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This is sixth 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 Callisto Jupiter-Four

None of my favorite erotic games are really queer. Most of them have girls fucking each other. Some of them have trans people. But none of them actually talk about queer experiences or depict queer life. At best, they’re a sort of generic chose-your-own-gender Everyone Is Bi procgen fuckscape. Usually, they’re male-centric, male-dominant narratives where trans people don’t exist and women only fuck each other to appeal to a male audience. A lot of the games I’ve spent hours jerking off to express a worldview that is roundly misogynistic in a way I struggle to square with my enjoyment of them as a queer woman.

There’s erotic games that are explicitly queer. There’s Hardcoded. There’s a solid majority of itch.io VNs. People on Twitter keep telling me to read Coquette Dragoon. I know these games exist; I have played several of them. And yet somehow I did not like them. I don’t intend to put any of them in particular on trial, here, because I think the devs still deserve to have more money, but I have played them and they haven’t done it for me.

Part of this is, I think, genre. I’m a really big fan of slave trainer games. Slave Maker was probably the most influential game in my adolescence and is almost certainly responsible for making me the kind of cool incorrigible dominant I am today. From there I moved to Free Cities, which is probably my most played erotic game of all time and also mechanically and narratively bigoted in just about every way you might imagine. But I play it anyway, because fantasies of training and nonconsent and ownership define much of my inner erotic world, and it delivers on that. The best example of the genre I’ve played that wasn’t by some cum-brained 4chan loser is Lilith’s Throne, whose queer rep comes in the form of blandly nonoffensive “Everyone is Bi and Into You” game mechanics coupled with a handful of tepidly written bi4bi f/f couples. And even Lilith’s Throne (which I like) doesn’t quite scratch the same itch.

Free Cities is a game where you play a libertarian oligarch (either a man or a woman “affecting male attitudes and tastes”) who uses their vast wealth and social power to enslave women (or men, who immediately become identified as women upon enslavement). You break them through a regimen of control and violence they are helpless to resist, over the course of months transforming them from terrified and resentful captives to indoctrinated Stockholm’s Syndrome cases, in love with you but “sensibly frightened of your total power over [them]”. The paradigm is nakedly misogynistic, horribly transphobic, and the racism is super there if you click the racism box on game start. It’s also extremely hot. The sense of power is intoxicating. The psychological resistance of your victims feels real, has bite to it. The overall game loop (an economics simulation that is at times brutally difficult, forcing you to sell victims you’ve spent months training and conditioning so you can stay afloat) masterfully produces a grinding sense of objectification that is as skeezy as it is thrilling.

By contrast, Lilith’s Throne has slavery, but it’s soft and inoffensive. Your victims “deserve it”-- they’re criminals and generally speaking attacked you in an alleyway before becoming your victim. They’re all attracted to you and happily consent to sex if you happen to be presenting as one of their preferred genders. Their hatred for you has all the bite of a moody teenager and if you leave them in a decent room with decent food for a couple weeks they will quickly become your doting, head-over-heels submissive. It’s absolutely a game where you can kidnap a woman, make her like you, put her in a cute dress, and make her clean your house, but it lacks the verisimilitude and the bite of Free Cities and games like it.

And the thing is, this happens a lot in queer games. Queer games want to be safe. They want to be kind. They want to be gentle. And I understand why that’s the case. Our lives often feel unsafe, unkind, and callous, and it can be nice to play pretend that we’re in a world that isn’t like that for an hour or two. And, more, when sex is such a focus of the ways the world is out to fuck us, making a safe space can be critical to letting people enjoy themselves. But that’s not the only response people have to the queer condition. Some of us need things to be rougher, more cruel, more dangerous. Some of us want to be the one making the world unsafe, for an hour or two. And there’s plenty of horny queer art that scratches that itch for me. I’ve read comics and novels by queer people, for queer people, that are unsafe in the way I want. But video games just... don’t get there, nine times out of ten.

It bears saying that there’s social pressures at play, here. Queer creators are under an incredible amount of scrutiny not to make shit I like because making shit I like is how trans women get called rapists on twitter and wind up bullied into nonexistance. I get it! I am also a queer creator and I’m also terrified of posting anything with more grit than an episode of Steven Universe. But at the same time I think we’re obligated to talk about this, and to push back against the people in the queer community who want to strip our sexuality of anything objectionable out of some sense of propriety. I don’t want to let them win! And I think in lots of mediums, you find a lot more people pushing back against this puritanism than you do in games.

I think it comes down to the unique relationship a player has to a game world. It’s easy, relatively speaking, to read a horny webcomic with some sex crimes in it and position yourself as the mere witness to these events. Some genres of game offer similar levels of protective distance. But heavily gamified genres like slavemakers and life sims inevitably cast the player as the aggressor, and demand that the developer appeal to the perspective of the aggressor when designing them. This is a hard position for queer people to be in. We are not used to being the aggressor; we are used to hating the aggressor. That’s why it’s so much easier for weird mediocre straight people currently downloading the entire Princess Peach tag of rule34 to make these kinds of games than for queers with a well-developed sense of sexual ethics. They are used to the perspective of the aggressor; so used to it, indeed, that they barely recognize themselves in the mirror. And that lets them go harder and pull fewer punches than developers who are so familiar with what it’s like to be on the receiving end.

I don’t like the fatalism of that conclusion. I don’t like the way it equates my desire for control and power with a desire to identify with hegemony. I would absolutely devour some kind of revenge-fantasy about, like, a broke trans woman breaking and enslaving her way up the system. I would genuinely love a D/s-y management sim that doesn’t involve a recapitulation of chattel slavery, actually. But there’s definitely internal forces at play that condition us away from portraying too much hard-hitting wickedness, to say nothing of the external forces-- the way the queer community attacks itself for producing “deviant” art in a way that the cumlords shitting out het-focus sex games don’t have to deal with. I don’t know how to fix it. I struggle with this pressure in my own writing. Trying to write a rape scene sends me into paroxysm of self-doubt; I can only imagine how bad it would be if I tried to write a rape simulator. But we have to figure something out, because I’m sick of living in a world where no game that can get me off is aware that trans people exist.

Callisto Jupiter-Four is a dominant butch trans woman. She sometimes writes erotica as elgeonmb on Ao3.

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in reply to @BPGames's post:

Fantastic piece, really appreciate hearing this perspective voiced so well 'cause it makes me feel seen.

In general I think itch's ecosystem for 18+ work is still a bit immature. I love tons of the queer VNs you talk about as stories, even if I don't actually get off to them. (And there are a few like Victim Doll by communistsister that get me there.) But most of the games on there that feel like they'd appeal to my lizard brain are eternally-incomplete demos linked to a patreon somewhere, instead of complete commercial products I can buy. And I'm not a huge fan of the 3D renders most of them use.

If you want tons and tons of good smut games, 18+ games with danger and real edge and attractive 2d art, dlsite has oceans of it. Mangagamer has a nice selection too. I've been picking up stuff on those storefronts for years and I've generally felt more rewarded than when I've trawled adult games on itch.