The Folly of Porn Games
- Posted on
- By L
So focused on the porn aspect that they forget they’re supposed to be games.
Have any of you ever played a porn game? A porn video game, specifically. If so, you might be familiar with the complete disregard for game design present in them. Most porn games are just simple match-in-a-row games, a-la Candy Crush, with vague moaning in the background and then the reward of a naked anime girl of some kind. These games frequently have a tepid story element justifying themselves, and then a gallery where you can view the images after the fact.
This seems completely ridiculous to me, frankly. A porn GAME should have interesting GAMEplay, otherwise you could just achieve the same thing by watching regular porn! I’m talking about a simulator where you have to hit quicktime events to get your partner to cum, I’m talking complex dialogue trees and multiple endings, some of which don’t end in sex. You should be able to fuck up and not get the porn if you play the game bad enough. Maybe a rhythm game that has them get more naked or closer to orgasm the more combos you hit!
There are many pornographic visual novels that exist, and those are not what I’m talking about. A visual novel frequently has no gameplay at all, therefore there is no gameplay to improve upon. A visual novel is an interactive storytelling medium that happens to be a video game, not a video game medium that happens to tell a story. A visual novel can be part of a porn game, but if you’re going to go through the trouble of integrating additional game mechanics, then they have to justify themselves.
I went looking for better-designed porn games, and found one on itch.io where you use your mouse to control a proxy of a penis, with which you have sex with a sex robot. This was kind of interesting! It’s a more novel mechanic and integrates the actual intercourse with the gameplay! Unfortunately, it became very quickly repetitive and boring, limiting you as the player with what you’re able to do, and confining you to a very vanilla, cishetero sex experience. It’s a start! A model for a future of more engaging porn gameplay, perhaps, but we’ve still got a long way to go.
I’m of the mind that art must justify itself, it must give me a reason for engaging with it, and art that assumes it is entitled to my attention and respect by virtue of it existing is bad art. In this same vein, a game that has no reason for being a game is a bad game. If you wanted to make a visual novel or draw a comic, and instead you made a weird space shooter that reveals a big naked woman for some reason, then that’s not good game design! Though maybe I’m being too critical- it must be tough to design gameplay that can work with only one hand.
Happy gaming!