Theme vs. Mechanics

[Content warning: This post will get pretty heavily into adult content discussion, as it explores ways to theme adult games. Reader discretion is advised.]

Game theming

One of the neat aspects of games is how players can experience things they would otherwise never get a chance to:

You can be pilot of a big airplane, you can be the commander of a giant space army fending off the alien bugs, you can be a slut desperately trying to get to the hotel through the woods, but constantly getting stuck on dildo traps, all from the comfort of your own home.

Such is the power of theming: With just a dash of imagination and some suspension of disbelief, players can be projected into pretty much any story. And where books and movies are restricted to a passive observer, games let the player drive that story and control how it plays out.

It is important to note, and we’ll get back to this, that this is still all fiction and imagination. While there are some promising developments towards using computer games directly as teaching tools, and there are some skills being transferred: A veteran RTS player is not an army general, sim city does not replace an education in urban planning, and no amount of racing car game hours is itself sufficient to grant a driver’s license. Sorry, folks: All those hours spent playing dating sims does not make you an expert in how to fulfill another human’s desires and needs, and will not set you up with a mate for life. (The elephant in the room, about whether or how fictional experiences might inform a person’s expectations, needs, and desires, particularly as to sex, will not be addressed in this post)

Ultimately, all theming is by necessity an approximate model - if you want a perfectly accurate aquarium, get an actual aquarium, not a computer simulation. And frequently, conflicts arise between making a game that’s fun to play, and making a game that’s accurate to its theme. Except for the most die-hard of simulation games, these conflicts are generally resolved towards the “fun to play” angle.

This is a good thing: Games are entertainment, and should be entertaining. All theming exists to support the fantasy that for a moment, the player can feel like a character in the themed situation might feel, without any of the hardships and potential reality-altering that would be necessary to actually put them physically into that situation.

So long as the player is entertained, and ideally having contextually appropriate emotions, the game is working as it should. And so we simplify: Reloading in most shooters is a single tap of the reload hotkey, rather than an intricate dance of levers and hands and pockets. A more complete model would be more accurate, but it would be less fun to play.

I find this is a very easy mistake to make: We quickly get trapped by the theme, making decisions on game flow and UI and mechanics, based on what we think is absolutely vital to conserving the theme. But players are more flexible than we often give them credit for - a bare suggestion of “this represents XYZ” is often enough to kickstart imagination, while clunky and convoluted gameplay easily creates enough frustration to just shatter the illusion outright.

We need to constantly ask ourselves “but is this fun to play?” and make adjustments. Never put theming in charge of gameplay decisions - decide on the experience that we want the player to project themselves into, then build gameplay, and theming to support it. Our goal is to provide a fun few hours where the player can explore a fiction, not to win awards for how closely our fiction aligns with boring reality.

This has been a ramble already, but this is a blog about horny game design, not just general-purpose game design. So let’s explore these principles with some popular concrete themes, provided in a plausibly causal order:

Clothing

Clothing is a neat way to layer modifications: The same underlying character may appear in some situations in different, or even without any, clothing, changing how a scene is perceived.

There is a clash here: In more sandbox-y games without as much game-ification pressure, players are often free to adjust their character’s looks to great extents, without any impact on gameplay. But particularly in RPG-style games, clothing is armor, and even classes that don’t rely on defensive armor, like a wizard, often draw significant stat improvements from higher-level robes.

Most MMO-RPGs I’ve played lately have some mechanic to address this, even though it wasn’t always originally part of the game: It is useful to see at a glance “oh, that character is wearing the XYZ armor, they must be a veteran player”, but it is more important to allow players to express themselves. And so there is typically a way to override the default look of any outfit, to instead appear as if it was some other outfit of the player’s choice.

To finally pull the corner towards horny gaming: In sex-as-adversarial-combat games, I often appreciate clothing destruction as a particularly compelling theme. Here, clothing tends to work as sex hyper-armor: Many sex interactions are dampened or outright forbidden while the clothes are on, but as they come off, more and more actions become available.

Digging into why I think this is so compelling: Horny games are often a cycle of build-up and pay-off, and progressive clothing removal can act as a very mechanically integrated “progression to sexytimes payoff” indicator, allowing a player to see how close they are, and building anticipation. Also, many people just appreciate a good pair of boobs swinging in the breeze, but having characters permanently naked doesn’t fit most settings.

A frequent thing that I think is a mistake: Driven by the traditional RPG model, games with equippable clothing slots often have them provide defensive stats. Which is still fine. The mistake is when a “character stripped” status also negates all these stats. While it’s arguably accurate to the theme, the resulting gameplay is problematic: Now getting stripped not only removes the sex hyperarmor, it also makes characters significantly more vulnerable to normal attacks. This gives players a bad incentive to keep characters clothed at all times, because of how debilitating the “stripped” status is to combat progression. Which means that the sex-in-combat part, the whole reason the horny game is horny to begin with, is actively avoided by players most of the time, which isn’t great.

This is a place where the “but obviously” of theme-driven design bites us. Obviously clothing should confer stats, because that’s how RPGs work, and obviously removal of that clothing should remove those stats, because it must be worn to have an effect. I think this is an example where model accuracy conflicts with fun gameplay. As game designers, we have ultimate authority over the world: We are absolutely allowed to say that defensive stats stick even when the visual clothing does not. It makes the model less accurate (to the extent that we can even argue about accuracy of fictional RPG universes) but may make the game more fun to play.

A few games I’ve played even take this a bit further: They do the whole clothing-as-sex-hyperarmor and stripping-attacks thing, but the “stripped” status is temporary: There is a character action to spend a turn and consumable resources to remove the status immediately, but it will also fade automatically after a few rounds, so long as the character wasn’t locked in any sexytimes that implied continued nudity.

From a theming standpoint, this is completely bizarre: How would a character, in the middle of punching several goblins, magically materialize their clothes back on? But suspension of disbelief can take care of that, particularly when the player has other things to focus on. And it greatly improves gameplay: Fights no longer become all-nude slapfests as an encounter drags on, and there is now more strategic choice: Spending the extra resources to re-dress immediately is the safe but slow choice, but often it’s worth taking the risk-reward path of staying vulnerable to sex for a few turns in exchange for action economy. This also keeps the player from feeling like they would have to play sub-optimally to hit the sexy bits, as there’s now situational reasons for either choice.

Sex

Switching gears a little: How does theming apply to sex itself?

Even though it may seem obvious, allow me to reiterate our earlier arguments: Theming should exist in service of gameplay, and is often far simplified from the reality it’s supposed to model.

To set up an example: Consider building a sawmill in a strategy/planning game. In most games, you declare that you want to build a sawmill and where, and the game consumes resources and eventually a sawmill stands at the indicated spot. Most games do not ask you which resources to use for it, how it should look, how its interior should be designed, which technology it should use. Some games may include one or more of these aspects, if it serves a focus the game is trying to explore, but they’re not the default. Players don’t feel cheated of the full sawmill-construction experience, just because they didn’t get to sue the electrical installers for using the wrong gauge of wire.

By a similar token, I think the default angle on sex as gameplay mechanics should also omit many details, and I feel many games unnecessarily complicated here: Sex can be represented by an image, or an animation, or a descriptive text, without requiring any player interaction: Conceptually, we understand that sex happens, and imagination and suspension of disbelief take care of the rest. We could have the player select the specific details of sex position, or give them a play-by-play progression of acts, or even detailed insert-tab-a-into-slot-b minigames, but we don’t have to. Sometimes they’re providing interesting gameplay, but often they just get in the way.

Again, I think the impulse of “but obviously” is leading us astray, and we should be considering what is fun to play. In a game where half the game is a single sexy evening, micro-managing what happens when and managing everyone’s feelings may be fun. But games where most of the gameplay revolves around other things, a simple “okay, sex happens over here” may be sufficient - the human imagination is a wonderful thing that can fill in many blanks.

Also, even though the horny is typically the point of horny games, the player isn’t necessarily here for all the horny all the time. In games where different encounters produce different scenes, the player may have seen one encounter’s scene many times already, as they’re trying to build game progression, or just hunt for a rare encounter. Taking more than a second or two for “yes, yes, they fuck, been there, seen that, next!” can quickly get frustrating, even with simple progressbar-filling minigames or fixed-time animations.

Ultimately, in most games - I’m fine with an arbitrary pre-defined sex interaction happening for each setup, usually I’m not looking to micromanage the exact what and where.

Pregnancy

[Severe Content Warning: This section discusses a somewhat divisive fetish. Though I try to avoid getting too graphic: If you’re squicked out by the notion of a living being growing inside another, and eventually needing to get out, you may want to skip to the conclusion heading below. I don’t blame you - procreation is a lovecraftian horror show if you think about it for too long.]

As we discuss sex, let’s also get a bit into what it might lead to. It doesn’t have to, because again, we are shaping a world of our own design: If we decide that in our world, sex is good, clean fun with no more consequences than happiness and mild exhaustion, we can absolutely do that, and we can build many great experiences from that.

But pregnancy mechanics are undoubtedly popular, among those into them, though I think it’s less immediately clear why - the motivation for sex is obvious, but what makes pregnancy interesting? An incomplete list of possible angles that different people might have:

  • A gambling/uncertainty element of “that was risky, but maybe I got away with it without consequences?” potentially with a wait time to find out for sure.
  • The idea that it’s proof that “real sex” happened, as opposed to the fake for-show storebought sex.
  • A power dynamic where a woman is now “stuck” carrying something, with someone else having responsibility but none of the burden.
  • A progressive weakening of a once-powerful character, potentially with various bodily changes.
  • The alien-esque horror of carrying other life inside a person.
  • The miracle of life.
  • Just another thematic and mechanically-interesting debuff to change up gameplay.

This variety does make simplification more complicated: If we create a theme that provides some of these things but not others, we might disappoint players who were looking for it. At the same time, we’re still going to have plenty that are fans of what we are providing.

One obvious adjustment that is often necessary is a timewarp: Human pregnancy should take a bit past nine months to fully develop, but many games don’t work on those timescales. Again, suspension of disbelief will take care of most of it, so we’re pretty much free to accelerate timescales to whatever we want, particularly if fantasy and magic gets involved.

Also, if we were to try for detail, we’d probably need to get into maternity leave, which isn’t going to make sense for most games. Perhaps it might be interesting in an xcom-style setup with swappable characters, where it could produce an injury-style status to make a unit inaccessible for a time, but in most games we probably just want a debuff progression, with the character back fully ready for action right away. Similarly, childcare may be a bit much, unless the game is a very focused one-person-life-sim setup.

An interesting variant I wanted to mention: I remember playing some games where an all-women squad of heroines was beating/fucking through various not-necessarily-humanoid creatures of all flavors, which were mostly still quite fertile. This creates a potential problem, as the “life growing inside there” gets even more horror-like in those cases. What they did to solve this is what I’m going to call “Eggnancy” - in all the visuals, what’s growing after fertilization is an egg-shell orb, which gradually increases in size, until it is eventually expelled whole, to be further handled or hatched off-screen. I figured that was a neat way to reduce the horror effect, while still keeping the “growing belly” visuals working.

Ultimately, I think impreg mechanics are tricky to get right, but with a bit of effort, I think they can be a pretty fruitful source of interesting theming and mechanics. It will put off some people, but others will be very much here for it. In the interest of exploring variety, it’s probably worth including now and again.

Conclusion

The conflict between theming accuracy and gameplay is true for all game design, but I think worth calling out specifically for lewd games: I think it’s both easier to be seduced into over-detailed micro-mechanics, but we can also get away with more simplification and suspension of disbelief, as players will have other things on their mind.

However, there’s also fewer well-established “this is how everyone does it” rules, as there haven’t been as many experimental horny games, as we’ve had overall experimental games in various genres.

It’s up to us to make weird games, make crazy games, throw a whole lot of panties at the wall and see which of them stick.