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.
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 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 you, as someone 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.
Before I wrap up, I'd like to shout out a couple of people who HAVE been doing the kind of porn-games-focused work I'd like to see be far more widespread:
- Ana Valens (@acvalens): Ana hardly needs any introduction from me - her body of work is vast and sprawling, ranging from essays on and criticism of porn, porn games, the porn industry, and sex work to vtubing, to porn game development. I really can't say enough in Ana's favor as someone who knows what she's talking about
- Mr. Hands (@mrhands): Mr. Hands and his regular porn-games-focused newsletter Naughtylist are relatively new finds for me, but I've been consistently pleased by his output. If you're looking for a good way to keep on top of new releases and adult industry happenings, in addition to some thoughtful essays on porn game culture and development from someone with years of experience in both development and criticism, look no further!
Anyways, thanks for reading - if you have any thoughts or want to recommend other good critical voices that focus on adult titles, I'd love to hear from you!
I feel as though I come across a little harsh in the second paragraph of the above piece, so let me take a bit of the edge off with some explanations & expansions.
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.
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 we've covered above, 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. 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 a porn game through to completion.
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.
Okay I'm done for real now thanks for reading
Sorry sorry one more quick thing I forgot to mention that also didn't really fit well into the original essay or the first addendum: 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. More people should care about this shit! It's fertile ground! Fuck!!!
Okay done for really real this time because I'm just rambling at this point, have a great night
