Before I started using Cohost, I hadn't really understood that porn games where a thing. I knew about stuff like lewd card games and mahjong or whatever, but I didn't really understand there were other sorts of porn games.
As someone interested in games, and especially games that manage to deliver some sort of emotional payload, I have since picked a few up. I even played some start to finish (pun not intended).
Did y'all know many of these are basically visual novels? I didn't. I'd even go so far as to say, many of these are more about the courtship than just the Doin' It. I think that's great.
I found myself remembering a college roommate who had a copy of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball and how I thought that game was really interesting because there's the volleyball part which is okay, but then there's this whole other part where you're supposed to foster friendship with the other athletes by listening to things they like and buying them fitting gifts and so on. Some porn games play a lot like that, except you substitute the volleyball matches with sex scenes.
Anyway, a big takeaway for me in all this "research" I've been doing is this: games that bother to model the relationships between characters are way more interesting than the ones that don't. Some people snark at "romance systems" but I think that is a valid approach toward this.
If I squint my eyes, I can recognize a resonance in From Software's Dark Souls series, each game of which includes what I've long referred to as "political intrigue." Common in Dark Souls games is to have an ensemble of NPCs who each bring their own agenda or have hidden motivations, and through your interactions and choices you can wind up betraying one to win favor with another and so on. These elements add an emotional weight to all the action that happens to be woven through the game, and for me this makes everything better.
Thanks to @Bigg who has been my casual-via-osmosis educator in this. Follow @Bigg for porn and porn accessories.