i zhink suggesting people should stop saying "protect zhe dolls" and start saying "protect trans people" misses zhe entire point of having zhe catchy slogan in zhe first place

i get youre not included here but you solve zhat by making your own catchy slogan people can wear in public or chuck at zhe end of speeches wizhout making a huge obvious stance, not to get hissy at allies who are already doing more zhan zhey would normally

touch grass (tear out your lawn with your bare hands and replace it with native mosses)

@eclairwolf there’s a few of the platformer ones that i thought were pretty funny and glad they exist (but not from a “wau this is hot” kind of way)

there’s a video that @kasdeya sent me a long time ago about how game design has spent significant amounts of time researching and honing gameplay mechanics which center violence and i can’t help but wonder if we simply don’t understand what mechanics lend themselves to smut games because it’s just Different in every possible way. violence is often a tool for achieving a goal which makes it well-suited for our current model of gameplay loop design. violence/combat is our short-term goal and is very easy to explain (kill or die). we’ve seen more non-violent options added to games that center violence and combat, but this is still centering combat even if we offer a way to circumvent or subvert it.

much like you pointed out, sex isn’t a tool to achieve a goal (…, well, it can be but that’s something else). however, when we think of sex this way, it works perfectly well in our current game design models as a gameplay mechanic… unfortunately, i feel that we lose the reason we wanted it in the game in the first place.

no,bad claire, do not call bdsm "simon says, but for perverts"

@salad_bar_breath not to defend too much the zero thoughts regurgitation of information but it’s not surprising to me that people implicitly build up a worldview that mostly supports the status quo. it’s very hard to critically think about every bit of information we get when our primary concern is looks at spread of late bills on the table

i’m still undoing decades of nonsense i’ve picked up over a lifetime

@lukyan ah,, yeah sorry! i was specifically talking about smutgame mechanics! stats/attributes are pretty well-defined for combat/nonsmut stuff so i think we can be reasonably sure it works there. i think in any case where there’s a dual-genre separation, you can apply typical game design stuff. though, it does come back to the discussion of “are these mechanics well-integrated into the overall gameplay” when doing something like that

@eclairwolf

@eclairwolf of the porn games i’ve worked on, they often tried extremely novel things that worked to varying degrees. i’m not comfortable listing which ones in public but i’ll talk about what i think worked at a high level and what didn’t

• pet management games

this one is surprising to me but this one seemed to work pretty well. i am extremely uncomfortable with the dubcon elements that these have, but these same issues are present in pokemon games too so i guess most players don’t care? i wasn’t really into the games personally but they seemed to be pretty well liked so maybe there are things to take away here? from what i could tell, it had one major thing going for it: there was an objective associated with sex which was plausible enough to roll with.

• correct pacing

for some reason, it’s always appreciated when the player can control the pace and speed at which things happen in the game. i wonder why

• stats

stats / attributes in smut games always seem frustrating. i’m not sure if this is an unpopular opinion but it overly gamifies the experience for me. i think there is a way to incorporate stats/rpg stuff into smut games but stat gating player experience just feels bad. maybe it’s because rpg mechanics are from the perspective of “my character is passing/failing this action” but if there’s any level of wish fulfillment, this just gets in the way.

• minigames

these seem extremely hit/miss whether they work or not. i’m pretty sure “move your mouse up and down really fast to masturbate” never works but there might be something to a subtler approach, especially if the player is already invested in the experience and not racing toward the next sex scene.

• platformers

stop

@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