pillowkisser

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BPGames
@BPGames

This is ninth 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: @MorganH

It is, at this point, a cliche to introduce any topic on videogames by describing their interactivity as a unique element of the medium. Fortunately, it is not yet a cliche to describe how it is this precise quality that transforms players from fucking themselves to fucking their games.

Adult videogames and pornographic community mods have a long and under-examined history in games, and while there is little criticism on the subject, there is even less that uses adult games to investigate the complicated interface between players and games. Players have had sexual interactions with their videogames long before haptic vibrations turned controllers into makeshift sex toys, but recently, the increasing popularity of porn games and the growing presence of digital connectivity between videogames and electronic toys make this relationship even more intimate and intertwined. Examining how adult games mechanize players’ own bodies reveals a particularly potent image of how videogame play is mediated through corporeal presence.

In his book A Play of Bodies, games scholar Brendan Keogh writes that the videogame play experience is not merely a textual one, but a haptic interaction where both the player and the game synergetically exert upon one another. The ways we play games with our bodies, Keogh argues, inform the experience of the game as much as the “text” of the game itself.

Within the context of adult games, this framework is complicated by its literalization. In playing adult games, the “perceptual apparatus” that Keogh describes swells to include sensations normally avoided by most mainstream games. If the “videogame experience depends on a hybrid sensorial engagement of using a motor gesture to push a button while looking at a screen… while listening to sounds and music,” (Keogh, 2018, 110) then the adult videogame experience appends “while masturbating” to that sequence.

Keogh presents two “technicities” with which to understand videogame experience: the hegemonic hacker-gamer and the more embodied cyborg-players. Though the hacker-gamer paradigm is more concerned with enacting control over the videogame and achieving system mastery, this attitude becomes troubled upon encountering adult games. Any kind of mastery or objective-accomplishment in the context of pornographic videogames necessarily rebounds back towards the player — succeeding at the game typically means masturbating to it (or at least deriving some amount of erotic pleasure), a carnal communication that results in a player-game superbody. The player’s own body becomes the center for haptic attention, the controller through which the success of the game is both measured and pursued.

Adult games typically use erotic content as a reward for the player’s completion of generally standard ludic goals. Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business! is a management / dating simulator in which the player must succeed on a series of “lunch date” minigames in order to advance the erotic content for each of the game’s principal characters; Third Crisis is an action-RPG that features erotica in the combat itself alongside both scenes that are unlocked through story progression and the advancement of a “Perversion” character stat incorporated into the RPG system. In adult visual novels, one of the most ubiquitous forms of pornographic games, erotic scenes are meted out over the course of the game’s story, generally paced such that the player never goes too long in the narrative without encountering explicit content.

A videogame does not need to release as an adult game in order to become one. Community made mods that inject pornographic content into games are extraordinarily popular. In games like Skyrim and The Sims 4, porn content dominates modding communities. In a separate but related phenomenon, networked sex toys are increasingly common and affordable, and so it should be no surprise that the two have begun intercourse. “Buttplug.io” is a website that hosts open-source resources for modders to use to insert networked sex toys (vibrating dildos, buttplugs, strokers, etc.) into videogames, providing compatibility between game events and sex-toy activation. These mods are of various complexity: “Skybutt”, a mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, interfaces with pornographic mods to provide haptic-feedback during modder-created sex scenes. “Buttplug Valley”, takes a different approach, and generates vibrations in Stardew Valley whenever the player performs basic tasks, such as cutting down trees, harvesting crops, or simply completing another in-game day. Even the types of competitive, objective-oriented games highly associated with the hacker-gamer paradigm are transformed into highly embodied play experiences. “Buttplug of Legends - Unity” is a mod for League of Legends that rewards players for completing desirable in-game objectives with (presumably) more desirable in-ass effects, increasing vibrator strength and frequency the better they perform in game.

Increasingly, adult videogames include networked sex toys as a deliberate element of their interface, to the degree that both games and sex tech creators advertise their compatibility. Games such as Treasure of Nadia, Fetish Locator and Third Crisis advertise their partnership with companies like Lovense, which produce networked toys. At its most basic level, these partnerships might be interpreted as most similar to branded controllers or other peripherals, but the discrete quality of interaction with a networked sex toy, unlike, for example, a USB-steering wheel for a racing game or flight sticks for flight simulators, is that the sex toy is not for optimizing input. While both sex toys and other gaming peripherals offer a heightened sense of “immersion,” conforming the physical body to the virtual body, only the sex toy is equipped to allow the player to be acted upon by the videogame.

In this way, regardless of if a videogame has networked sex toy connectivity or expects more manual interaction from the player (such as jerking it), activity that could otherwise be seen as broadly gamist — understood here as a detached, completionist attitude in which the gamer is an external manipulator of the game — is instead rendered corporeal and experiential. The achievement of in-game goals loses its externality as those goals become more intertwined with the player’s own body.

The critical element of adult games as pornography is that they are not passively observed, but rather are longer-form play experiences more bi-directional in nature, acting on the player as they are enacted upon. Pornographic games (like all videogames) are static without the presence of player interaction. While there are fitness games like Wii Fit or Ring Fit Adventure that seek a physical response from their players, and innumerable narrative or experiential games that produce emotional responses, the sexual gameplay of adult games provides a strong and meaningful framework for understanding the corporeal nature of play by abandoning all subtlety.

In order to fully understand the various pleasures of adult games, both literal and figurative, one necessarily needs to consider the relationship between player and videogame as being fundamentally cyborgian as Keogh describes it in A Play of Bodies. The cyborg is a “posthuman amalgamation of player and videogame” which, contrary to the hacker-gamer, “is not ‘in-charge’ of the videogame’s systems but assimilated into them so that the system is the player-and-videogame across bodies and worlds.” (173). In porn games, play occurs with both the game and the self, because here the self is also distributed across the game, and the game in turn reaches out to play with the player.

It is important to not misconstrue the heightened complexity and corporeality of adult games as being of some kind of ero-Edenic virtual paradise where players and their game avatars are unified in enlightened beatitude. Pornographic games can be as rife with misogyny and racism as they can center egalitarian and queer narratives. The hegemonic, heterosexual white masculine figure is still the dominant avatar in the adult game imaginary, and no amount of wireless connectivity to a Bluetooth buttplug changes this. In playing games, we distribute ourselves across the virtual world, bringing our bodies along, inescapable from the politics of being. These bodies might be abled, disabled, a victim of systems of oppression or a beneficiary of them, or even a gleeful enabler of them. In pornographic games the presence of the player’s own sexual body takes on even greater significance. Adult games function only when our bodies are present in every way a body can be present: physically, actively, and sensually. That this sensual interaction pushes players towards a more symbiotic relationship to the game does not cleanse either player or text from their respective contexts.

Therefore, the goal of this essay is not to pedestal porn games as the virtuous pinnacle of interactive media but to demonstrate that the eros of adult games shares and heightens the embodiment inherent in all videogames. It is most useful to consider erotic intercorporeality in videogames as being the clearest, most literal example of how we play games: physically, carnally, inseparably from our bodies. When playing adult games, we become both controller and objective, the vehicle and the destination. When we fuck games, they are also fucking us.

CITATIONS:

Bibliography:

  • Keogh, Brendan. Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames. MIT Press, 2018.

Ludography:

  • Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business! The Men Who Wear Many Hats. Windows, 2020.
  • Third Crisis. Anduo Games. Windows, 2018.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks. Windows, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2021.
  • The Sims 4. Maxis, Electronic Arts. Windows, 2014.
  • Stardew Valley. ConcernedApe. Windows, 2016.
  • League of Legends. Riot games. Windows, 2009.
  • Treasure of Nadia. NLT Media. Windows, 2019.
  • Fetish Locator. ViNovella. Windows, 2019.
  • Wii Fit. Nintendo EAD, Nintendo. Wii, 2007.
  • Ring Fit Adventure. Nintendo EPD, Nintendo. Nintendo Switch, 2019.

Websites:

  • Machulis, Kyle. Buttplug.io. Nonpolynomial. August 2023. https://buttplug.io/
    Software:
  • Skybutt. Version 4, Programotter, April 13, 2020.
  • Buttplug Valley. Version 1.1.0, The Salty Gaming, July 12, 2023.
  • Buttplug of Legends - Unity. Version 1.3.0, Furimanejo, March 28, 2023.

MorganH is an erotica writer and media scholar with a long academic interest in videogames, interactivity, pornography, and instances where the symbolic becomes the literal. As a fiction writer, Morgan is currently working on Acolyte of the Pleasure Goddess, an “Epicurean fantasy novel” that is the start of what will hopefully be a long series. Currently, chapters 1-9 (about 110,000 words) are available free on Literotica. Delighting in online anonymity, Morgan uses any pronouns.

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Bigg
@Bigg

I'll have a wrapping-up post written by this time next week, but for now just enjoy Morgan's excellent writing!


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @BPGames's post:

"masturbating to [the game] -- results in a player-game superbody."

I see. I have always felt I have a superbody. Nice to get it confirmed.

(Also beyond jokes, neat essay.)

Any kind of mastery or objective-accomplishment in the context of pornographic videogames necessarily rebounds back towards the player — succeeding at the game typically means masturbating to it (or at least deriving some amount of erotic pleasure)

Is this truly a requirement of a porn game? Putting aside all the win-by-losing games where ludic success is measured differently from narrative success, this stance seems to preclude alternate play styles - the original Corruption of Champions allowed the character to be chaste and pray away their arousal, and I have a Trials in Tainted Space savefile where I try to do the same as much as possible - or the existence of a "Desert Bus of porn".

While both sex toys and other gaming peripherals offer a heightened sense of “immersion,” conforming the physical body to the virtual body, only the sex toy is equipped to allow the player to be acted upon by the videogame

OK, as a racing game sicko I understand the point you were trying to make here, but I don't think it holds up - putting aside the fact that it's not difficult to find steering wheels and pedals that offer some form of force feedback (which you may not agree is "acting upon" the player), when you're a true sicko you can obtain truly immersive experiences that will act on you far beyond any vibrator.

The critical element of adult games as pornography is that they are not passively observed, but rather are longer-form play experiences more bi-directional in nature, acting on the player as they are enacted upon [... w]hile there are fitness games like Wii Fit or Ring Fit Adventure that seek a physical response from their players, and innumerable narrative or experiential games that produce emotional responses, the sexual gameplay of adult games provides a strong and meaningful framework for understanding the corporeal nature of play by abandoning all subtlety

I think this is again assumed without proof - even if we disagree that crying because of a game meant to make you sad is more or less bidirectional/experiential than orgasming because of a game meant to make you horny, I can once again call upon my racing game sicko knowledge to state people compete in real-time 24-hour races and are fully aware of how their bodies effect their play and vice-versa.

Nevertheless, this article really gave me something to think about.