CW: This article contains references to sexual acts and sexually explicit content.

Adult games have been getting more attention than usual lately. Since early July, game storefronts including Steam and itch.io have been pressured by banks and payment processors such as Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and Stripe — who were catalyzed into action by anti-porn group Collective Shout — to take harsh measures against NSFW content on their platforms. The effects have ranged from a mass deindexing of NSFW content on itch to the removal of games from both itch and Steam. These actions have a direct impact on creators’ livelihoods and further create a hostile environment to NSFW content. It’s also worth noting that this censorship has a disproportionate impact on the LGBTQ+ community, which is already having a rough time under a U.S. administration that has been ready and gleeful to contribute towards homophobia and transphobia.

These measures have not been met warmly. From developers to VTubers to pretty much anyone against attacks on creative freedom, people have begun a massive call campaign against the involved payment processors and banks, flooding the companies’ emails and phones with complaints. The companies’ responses to this backlash have been lackluster, unless you were looking for a game of pass the blame around and censorship lite.

This moment makes for a good opportunity to interrogate how people understand and talk about adult games. While several factors have contributed to the ongoing censorship, a major one is how little adult games are discussed broadly and the subsequent ignorance born from that. And when it comes to discussing adult games, there are few places dedicated to doing it critically like the Adult Analysis Anthology from boutique erotic media development team BP Games. Aimed at creating space for long-form writing on adult games and the culture around them, AAA has featured essays from adult game developers, players, and more on subjects ranging, in the team’s words, “from 101-level primers on the ins and outs of adult game development for the uninitiated, reviews of adult games and major franchises, anecdotes from longtime subgenre commentators on their experiences, and tender accounts of players’ personal relationships with porn games.”

Exalclaw reached out to AAA editor and long-time game developer Bigg, who is also the writer, designer, and coder on all of BP Games’ projects including Monstrous Liberation and Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story, to discuss adult games. In the full email interview below, Bigg shared his origin story for making and critically covering adult games, a thoughtful (but not exhaustive) list of questions that come to mind when setting up a sex act, and the ways game storefronts and games media can improve their approaches to adult games. 

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Exalclaw: How did you get into making adult games, then covering them critically?

Bigg: I tell a longer version of this story in the first chapter of my retrospective series of essays about developing Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story, but here’s the abridged cut: In 2016, I had just started working a new job as a massage therapist, which is a career that CAN be mentally-stimulating at times but most of the time your brain is just idling while your hands are moving. I had also just gotten out of a long-term relationship around the same time, so I was very bored and suddenly had a lot of free time. One night I got a bit nostalgic and decided to check out the adult games section on Newgrounds for the first time in years, and wound up playing through Marblesyrup’s Re:Maid. I don’t want to slag it off here, but I was pretty unimpressed – enough so that I started to think “Hey, I’ve made games before. I can write. I know what sex is. Couldn’t I do better?” And here we are, nine years later.

As for covering them: there was a very good, very short-lived social media platform some friends of mine made that was called Cohost. Cohost had a relatively-small userbase but it encouraged long-form blogging and thoughtful interaction with other users in a way no platform has before or since, and as such was what really got me started with doing long-form non-fiction essay writing. One post of mine that wound up getting a lot of very positive feedback was called Porn Games & Writing About Porn Games, which pointed the finger at games media’s willing blindness towards adult games despite the genre’s proliferation over the past several years. (This was something that had been eating at me for a little while, both because I love porn games and want to see them discussed thoughtfully in the critical media I consume, and also because I MAKE porn games and it would be nice to think that someday there might be a world in which the games I make are discussed with the same level of passion and care that I put into making them.) I decided I’d take matters into my own hands and put out a call for essay pitches, offering $50 USD per finished essay, and wound up selecting 8 for what would become the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology. 

Exalclaw: How do you define an adult video game? When does it become a porn game, if that’s a differentiation you make?

Bigg: Happily, I just recently published the web version of Stanley Baxton’s essay from the third issue of AAA, which is literally about the differences between “serious” and pornographic games, and contains a pretty good definition of terms: “…I’m calling this sub-genre of games that seek to present a more serious experience an “artistic adult game” (AAG). For games where the intent is almost entirely sexual gratification, or more crassly defined as “just porn”, I’ll be referring to them as porn(ographic) games. Adult games will refer to both interchangeably.” To put that in my own words, I think that if a game is presenting explicit sexual images & themes with the intent of provoking a sexual response and/or serving as a masturbation aid, that’s porn. If it’s presenting those images & themes in service to provoking some OTHER kind of response, then it’s something else.

However, I’m going to quote Stanley again here: “If a game depicts sex, it goes in the adult category. It doesn’t consider why or how the sex is depicted, and if the player is or isn’t invited to jerk off to it.” Stanley is referring here to how games with explicit sex get categorized under capitalism, but I think it’s also fair to say that at a certain point there isn’t much value in trying to act like there’s a super-clear delineation between “games that have sex that you’re expected to jerk off to” and “games that have sex that you aren’t expected to jerk off to”. For example, one complicating factor is that there’s a growing number of Games With Sex That You’re Expected To Jerk Off To that ALSO want to engage with serious themes and be taken seriously in return – I count my own games among those, but developer Zoquete also talks about the themes they wanted to broach in Deathblossom in their AAA3 essay.

Exalclaw: You explicitly call porn “one of the most truly expressive art forms” in your bio on the About page. Why do you think it’s one of the most expressive? How do you explain that adult games are art to those unfamiliar with the space, or those generally averse to sexual content?

Bigg: Fascination with and desire for sex is one of the most fundamental human traits*. What a person finds arousing, what a person finds disgusting, all of that comes from a very primal place, and it’s different for everyone. Add to that the fact that there are a truly mind-boggling number of ways to express this desire for sex through art, and an unlimited number of variations on those artistic expressions, and you really start to see how this is an art form that simply CAN’T ever run out of interesting work to explore.

Take, for example, a blowjob. As sex acts go, it’s pretty pedestrian: penis -> mouth. Now let’s see what kinds of questions we can ask about this set-up. How big is this penis? Is it a man or a woman’s penis? Is the penis organic, or is it a sex toy? Does the penis belong to a human, or some non-human entity? Has the penis already cum? What’s the pubic hair situation like around the penis? How about the balls, do they hang? What’s the relationship between the person with the penis and the mouth – are they husband and wife? Boss and secretary? Secretary and boss? Princess and knight? Roommates? Enemies? Is there an audience? Is the audience there in person or are they watching from afar? Are they watching in secret? What angle are we viewing the blowjob from? Side-on? Are we in the blowee’s point-of-view? What temperature is it wherever the blowjob is taking place? Are the two participants clothed? Are they nude? Are they somewhere in between? Are there other sex acts taking place around the blowjob? 

What do the participants’ bodies look like – average, skinny, muscular, voluptuous, rotund, emaciated, wounded, mechanical, alien? How are the participants positioned – is the blower kneeling before the blowee, who is standing? Is the blowee lying back on a bed? Is this occurring under a desk? Under water? In the underworld? Is there music playing? Are there any words being spoken? Are there thoughts being thought? Did money change hands? How will the relationship between these two people be complicated by this blowjob? What would happen if they were to be observed by important people in their lives? Are they filming the blowjob? Is the blowjob being filmed without their knowledge? Are we reading about this blowjob? Are we listening to the audio of the blowjob? Are we watching it as a video? Are we watching it as an animation? Has the blowjob been rendered in marble? Is the blowjob interactive – if so, via what inputs influence the blowjob? Is it mouse-driven? Are we using WASD? Are we tapping out combos on a fightstick? Is the blowjob being scored? Is the blowjob even any good?

I could continue, but hopefully you get my point: a seemingly-mundane sex act can be employed to convey an impossible wealth of information and meaning depending on context and execution. What incredible economy and flexibility for a storytelling device!

As for the second part of this question, I feel like “is X type of game art or not” has been a settled question for the better part of two decades now, and the only time people ever act like it’s still a debate is when they don’t have anything better to do & want to pass the time with a bit of fruitless arguing. If someone doesn’t like porn or sexual content, that’s fine! That’s a fine thing to dislike and I’m not going to waste time trying to argue that everyone has to like it, because they don’t. 

*Before anybody what-abouts me on this, yes, I do include asexual people in this. Asexual people can be (and frequently ARE) interested in sex and porn! MorganH has an essay about this subject in the latest issue of AAA! (Sorry to be linking to so many things, but what’s the point of building a body of work if you can’t refer to it constantly?)

Exalclaw: The Adult Analysis Anthology page starts with the headline “A Higher Standard For Writing About Adult Games.” What was the standard for writing about adult games that made you want to aim higher? How do you go about doing better than that standard?

Bigg: Typically when a games-focused publication like Polygon or Kotaku even deigns to mention adult games, it’s primarily to gawk. They can be broadly trusted to report on misfortunes suffered by the genre, such as when a storefront bans adult games, but they will almost never give adult games the same kind of coverage enjoyed by other genres. The other kind of writing that exists about adult games is that coming from amateur enthusiasts. This kind of writing tends to be pretty shallow – individual game reviews, “Best Of” lists, that kind of thing. Sometimes you might get the odd interview with a developer, but these tend to not be very good because the people conducting the interviews typically don’t have any experience with actual journalism. Again, I get into more detail in my essay about just this subject.

Obviously, this sucks. But the good thing about it sucking is that it makes it actually pretty easy to do better. There aren’t really any adult game reviews that interrogate their subject matter beyond surface-level observations about sex scene frequency and art quality? Okay, well, I’ll make sure to include a couple in the next issue. Nobody’s publishing longform thinkpieces about how adult games have affected their lives? Cool, that means I can look awesome for doing that. Nobody gives space to people who actually know about how making porn games works & who want to explain it? Guess what, bitch: I do. I’m being somewhat tongue-in-cheek here, but when the “standard” is so low, you can surpass it simply by caring a little and being curious.

Exalclaw: An essay that stood out to me from AAA that feels especially relevant today is “What Makes A Game Storefront NSFW-Friendly?” from 7 months ago. It makes a few concessions about the ways major storefronts made progress towards being NSFW-friendly, but states that storefronts largely weren’t built with NSFW games in mind. In your eyes, what is the role storefronts have in hosting NSFW content? And with the recent censorship incurred by payment processor pressure in mind, what do you think storefronts interested in hosting/selling adult content can do in the future to be prepared for external pressure, if anything?

Bigg: If a storefront is going to host adult games, they need to make sure that seeing adult content is explicitly opt-in for customers. They also need some kind of robust content tagging system so that customers can further customize their browsing so that they’re only being shown things they want & not being shown things they dislike.

However, saying that is very much putting the cart before the horse because what currently at stake is the ability for any gaming storefront to carry any games with explicit sexual content in them whatsoever, and that’s something that comes down to whether or not credit card companies like MasterCard & Visa and payment processors like Paypal & Stripe will back down from their vague, easily-weaponized adult content policies. Whether there’s actually going to be any change on that front remains to be seen, but given the effects that the past two weeks of pressuring them with e-mails, calls, and physical mail have seen, I’d call myself ‘cautiously optimistic’ on that front. It also comes down to legislation, which has obviously been extremely fraught recently, especially in the US.

What storefronts can do is try to support as many different payment methods as possible, and if possible, agitate politically for their governments to adopt digital payment solutions like Brazil’s Pix that sidestep the monopolistic influence of credit card companies and payment processing giants. I’ll further add that I really don’t want to be thinking about this. Making games is hard, writing about games is hard, and I’d really like to be able to focus on those things without also having to worry about whether I’ll even be able to do it a year from now.

Exalclaw: As an editor of an adult games-focused publication, what do you think of games media’s approach to discussing adult games generally? And should publications be covering adult games more outside of when they’re under attack in a highly public way?

Bigg: I feel like I’ve covered this in my other responses, but: games media’s approach to covering adult games is largely bad! It should be better! Granting adult games the perceived legitimacy of coverage that doesn’t scold or condescend would be a great boon not only to adult games, but to games writ large. This can only be achieved by assigning writers to adult games as a beat, because just like every genre it’s got its own history, conventions, and quirks – you wouldn’t expect good coverage of fighting games from a writer whose primary gaming experience comes from JRPGs, after all.

And yes, if gaming media had deigned to give adult games the time of day prior to this most recent wave of payment-processor-motivated censorship, we would be in a better, stronger place. If something is unspeakable – if it literally isn’t spoken of – then it makes it that much easier to make it disappear without anyone noticing or caring. I think people might finally be realizing that adult games represent a crucial bulwark in the struggle to have games that deal with challenging, interesting subjects, and I really hope that manifests as increased coverage of adult games in the future.

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You can follow Bigg on Bluesky and check out his blog here, where Bigg says he’ll eventually be publishing all the essays of the latest Adult Analysis Anthology. As for BP Game’s projects, a Monstrous Liberation update is dropping today. As Bigg shared, “there’s orcs in this one.”