@eclairwolf barges through the door uninvited yes hello are we talking about one of my favorite intersections of things

if this topic isn’t anything then i spend a lot of my time wasted because i actually think about this a fair bit. disclaimer: i don’t find the vast majority of sex games sexy, and i very often find many of them silly, gross, boring, or some combination.

deliberately setting aside your very good point of “how do i add an inherently objectiveless act into my goal oriented game” for now, there’s also a few other things i’ve noticed that are difficult to handle correctly. how do we make a game which…

• meaningfully models/signals consent? we can, of course, have noncon/dubcon games but i think this only goes so far and undercuts letting the player feel desirable (i also am personally not into noncon lmao)
• avoids feeling transactional? buy 10x of your victim Crush’s favorite thing and you get one (1) tity flash
• meaningfully integrates smut with gameplay? this covers both “win this romhack of tetris to get a low res hentai pic” and “get an SSS+ score on this tity fucking minigame for 20 romance points”

i think putting it this way kinda explains why so many porn games are that type of “avoid the monster or get raped” game. it leans on well-developed gameplay mechanics, integrates smut in an extremely minimally meaningful way, and it’s not transactional. unfortunately for this design, it’s flawed from the start because this just creates a perverse incentive: players just run directly into the enemies to see the sex scenes i would bet that most players don’t get past the first 10% of the first level in these.

so how do we make a game which meets all the above criteria, doesn’t make sex a goal, but also is enough of a game to encourage the player to keep going? the games that i feel do this the best are ones that focus on the player’s relationship with other game characters… which, honestly is not all that surprising to me. this actually goes directly back to your point of “sex is to feel good and also maybe to share with others that i want to share it with.” i think this is why VNs are so good at this particular thing and every other game is awful. they often focus on a player’s relationships with others which gives a vehicle to include smut in a way that doesn’t have to be gamified. it’s also possible to (relatively) easily meet the other criteria listed above

other ways i’ve tried thinking about it:

• games as a power fantasy / wish fulfillment

this seems like a model that would be naturally suited to making smut games but i think it actually poses more problems than solutions. foremost, again, is consent and desirability – giving power to the player is to give them absolute freedom in choice (at the expense of others). this works well in games where you’re brutalizing a cave full of creatures but this can feel kinda bad if we also want to feel desired. we can try to marry this with “well your character has 100000 Desirability stat and used the Seduce skill” but idk i just hate that.

• start from what works and move back toward other game types

if we know that text games and visual novels work, maybe there’s some gap in game design knowledge, player expectation, or both that we’ve yet to deal with. it might be worthwhile to explore what works and what doesn’t by making games that are one step removed from a successful example. can we introduce gameplay mechanics to VNs/text games until we ship of theseus a porn game?

https://akko.chir.rs/objects/0e6485ca-8518-49f9-9f2e-0ecafbfc9c3f

i'm just saying, it's romantic to take an interest in the things your girlfriend is excited about! even if those things are "brainwashing you"

sorry i havent been around lately gamers, ive been horribly sick and nauseous for like a few weeks now and the past week has been kinda Terrible so i’ve been in bed playing gambling simulators balatro and luck be a landlord

ah the familiar curse of having extremely limited social energy and extremely unlimited loneliness