them upfront with content warnings.
After I patched my version of The Imperial Gatekeeper, I had a great time with the game. It offers a compelling narrative full of unexpected political upheavals. If you can stomach the sexual violence of its setting, I can highly recommend it. But you shouldn’t need a patch from an external website to play the game as the developers originally intended. Ultimately, adult games are just another form of storytelling; we can do much better to protect that speech.
Mr. Hands is a AAA game developer and adult gaming enthusiast. Until recently, he wrote a weekly newsletter about adult gaming, but he’s now given up on that to focus on his true passion: Failing to make his own adult game. You can follow his antics on Cohost.
