Porn games are exploration games

I find that many porn games are basically exploration games. Let me explain.

I don’t mean that they’re all just walking simulators with no interactivity. If you’re looking for non-interactive porn, the internet has many galleries and videos for you. What I mean is that as the player, I am typically not trying to speedrun the game as quickly and efficiently as possible, nor am I usually trying to win the tournament and be the very best. I’m just trying to walk through the game and see everything it has to show.

Another way to see it might be “achievement-hunting games”: In most games, I want to try and get all the scenes as I make my way through - I typically want to get everything before progressing the plot, because that often locks out previous content. Some of this may be due to low replayability, so that one time was probably the only time I will get there in a while. If there’s something implemented in the game, I probably want to see it.

All this boils down to how I feel about difficulty in porn games - I often find myself frustrated when games try to be particularly difficult. I’m just here for the boobs, dang it. Not that this means that games need to be trivial, otherwise we’re just back at non-interactive galleries again.

Difficulty is random, horny even more so.

I mostly agree with the excellent Tom Francis when he says that difficulty is random. People have different approaches to games, vary in ability, some see “cheesy” tricks instantly, others just don’t. Effectively, the intended difficulty of a game can come across dramatically differently depending on who’s playing it.

And that’s just regular, SFW gaming already having this problem. Throw in gameplay-integrated porn, and things get much worse: Our players won’t always have two hands above the table, they may be distracted, they may have horny on the brain. And there’s entire industries built around how humans do not always act rationally when the horny gets involved.

Again, I’m not proposing that all porn games should simply be “click for next picture” linear galleries. We do need gaming in our gaming. But I think we need to be extra careful about difficulty tuning. Asking for a bunch of precision inputs can be problematic, even basic reaction-time or quick-math checks can become an unexpected problem. I think slow strategy-type selection is the safest, where the game waits indefinitely for the player to make a move. But even then, beware that players may well be picking choices to get to a particular scene, not the one that gets them into the safest position.

I’m probably going to write an entire article about this later, but consider that last point: If you let them, players will set their own goals, and you should probably let them. At the end of the day, we’re here to have fun, and the player is the only one who can really say what’s fun to them right now. When possible, there should be several viable approaches, and soft failures.

Elixir syndrome

There’s an interesting game design term: Elixir syndrome. I’m going to try and briefly explain it, for those unfamiliar:

In many JRPGs of old, there was an “elixir” consumable item, which often restored full HP and MP of all party members on use. This was immensely powerful, basically restoring a party to full fighting power while leaving the enemy in their current weakened state. To balance this out, this consumable could typically not be bought in shops, you could only get it from chests hidden in dungeons, so there was a small, finite supply, and each one you used, you could never get back. The net result was that this was an item that most players would never use. Even if they were in a boss fight at the end of a dungeon, they would rather reload a save and try again than spend an elixir mid-fight, because what if the next dungeon has an even more difficult boss and we’ll need it then?

So I would say that elixir syndrome happens whenever players choose to conserve a resource, even if it would be useful now, out of fear that otherwise, the game may punish them later for not having it - and the game never quite puts up a sign “it’s a good idea to use an elixirs here”, so players will save them right through the credits.

Note that this isn’t just limited to restoration items. It can apply to any resource, including HP: If players are sticking to safe, slow, low-risk strategies and never using the flashy high-risk-high-reward moves, because they think low HP may make fights unwinnable later - your players may be suffering from elixir syndrome.

In general, I think, games may have some long-term resources that need to be used sparingly throughout, but some resources should be short-term, to be spent freely at the player’s discretion: If there’s a savepoint before every boss, and the savepoint restores HP and MP to full, then players have more confidence that they can spend these resources: Reaching the savepoint at 0 MP counts just the same as reaching it at full MP. Alternatively, ambient MP regeneration encourages players to cast spells, as the MP will recharge anyway, and they’re just “losing” mana to regen past the cap otherwise.

For consumables like potions, making them cheaply purchased at vendors, but limiting how many the player can carry, can help get players to see them as rechargeable resources to be freely spent: Effectively they’ll probably be full up whenever they leave town, and they shouldn’t spend the entire stack immediately, but returning to camp with nearly empty inventories isn’t a big problem.

So how does this relate to porn games? Often, the player goals of “gain game progression” and “see porn” are in opposition: If the porn comes from taking a particular enemy attack, then bypassing or quickly winning the encounter will avoid the porn, much as it is generally the optimal strategy to gain progression while minimizing resource consumption.

When games get too far into elixir-syndrome territory, players will initially avoid any new enemies they see, until they reach a save point, and they can quickly go back to see what it does without permanently spending resources. Which can still work, and there’s good games doing this, but it feels suboptimal.

Ideally, I think I would want players feel secure in taking some risks, and using strategies that aren’t minmax-optimal, because it lets them play the game in a direction they want. They should feel confident to experiment, to explore. Exploration games!

Of course, the game should still not be without any challenge, the players probably don’t want to feel stuck in a sandbox where you “can’t lose” and their choices are ultimately meaningless.

Soft failure states

One way that I like to look at failure in games: When the player screws up, loses, dies, or hits one of the plethora of ways in which a game can say “no”, how much time will it take them to get back to an equivalent position to where they were just before they lost?

Different games address this differently:

  • RPGs traditionally just hand you a game over screen and make the player reload from a save.
  • Many modern RPGs teleport the player into town / base camp, with the inventory state they had on death. This is nicer on players in typical field battles, as they get to keep what they collected so far. But it can actually be worse in boss fights, as they not only need to get back to the boss, they might also need to farm back any consumables they spent in that fight.
  • Some rare platformers have no death states, but dropping down can still mean a lot of retracing previous steps.
  • Celeste and VVVVVV are worth calling out: They hard reset the player to the last checkpoint, but checkpoints are so frequent that this typically loses a few seconds or a few minutes at most.
  • Roguelites typically reset the player entirely, often moving forward some permanent-upgrade meta progression, to soften the blow. But the player can only start a new run, which will likely be very different. From a strict “how much time to get back” standpoint, the answer would be a very long time indeed.

There’s more to talk about in another post, but for now, note how failure states can interact with elixir syndrome:

A failure state that sets the player back less progress will make the player more likely to experiment and try high-risk-high-reward strategies, as the cost of failure is lower. Similarly, following the horny is less dangerous if the worst it can do is set you back a few minutes.

Summary

If we’re focusing on player experience (and as game developers we should be), I think we need to consider what encourages and discourages the player from engaging in the game content that we want them to.

It is absolutely possible to make good games that ignore or even break the ideas here - your run-of-the-mill daz3d landlady-tenant dating sim still functions as a game without having to worry about elixir syndrome. But particularly if we’re going to make more mechanically complex games, I think it’s worth considering these angles, and how they shift under the unique challenges and opportunities of porn games.

I hope that with this blog, we can try to explore these in more depth.