In my spare time, I’m an avid player of video games. I have consistently marvelled at how the industry has evolved to create masterpieces that now exceed the experience offered by Hollywood. I’ve also applauded as, unlike the movie industry, the games industry has expanded to include all sorts of studios and genres from around the world, offering greater cultural diversity and exploration of concepts.
As an example, I was thrilled when an Eastern European studio CD Projekt took on the Witcher series, in so doing giving a middle finger to the prudish American games studios, and tackling a universe that includes racism, bigotry, nudity, sex, lack of consent, and a range of other mature concepts. Finally we had started to mature as an industry and begun to explore actual adult concepts, instead of what typically passes for an American-exported 18+ i.e. ‘bewbs and/or drugs’, even if ratings boards continue to make doing so stupidly difficult.
Over the years I’ve played a lot of different games across many genres, and while I’m no expert or so-called journalist, I feel I can offer some insight into the subject. I can recall times games truly emotionally moved me – Bioware’s Dragon Age: Inquisition (with full downloadable content, because Electronic Arts never could stop themselves from charging extra for a game’s ending) stands out as probably the high point; it had me crying and then in emotional shock for at least a week. I don’t think a movie’s ever achieved that. With the slow erosion of sensible writing in the industry in favour of the nearest social-justice-buzzword dartboard, such high points may become harder to find, which brings me neatly to the topic at hand.
Adult Video Games
Big Drunk Satanic Massacre – it doesn’t have stellar reviews, but with sex, satire, and adult-only unlocks, it shows how mature themes are penetrating (see what I did there, I could work for Polygon with that wit) the games market
I haven’t tried any of these, that’s how many there are, but they look like they have their moments
This blog post isn’t about mainstream games. There are a lot of people doing that already, and I feel little need to re-tread that well-covered ground beyond the above paragraphs. Courtesy of COVID, I had downtime and a desire for minimally taxing entertainment, and found myself in boredom flicking through adult games; the digital equivalent of browsing the top shelf. I found it quite illuminating.
(Incidentally, you may be surprised, amused, or annoyed to discover that some media categorises Second Life as an adult video game… I disagree!)
The first comment I’d make is something of a Public Service Announcement: my god there’s a lot of crap out there. Bring your waders.
Rather like Steam Early Access/Greenlight and Kickstarter, there’s no shortage of talentless fools attempting to part other fools from their money; only this time breasts & dicks are involved and thus probably reduced decision-making capacity. Yet once I browsed past the endless array of nonsense that barely qualifies as teenage fan service, I found to my surprise there are some extremely good games out there. There are also now enough sites offering meaningful reviews (also deeply sketchy free downloads…) that it’s actually possible to find fun & thought-provoking mature video games.
It’s true to say that mature games do have a tendency to focus on matters such as sex, nudity, kinks, drugs, and other aspects of vice, but I think what I enjoyed most about the few gems I encountered was the way they were woven in. Rather than crude depictions or unnecessary instant gratification, the best mature games appear to weave adult concepts throughout the more normal game aspects, including some really good story. Where once we might fade to black, or pretend that a given situation won’t lead a given way, the game instead goes ‘no, this is reality and how it really works’, often covering prejudice, consent, or diseases. I found that so refreshing. It’s also perhaps a commentary that the suppression of such things in the rest of the industry has led to an over-emphasis elsewhere, and if this were balanced out, maybe we’d see more Witchers or Vampire: The Masquerades in the mainstream.
Many are still in development, so you may not always get a complete game if you go looking; some patience may be required, or there’s a risk it’s never finished just as with any Early Access game. This is testament to how new the concept is, driven primarily by Patreon, SubscribeStar and their ilk; a chance for talented artists to connect directly with & be funded by those that want their work. I actually subscribed to one, it was that good.
I was surprised by how many erotic games are now on Steam (increasingly appropriately named). I can’t tell if this is a commentary on Valve’s desire for more money, a liberal ‘anything goes’ viewpoint, or a long game by law enforcement to have clear proof in people’s digital libraries of what they really get up to. Given Steam’s transparent ability to advertise one’s gaming habits to the entire Internet, I can’t say I’m terribly inclined to buy there, but each to their own.
No, really, this is a real game on Steam, and all you have to do is lie about provide your date of birth.
I feel obliged at this point to draw a distinction between two bifurcating themes in the adult market. Some are clearly pure visual novels shoehorned into a digital package; the vast majority of the experience is just clicking to the next image, what one might call the old-school approach of ‘sex sells‘. To me these aren’t games, in much the same way as walking simulators drew the ire of gaming pundits as ‘where exactly is the game here?‘; you could post the whole thing as a video and lose nothing. Others really are games; they feature decisions, dialogue branches, combat, character development, the whole nine yards.
I can probably best illustrate the difference by unrealistically & obsessively focusing on a single entry that turned up in my explorations: the NTR prompt.
Netorare in Japanese eroge is the erotic imagery of your digital significant other sleeping around – this implicitly also means that the game features one or more such characters. A surprisingly large number of games I came across had an NTR option, even where it really makes no sense. I found this amusing, but it also speaks to the relative immaturity of the genre, that we haven’t yet had adult conversations about this (no pun intended).
This intriguing RPG (Seeds of Chaos) features almost every mature concept under the sun, but only worries about me seeing infidelity…
I realise I may be stepping all over hallowed Japanese concepts with my Western heels, but lets’ be brutally honest: the typical eroge appears to be a vehicle for exposing girls of questionable age combined with silly ‘what are you doing, stepfather?!‘ moments. There may be some true classics that are actually good, but that’s not what makes it in translation across the pond.
You’re not my real ladder!!
Most of what is being made today are games, and they deserve to be discussed, analysed, and reviewed in that light. Moreover, eroge is needlessly limiting; game developers should feel free to make mature games, not constrain themselves to what one culture thinks defines mature games.
What’s in a game?
Why am I focusing on the NTR prompt; it might seem an overreaction. In truth, a lot of these games end up with a plethora of prompts or options of ‘is it ok if act {whatever} occurs?‘, and this is a troubling direction. It touches on a fundamental: what is a game, and what is the resulting conversation between the player and the author?
Why would you ask the player if there are consequences they’d rather not see? This doesn’t happen in normal games. Equally if I follow an adult comic, nobody asks me in advance if the comic author decides golden showers are on today’s strip, whether I find that distasteful or not. Name a kink that is likely to be contentious: we could have prompts galore that determine what the player explores.
That doesn’t make options wrong per se – there may be good reason when catering to erotic desires to limit what is seen in the game to an extent (see: ratings boards, gore options, gambling laws) – but conceptually it feels immature. Equally a game author might eschew particular topics or paths because they don’t creatively fit or won’t appeal to their intended audience. That’s all fine & expected.
Eight Billion Ways to Lewd
In much the same way that I don’t buy a racing game when I absolutely detest racing, there’s a concrete argument to be made for not buying an adult game if it heavily features fetishes I’m not into. How has this options-based circumstance come about? A few possibilities come to mind:
- Much of the adult game genre started life as visual novels and it’s just carried over
- The genre is so starved of competent results and so flooded with rubbish that limiting possible audience might be considered foolish
- Feedback is mostly from a sex-starved or sex-addicted crowd that can’t help but try everything & demand it cater to their tastes
- The NTR prompt in particular implies that the consumers can end up so invested in their digital waifu that the sight of that character cheating on the player is emotionally compromising
I have a problem with this in terms of the evolution of the genre: it threatens to compromise the point of making a game. A game has some clear components: player agency, core mechanics, failure states, and an intent to convey a vision from the author to the player. It is the failure states & vision aspects that feel grossly mismanaged by trying to cater to every possible player desire, by allowing the player to opt out of bad ends, character infidelity and so on.
Such designs teach that you can avoid the consequences of your actions by simply opting out. It’s fine to booze & sleep around, drive your wife to distraction, but don’t worry, she won’t cheat on you because you unticked a box that allows it. I find this approach incredibly childish. Reloading a saved game by contrast suggests a desire to learn, to go back and do better/differently, and who amongst us hasn’t had such regrets in real life now and again?
You might by this point be crying out ‘but the point of games is to entertain, they don’t need to be realistic!‘ – quite right, and I am not intending to imply all must be realistic, but what we consume as our entertainment also moulds us, and to qualify as games, they should challenge us in some fashion. I would much rather have a mix of mature and sanitised games to pick from, and debate whether a given creative choice is good (just as we might debate the ending of Mass Effect 3, to touch a nerve for much of the Bioware-consuming audience) vs have developers artificially offer an echo chamber where I never see anything that might offend. These days, the mainstream games industry has that covered.
Similarly, you might still ask ‘Why so serious, Anthea? What’s the big deal?‘ – and in reply, for me, this touches on a wider divergence in thinking, between a pair of world views. Too often, I have encountered reductive thinking that suggests ‘if we just ban it, it’ll go away‘ or ‘if we just deal with the evil people, then the world will be better‘. There is a seductive power to such thinking; it simplifies things, makes them nice consumable soundbites and easy crusading points. It is the cultural equivalent of unticking the NTR box: ‘no, we don’t talk about that here‘.
Slippery Slopes, and other innuendos
The trouble is we’ve tried that. One need only skim ‘The Gulag Archipelago‘ by Solzhenitsyn to establish that the more we untick (or are strongly encouraged to untick by society) the NTR box in our daily lives and pretend things don’t exist, the more we cannot have meaningful conversations about those effects or their causes, and the more they surface as a consequence. How do we learn from a tragic occurrence in human history if nobody is allowed to speak of it? How do we prevent it from occurring again if we do not teach of it?
Sure, it is something of a stretch to go from bouncing digital breasts to how we perceive the world, and again, games need not always be so seriously analyzed or held to such high standards. This is a deep subject worthy of its own books, let alone blog posts, such as the corollary of how much exposure to competing viewpoints is too much for the mind to realistically handle, or how to keep mature topics from children not ready for such things.
Yet I hope I can encourage you to tick the box in some small way; to embrace that you may be challenged by difficult topics or uncomfortable conversations or games that offer narrative choices you don’t agree with; that the choice is one of debate, of realistic portrayal, of support, versus ignorance actively pursued, or worse, chosen for you.
To a artistic future of sexing it up
It is my hope that the gems in mature gaming which blend mature concepts with excellent gameplay succeed, and find their own niche where they do not need to pander to lowest common denominators or attempt to force in options to cover every possible taste – where instead we see game worlds that contain what the game author wants them to contain, and it’s up to us as consumers to decide whether to partake.
Today, these games are often threatened either by suspension of funding by a crusading Patreon, or just doomed to obscurity, with nobody being prepared to risk signal-boosting them. Imagine a world where none of these games were even allowed to exist. Imagine the many sims in Second Life that also explore these things being shut down. Having spent a COVID-filled few weeks with the former, and a decade in the latter, I think that’d be a shame.
To finish with some context on how far we’ve come, I’ll leave you with this 90s promo image I found, presumably from back when ‘erotic games’ were just segments of Full Motion Video. Pitching budget Hercule Poirot vs budget Barb Wire might just be so bad, it’s good – but I doubt it.
I have so many questions…
Anthea in Second Life 
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