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