Get the kiddies out of the room, I’m going to be talking about a slightly different type of game: those with naughty bits. No pictures, but still… probably not very safe for work.

If you’ve been on the Internet for more than an hour, you know that people are obsessed with porn.  With the advent of relatively easy to use programs like Flash, GameMaker and Ren’Py, amateur devs have never had it easier when making imaginary characters bump uglies with each other. Of course, being a still relatively new “genre” of games, many devs often make common mistakes. In this post, I will describe my findings after hours of indulgence research.

Note: I am NOT talking about interactive animations. Just because you have to click “play” a few times does not mean it is a game.

Porn With Gameplay Attached

The most common porn-game out there is the “Porn with Gameplay Attached” (or PWG). If you’ve been on any of the adult flash websites, you are familiar with this type of game. Stuff like porn quizzes, match 2, and breakout are what I’m talking about. In these games, the gameplay only serves as a stopper for the player, limiting their porn intake based on skill or luck. This is one of the most infuriating and confusing approaches I could find.

To understand why it’s annoying, we have to look at what niche the porn games have over other forms of porn, like movies or pictures. In porn movies and pictures, the “plot” happens to you, with you having very little control over what exactly happens. In porn games, one of the biggest appeals is the aspect of control you have over what is happening. You get to decide which characters bone, for how long, in what position etc. In PWGs, you don’t really have any control. You only get your satisfaction if you pass an arbitrary test, and that arbitrary test could just as simply be “click on the thumbnail to play the video.”

But, as with anything, there is sometimes good examples of a bad genre. In this case, Artificial Academy is a way to do the PWG right. In AA, you control a student or a teacher walking around in a hentai comic, boning random people and watching relationships form and dissolve. This is interesting because both elements, the porn and the game, are absolutely atrocious when taken by themselves. The porn is that 3D celshaded thing that looks kind of weird, and the game is basically the most boring part of a visual novel. But, put them together and you get something interesting: porn that makes it’s own plot.

The absolute biggest thing is how the characters will interact with each other. In one session, I made a wimpy and shy boy and a tough, short tomboy. The tomboy and the wimpy got together almost instantly, but their relationship was special. The tomboy would insult the boy, and they would break up quite often. However, in a class of about 26 girls and 4 guys, this boy always got back together with what was essentially the meanest girl in the entire school. I also found it really interesting that many other girls would fawn over him, but he never gave them the time of day. Because the game gives you so little hard data, you are allowed to fill in the gaps yourself. I always thought that the girl was this big meany pants to everyone in public, but was able to finally be herself and open up with this shy, reserved and quiet boy. It was… sweet in a way that no other form of porn can be.

Games with Porn Attached

On the other end of the spectrum, we find the “Games with Porn Attached” (or GWP). These games are similar to the “run or rape” style of games like Kurovadis and Demon Girl. There is a game, but sometimes sex happens.  In the two games mentioned before, you play as a girl trying to escape a bad place. In your way are lots of sexually charged monsters trying to copulate with you, but luckily you have a few skills to be able to bypass the enemies. These games are much more interesting to talk about, especially when you look at the player as two different entities: the gamer and the porn-er.

As a gamer, your goal is simple: have fun. The easiest way to have fun is to conquer challenges and beat the game. You do this by running around, killing or avoiding enemies, reaching the boss and killing it in a gruesome manner. When confronted by an enemy or an obstacle, the player will want to either avoid, or kill, the offending obstacle. In games like Kurovadis, this also usually gives some sort of reward like health or ammo, to make the next fight easier.

As a porn-er, you goal is simple: consume porn. In these games, the porn often comes with as part of a negative consequence to you failing part of the game. In Demon Girl, for example, your avatar gets raped (a porn event) whenever you hit an enemy (a failure state). Immediately you can see the conundrum a person playing such a game would have. In these games, the player is either rewarded for losing, as they get porn for being hit, or punished for porn, as they lose health when porn happens.

To put this whole thing into a non-porn example, let’s say you are playing an MMORPG like World of Warcraft. Normally, when you succeed in killing the enemy, you are rewarded with experience and loot. However, in the bizarro world of GWPs, you are actually DENIED the exp and loot for killing the monster. Or, if you were to take the loot and exp, the game says you lost. Overall, these games are frustrating because I feel like no matter what I do, I feel like the game has said I failed.

But, just like Artificial Academy, there are some GWPs that do it right. The game I have in mind is Dragon Bride, a Dragon Quest porn parody thing. In this game, you are the big bad of the first Dragon Quest, and you are facing the hero of the game. Just like in the game, you offer the hero a chance to rule half the world, but this time he accepts. You get the worlds females, he gets the males. In the transference, you are transformed into a female, and your court mage gives you a magical penis to help keep the population from dying off. Unfortunately, the people seem to hate you, so you won’t be having any consensual sex in the missionary position.

Excuse plot aside, this game turns the usual formula and flips it on its head. Instead of a frail girl trying to protect her various holes from offending tentacles, you are a monster trying to rape as many anime babes as possible. Basically, this turns what was once a punishment (losing = rape) into a reward (winning = rape). You hit people with spells and whips, and they may fall down. If they do, that’s your cue to jump on them and perform the sex animation. Doing so will automatically defeat them, you get some mana back, and you get to see porn. All in all, that is a win for you, with no gameplay or porn related losses. And, if you lose, you don’t get to see any special scenes, because, well, you lost. You loser.

Gameplay and Porn Married

But, even the well made GWP and PWG are just that, games/porn with porn/games stapled on. It’s like those camp utensils that are a spoon on one end and a fork on the other: it may work well, but they are still essentially two separate tools. The holy grail of porn gaming is when both the porn aspects and the game aspects marry together in big happy hybrid that is more than the sum of it’s parts. Unfortunately, I have yet to find such a mythical game, but I will describe two games that are tantalizingly close, but just not quite there.

The first is Corruption of Champions, and by extension all other text based games like it. You play as a normal boring human champion sent from Ingrad or somewhere to kill the slut god or something, the plot isn’t a big deal. The biggest deal is that in the land of Mareth, everything can transform you into a variety of different shapes and sizes. Eat a fox fruit and suddenly you have red fur. Eat spider silk and you now have a huge ass that can produce silk. Become a half-demon, half-goblin 12 foot tall monster with 3 equine penises, 2 rows of breasts that lactate honey and a tail that can cause whatever you want to suddenly lose the will to fight and want to screw you. It’s a very interesting concept because it allows the player almost absolute freedom, but there is a problem: content.

There is… well… not a lot you can do. Sure, you can become 12 feet tall, but that doesn’t really affect anything. Sure, you can get breasts the size of a mini-cooper, but it doesn’t affect anything. Sure, you can become a giant bee, but aside from being able to fly away from enemies and sting them, it doesn’t really affect anything. A lot of things just seem to fail to have any sort of consequence. If I rape a bunch of goblins, shouldn’t that affect how the other goblins treat me? Or why can’t I use my wings to scout an area and choose who I want to attack?

On the other hand, the game Breeding Season get’s away from a lot of the problems that CoC has by focusing itself on one thing: breeding. The game is basically Reccetear meets the breeding of Pokemon. You are a young breeder in blah blah… debt yaddah yaddah… buy monsters blah blah… breed them blah blah… sell monsters etc. The only problem I have is that the main aspect of the game, the breeding, feels a bit routine and boring. I have to increase this one monster’s stats so I can sell it on the market for a load of dosh, and that involves a lot of repetitive scene watching. It’s just kind of… well… boring. Especially in the early game where all you care about is getting monsters with good base stats. There is a certain level of eugenics that I actually kind of like. A combination of limited time and space in your kennels means that the choices you make are often meaningful.

Again, the game falls off with just not enough content. But, the game is still in alpha, and it’s in the middle of a complete overhaul, so I have high hopes for it. The people working on it seem dedicated, so maybe. We’ll see.

In my mind, the perfect blend of porn and gaming comes when both sides manage to benefit the other without being sacrificed. Artificial Academy and Dragon Bride are still good games, but they could be more. CoC and Breeding Season are great ideas, they just need more stuff to make it interesting.