Tuesday, November 6, 2012

November's Post - Not a rapist.

Okay, so let's start with my game.  No progress, nor was I expecting any.  Could/should get started as soon as the end of the year, so expect some more filler for the next month or so.



Around the interwebs this month there were 2 games that caught my interest.



The first is called Youth Ward, and the demo can be found for free here on Newgrounds.  Let me say straight up that the porn isn't very good.  I was really caught by the story/setting though.  I'm the 'stable' one of all my friends, so I've never had the 'privilege' of being  in a mental house as a patient.  I've visited plenty though, and I'd bet this is pretty much spot on.  So, highly recommend you go play the demo, especially if you know anyone mentally unstable & want to get a glimpse of life on the other side of that door.  Can't recommend it as a buyer, but at only $4, you might consider buying it just to support the artist.  Think of it as a nice donation.



The second game that caught my eye this month is a demo from Toffi.  He's been on a break for a long time, so I was delighted to see him start posting again.  You can find the latest demo on his blog here.  The first two levels kinda left me limp, but this new demon girl boss is damn good.  Toffi has made some of my all time favorite porn games, so I'm just tickled all over to see him back again.   Here's hoping for more in the future.  =)



And now for the meat of this post.

I come back to this question time & time again, & now's a good time as any to pose it.  I'm of the opinion that in order for a game to be a game, it has to have some manner of challenge.  It's a bit trickier to provide a challenge in a sex game though.  The players (presumably) want to see sex.  It's a game, so it makes sense to provide porn as a reward.  The easiest way to do this would be involve gameplay vs  members of the opposite sex.  And as the reward for winning, you get to have your way with them.  Which sounds kind of fun, right up until you take a step back & go - hey, that's called rape.  I don't want to be a rapist.

Consensual sex would of course be best, but if it's consensual then where's the game exactly?  There needs to be a challenge somewhere.  In my racing game, the race was the challenge, and the sex was offered up as a potential reward.  Note the difference between offered rewards & taken rewards.  If the 'dialogue' had been written differently, so that the player was the one offering cars in for sex, the game would have taken on a much darker tone.

In order to avoid this problem, we end up with all manner of befuddled porn games.  In my mind, Illusion is the king of screwy with the sexy.  In "You can't escape the Heroines", the path to porn is to actually lose a fist fight with the girls, so that they will then try & jump you to 'seal your powers'.  Yeah, talk about going around your ass to get to your elbow.  But the more I think about it, it's really hard to provide a challenging game with a sex reward and have the player not come off  as the bad guy.  (There are a few games where the player is the bad guy of course, but let's assume we want to be heros).

We can dodge a lot of these problems by making the hero female & making the computer control the bad guys.  Now we can make the bad guys rapists as well.  They were already bad guys anyway, now we just have one more reason to fight them.   So we get our challenges & we get our sex & we get to be the good guy (girl).  The problem is that in most cases, the sex is provided as a reward for losing, not for winning.  If the player wants to see porn, they have to lose on purpose.  That's opposite the usual goal of playing in the first place.  The player is getting rewarded for sucking at the game.

Oddly, one of the better solutions I've found has been with modded games.  I think I like this because the porn (usually) has nothing to do with the main gameplay at all.  The porn is never there as a quest reward.  About the closest I've ever seen is a whorehouse that required in game money, so in theory your questing pays off with sex, but that's a very loose association in my mind.  Come to think of it, that isn't a bad solution for adding porn to all manner of games.  A brothel on the side means that you can spend your cash however you like, and if the player wants some jollies as well, hey, we just added an easy cash sink.  Perhaps this is why brothels appear in so many role playing games, despite no actual sex?

This is a tough nut to crack, which is why we see so many strange variants on sex games out there.  I'm not planning on fixing it anytime soon, that's for sure.  But it is something my thoughts drift back to constantly.  So I'm ending the post this month with a question to all of you.  If you could make any sex game you wanted, what would it be?  How would the mechanics work?  Would the sex be the main game, a mini-game, or something on the side?  Try to keep your posts short & keep it general, I'm not looking to read dissertations nor am I trying to steal ideas or anything here.  I just think there must be a better way to make fun porn games.

Til next time,
DirtyC101