Erotic games - the good, the bad, and the ugly. This is about one of the latter.

[Top Cat]

I've been scouting around for decent erotic games for a while now, and I'm still coming away disappointed with most of them. For some, the idea of having a competent writer is a novel concept that they might consider later, after they're done with this porning thing they're trying out. For others, the artwork is bad, or the animation is three panels on repeat (or both). And some can't seem to match the artwork to the actions and dialogue in the text.

And then there's some that manage to fail on all three counts. From an ad on Reddit, I picked up The Spellbook yesterday, and got around to trying it today. The artwork is the same 3d model stuff you'll see in dozens of other porn games (I can't remember the program used, but it's all over the place, and at a minimum, could really use some fine detail clean-up after the quick-and-easy posing jobs are done). The dialogue is stilted and uneven, making it pretty clear that the writer is either not a native English speaker, or failed 6th grade English, or both.

Then there's the writing not matching the artwork. There's a scene where your character gets upset that a male buddy is perving on your "landlady" (I'll get to that in a minute), and you punch him - which is an incredible overreaction for someone perving on someone you're not related to, and don't have a crush on. But again, I'll get to that in a minute. Your friend, in the picture, is glaring at you... but the dialogue has him shaking it off with, "No problem, I deserved that."

And then we get to the problem of your landlady. At the start of the game, it asks how you want to address her, and then uses whatever word you type in as a filler-word. Since the default is landlady, and it asked how you want to address her, I thought "ma'am" would be a good choice. Only it overuses this word - it's what you call her directly, it's what out-of-dialogue refers to her, and it's how other players refer to her when talking about her... except, in the last case, it's "your *blank*." Which ends up with really awkward text no matter what you put in, with one exception. Calling her ma'am results in friends calling her your ma'am. Calling her aunt makes that part of it work, but then you have parts where you'd be directly calling her aunt. "Aunt, will you do this thing for me?" That's clunky. And the default, landlady, is also painful to read when you're addressing her directly. Why aren't you just calling her by her name?

There is one word that works in all cases, though. It also makes sense why you wouldn't call her by her name, even when others are. The word is "mom." If she's "your mom," then your character getting upset when a friend is perving on her makes sense. Calling her mom directly also works, and so does mentioning her in expository text.

Which brings me to another problem. The Spellbook is a story about magical mind control. It boasts a wide range of kinks and fetishes. But for some reason, it pulls a hard right and avoids actually embracing incest, even when it's literally the only thing that actually makes sense in the way the story is presented. Calling her your "landlady" is a weak swerve, and for what? To avoid pissing off some readers? Mind-controlled rape and bondage is A-OK, but incest is a bridge too far?

This is not the first time I've hit this particular kink avoidance, and it irritates me. A much better game in nearly every respect, Snow Daze, is also a mind-control fetish story, and the protagonist is hypnotizing his mother and sisters. Except that before the story even starts, there's a prologue, out-of-story, where a perverted cat god goes to great lengths to tell you that while, yes, these are your mother and sister, you're not actually related by blood. It's just a pocket universe created by this cat god to explore this weird kink... but no, no, it's not blood incest.

Why? Why do people go out of their way to embrace and create a story about a fringe kink (hypnosis/mind control... although I'm not sure how "fringe" it actually is, since I do see a lot of it), but avoid this other kink. Are they afraid that it will turn off too much of the player base, or is there some law criminalizing incest in video games (which clearly does not apply to other media, as there's plenty of Dad-on-Daughter and Mom-on-Son kink on porn video sites).

What's the deal here?

[Revelation]

Looking it up, the devs behind the game have a patreon, and Patreon has this to say about certain erotic content

We also do not allow other fringe sexual fetish creations, such as incest, necrophilia, or fetish creations that is hard to distinguish from non-consensual sex.

I know there are a few other games that have to censor their incest elements in regards to Patreon, so I assume this is something Patreon is quite judicious on.

[Top Cat]

Fair enough, I was unaware of that. Thank you for the info! =^_^=

[Sabre]

And then we get to the problem of your landlady. At the start of the game, it asks how you want to address her, and then uses whatever word you type in as a filler-word. Since the default is landlady, and it asked how you want to address her, I thought "ma'am" would be a good choice. Only it overuses this word - it's what you call her directly, it's what out-of-dialogue refers to her, and it's how other players refer to her when talking about her... except, in the last case, it's "your *blank*." Which ends up with really awkward text no matter what you put in, with one exception. Calling her ma'am results in friends calling her your ma'am. Calling her aunt makes that part of it work, but then you have parts where you'd be directly calling her aunt. "Aunt, will you do this thing for me?" That's clunky. And the default, landlady, is also painful to read when you're addressing her directly. Why aren't you just calling her by her name?

There is one word that works in all cases, though. It also makes sense why you wouldn't call her by her name, even when others are. The word is "mom." If she's "your mom," then your character getting upset when a friend is perving on her makes sense. Calling her mom directly also works, and so does mentioning her in expository text.

I think if you expanded this, what you're really describing is an informal relationship with roles defined by some situational bond between two people. 'Mom' thus works the same way that 'boss' or 'senpai' or 'oppa' does. Even 'ma'am' works to some degree, and is only awkward because in the U.S. we only use honorifics formally, and informally we prefer private pet names for more intimate relationships.

As for the question of kink discrimination, I imagine a lot of these projects are artistic ventures, but not focused on the actual visual or written art so much as the desire around a certain fetish or aesthetic. It'd be like an indie video game developer making a fantasy RPG and not paying any mind to FPS gunplay, because of course he wouldn't. Being more inclusive (barring Patreon rules) would make financial sense, but for a lot of these artists it's about their own expression as much as it is about the money. That and promoting and supporting a community around said kink while choosing not to associate with communities from other kinks they may not want to explore.

As far as quality goes, not much can be done about that since it requires a good deal of luck and coordination to bring in talent for multimedia collaborative projects like that and it's rare to be a competent programmer who is also a good project manager and game designer and graphic artist and storyboarder and scenario and dialogue writer. You can compare these projects to indie movie projects which most would consider low quality or cheesy, and mostly derivative of more successful or influential works. But, hey, practice makes perfect.

I'd bet there's enough talent here on E however to make our own erotic game though.

[Rustic]

There's also the stigma of porn. If you're, say, trying to become a proffesional writer, you may not want to associate yourself with a porn game. It wouldn't look good nor give you the exposure you're looking for. However, with that said, there are plenty of great erotic writers out there.

So maybe it also comes down to money. People will buy it whether it has a good writer or not. So why waste the money on hiring a writer? Just write it yourself and people will come.

Its like quick erotica on amazon. This is stuff that may be written in literally a week. I've heard this from pro erotica writers. They write a new story weekly or monthly and throw it out there. So no big edits, no in depth characters or plot, it's just porn. Quick porn that people will pay for. It sells whether it's good or not, so there's no point in the effort to make it good.

[RedRose]

I've heard of this. If your books sell without sex, wow. I've been asked why I don't write sexy stuff for amazon. I don't because I don't want to do as above. I only love smut when it comes with deep characters, an interesting story and dynamic, and normal scenes before and after. I couldn't work on stuff week per week to dump it on Amazon. I also would need an airtight penname...

[aqua]

I've been scouting around for decent erotic games for a while now, and I'm still coming away disappointed with most of them. For some, the idea of having a competent writer is a novel concept that they might consider later, after they're done with this porning thing they're trying out. For others, the artwork is bad, or the animation is three panels on repeat (or both). And some can't seem to match the artwork to the actions and dialogue in the text.

And then there's some that manage to fail on all three counts. From an ad on Reddit, I picked up The Spellbook yesterday, and got around to trying it today. The artwork is the same 3d model stuff you'll see in dozens of other porn games (I can't remember the program used, but it's all over the place, and at a minimum, could really use some fine detail clean-up after the quick-and-easy posing jobs are done). The dialogue is stilted and uneven, making it pretty clear that the writer is either not a native English speaker, or failed 6th grade English, or both.

Then there's the writing not matching the artwork. There's a scene where your character gets upset that a male buddy is perving on your "landlady" (I'll get to that in a minute), and you punch him - which is an incredible overreaction for someone perving on someone you're not related to, and don't have a crush on. But again, I'll get to that in a minute. Your friend, in the picture, is glaring at you... but the dialogue has him shaking it off with, "No problem, I deserved that."

And then we get to the problem of your landlady. At the start of the game, it asks how you want to address her, and then uses whatever word you type in as a filler-word. Since the default is landlady, and it asked how you want to address her, I thought "ma'am" would be a good choice. Only it overuses this word - it's what you call her directly, it's what out-of-dialogue refers to her, and it's how other players refer to her when talking about her... except, in the last case, it's "your *blank*." Which ends up with really awkward text no matter what you put in, with one exception. Calling her ma'am results in friends calling her your ma'am. Calling her aunt makes that part of it work, but then you have parts where you'd be directly calling her aunt. "Aunt, will you do this thing for me?" That's clunky. And the default, landlady, is also painful to read when you're addressing her directly. Why aren't you just calling her by her name?

There is one word that works in all cases, though. It also makes sense why you wouldn't call her by her name, even when others are. The word is "mom." If she's "your mom," then your character getting upset when a friend is perving on her makes sense. Calling her mom directly also works, and so does mentioning her in expository text.

Which brings me to another problem. The Spellbook is a story about magical mind control. It boasts a wide range of kinks and fetishes. But for some reason, it pulls a hard right and avoids actually embracing incest, even when it's literally the only thing that actually makes sense in the way the story is presented. Calling her your "landlady" is a weak swerve, and for what? To avoid pissing off some readers? Mind-controlled rape and bondage is A-OK, but incest is a bridge too far?

This is not the first time I've hit this particular kink avoidance, and it irritates me. A much better game in nearly every respect, Snow Daze, is also a mind-control fetish story, and the protagonist is hypnotizing his mother and sisters. Except that before the story even starts, there's a prologue, out-of-story, where a perverted cat god goes to great lengths to tell you that while, yes, these are your mother and sister, you're not actually related by blood. It's just a pocket universe created by this cat god to explore this weird kink... but no, no, it's not blood incest.

Why? Why do people go out of their way to embrace and create a story about a fringe kink (hypnosis/mind control... although I'm not sure how "fringe" it actually is, since I do see a lot of it), but avoid this other kink. Are they afraid that it will turn off too much of the player base, or is there some law criminalizing incest in video games (which clearly does not apply to other media, as there's plenty of Dad-on-Daughter and Mom-on-Son kink on porn video sites).

What's the deal here?

I'm sorry about necroing this but I cant use DM's yet. I would like to say if you are looking for a game that has similar functions. Corrupted kingdom is unfinished but its really good and has a similar power system. Another is Town of passion. Great story and while you dont have literal mind control the characters are influenced by an aura of the hero that makes them more susceptible to your charms. It has similar patreon issues. But if you say that she is your mother it changes the dialogue. It makes little sense as in the story she literally gave birth to you lol. If you want incest. The mc is youngish looking but hes an adult.