2324: A Portal to Quality Filth

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One of the things the video games industry has had trouble with over the years is the issue of “adult” games. I’m not talking about M-rated violence-fests — those are seemingly fine. I’m talking primarily about those that contain explicit sexual content and/or themes a little more ambitious than you might find in your typical focus-grouped commercial blockbuster.

The stigma attached to adult games is largely due to retailer concerns. Specifically, retailers like Wal*Mart and Target in America have historically refused to stock games that have an AO (Adults Only) rating from the ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board), despite the AO rating existing and making it abundantly clear that the title is absolutely not for children. The situation is almost certainly the same in Europe when it comes to PEGI (Pan European Game Information) ratings, with the added awkwardness that different individual European countries have different rules on what is regarded as “decent”. Germany, for example, has less of a problem with pornography than some other countries, but is very strict on depictions of violence, with many high-profile triple-A games either not making it to Germany at all or being gutted (no pun intended) of violent content in the process.

In other words, making an AO game would historically have been commercial suicide for a publisher trying to make money from their product. After all, if you can’t get stock on the shelves of popular retailers, your avenues for selling your product are inherently more limited, and when it comes to big budget titles, you need every sales channel you can get.

But now we live in the age of the Internet, of course, and brick-and-mortar retailers are less relevant to our buying habits. It’s still nice to be able to go into a shop, pick up a product and walk out with it (having paid for it, obviously) immediately, but a significant number of people now err in favour of the lower prices offered by online stores. And when it comes to computer and video games, the rise of high-speed broadband and high-capacity hard drives has made games with no physical component whatsoever a prominent part of the digital landscape. In fact, the ability for software to be released as digital-only has allowed more developers and publishers than ever before to be able to bring their products to market — without overheads such as duplication and distribution, developers can focus all their time on their product and, subsequently, promoting their product rather than boring logistics stuff.

And yet we’re still stuck with the stigma over AO games. Console manufacturers won’t allow AO games on their platforms’ storefronts — presumably because it would be all too easy for minors to circumvent any sort of age gate technology and buy porn on Mummy’s credit card (suggesting that they should perhaps think about stepping their age gate game up) — and Steam, while allowing a couple of games with boobs in to be sold on the platform, still seemingly stops short of allowing outright porn/hentai games to be sold. (There is, of course, a whole argument about why it’s okay for The Witcher to have fairly explicit porking in it, yet the slightest hint of an anime titty gets the big red cross, but we won’t get into that now; nor will we get into the “double standard” argument re: violence vs. sexual content.)

This has meant that until now, AO games have typically been sold direct or through specialist distributors. J-List, for example, sells AO visual novels in both physical and digital format from its own publishing arm JAST USA as well as third-party localisation companies like MangaGamer. MangaGamer also sell their own products on their own website. Localisation powerhouse Sekai Project, meanwhile, have their dirty little not-so-secret arm Denpasoft to sell their AO titles (or AO versions of titles that get a wider, edited release for platforms like Steam). It’s good that we have all these places to buy AO titles, but until now there hasn’t been a unified Steam-esque platform for them.

There still isn’t quite that, but what Nutaku (very NSFW link!) is building is a step in the right direction. Nutaku, for the unfamiliar, is a website that sprang up relatively recently and provided adult browser games — typically the sort of gacha-driven free-to-play fare that you’d get on mobile phones, only with more porn. More recently, however, they’ve decided to launch a digital distribution platform for a variety of AO titles — primarily visual novels, as they tend to be — in collaboration with the popular publishers I’ve mentioned above.

This is a big deal. A centralised place for AO games to be distributed and for players to build up a library is a great thing, and helps deal with the inherent fragmentation of the market we’ve had up until now with everyone only distributing their own stuff (with the exception of J-List selling physical copies of some MangaGamer titles). While Nutaku’s implementation of its storefront currently leaves a little to be desired — you have to buy games with the “Nutaku Coins” premium currency that is also used in their free to play browser games, and you can only purchase this in bundles rather than the exact amount you need to buy a game — it’s very much a step in the right direction, and a system that is hopefully going to allow AO games to thrive in the online market. Perhaps it will even inspire some competitors to come along, or for services like Steam to have an age-gated 18+ section.

And it’s started strong; some well-regarded titles such as the 18+ version of Princess Evangile are available on Nutaku’s platform, and Sekai Project has even released the 18+ version of Sakura Dungeon first on Nutaku — even before the all-ages version hits Steam or the 18+ version releases on its own Denpasoft store. Let’s hope it keeps up this momentum — and if you want some quality filth, be sure to support what they’re doing.

1241: The Trouble with Rule 34

Lest you’re unfamiliar with one of the most notorious “Rules of the Internet”, Rule 34 states that “There is porn of it. No exceptions.” In other words, if it exists, someone, somewhere, somehow has generated some form of pornographic version of it. It may be “official”, it may be a fan work, but one way or another there is some sort of pornography based around absolutely anything you can think of.

My issue with Rule 34 is not that it exists, nor the fact that it’s true in an alarmingly high number of cases. No, my issue with Rule 34 is somewhat more psychological in nature.

Let’s back up a moment. Currently I’m playing Ar Tonelico Qoga on PS3, a game that features a mechanic in which characters take their clothes off in order to become more powerful. (It is justified in the game’s lore, to its credit, but yes, it is totally fanservicey.) Consequently, you spend a hefty amount of time in the game looking at the cast in their skimpies — particularly the female characters.

And yet do I want to see them actually completely naked? Do I want to see them — if you’ll pardon the explicitness for a moment — getting fucked roughly from behind or covered in jizz? Well… no, not really.

Why not, though? I find the characters themselves attractive — enough to want to spend virtual time with them, enough to genuinely agonise over decision points that require me to pick between them, and enough to project my own feelings about various issues and people onto them — so why don’t I feel the need to look at erotic material featuring them?

Well, the simple answer is… because of all the reasons I listed above. In a good character-led game (or movie, or TV series, or book, or whatever) you develop a close, intimate bond with the characters involved. In many cases, you spend a significant portion of time with them, and usually at a point in their life that is somehow meaningful or important in some way. This “important” moment could be anything from coming to terms with something small they’ve been in denial about for a long time, or it could be saving the world alongside them. Either way, you’re there with them, and you feel close to them. All right, maybe you don’t, but I do.

Consequently, unless you’re the sort of person who has a somewhat… physical relationship with your closest friends, to suddenly throw nakedness and banging into the mix can be somewhat… jarring. If my virtual time with these people has been, up until this point, entirely non-sexual (or at least, not explicitly sexual), I find it a bit weird to suddenly see them in this whole other way, and not at all comfortable in many cases. Kind of like, say, if I had a sister, suddenly saw her naked and got turned on in the process. (I don’t, haven’t and wouldn’t, before you rethink your friendship with me.)

Which is kind of weird when you think about it, sister stuff aside. (Kind of wish I hadn’t mentioned that now.) Being physically intimate with someone else is… well, the clue’s in what I just said. It’s intimate. If you’re very close with someone you love, chances are you want to have sex with them. (Sometimes you want to have sex with people you don’t love, but that’s an entirely different matter.) And yet I have no desire to look up erotic images of, say, Finnel from Ar Tonelico Qoga (pictured to the right), even though she’s a character I feel close to and can relate to in many ways having spent the last 56 (at last count) hours of gameplay with her.

I wonder why this is? It’s perhaps the fact that a lot of pornography (“real” or otherwise) is presented from a third-person perspective, making the viewer feel somewhat detached from the action. (Exceptions do, of course, exist.) Taking this interpretation to an extreme, I could probably argue that looking at an erotic image of, say, Finnel getting banged would feel like I was watching someone else having sex with her, rather than finding the image of her naked body in any way arousing, or feeling like I was the one in a physically intimate situation with her.

An exception to the feelings I describe above comes in the realm of eroge — visual novels with erotic content. In this case, the lack of “discomfort” I feel at seeing the characters in compromising situations is perhaps more understandable — it is, in many cases, in context. It’s not out of character for the protagonist of a visual novel and his loved one to want to indulge in some nookie to show how much they’re into each other. In many cases, the actual sexual content is teased and built up to with sexual tension — for all its faults and ridiculousness, I found that My Girlfriend is the President was actually very good at this, for example; the ero scenes were undoubtedly erotic, but I didn’t find them satisfying because of that — no, I found them satisfying because they marked a turning point in these characters’ relationships, or saw them showing a side of themselves that “the public” didn’t see.

In other words, in these cases, the sex doesn’t feel out of place or out of character because of the context. It makes sense. The relationship between the characters (and between the characters and player) is built on the understanding that these are people for whom sex is A Thing, and that they’re probably going to want to do it at some point. With that expectation in place, it somehow feels less awkward. (Until someone walks in on you watching an H-scene, of course.)

Perhaps I’m alone in this, and everyone who loved Final Fantasy VII as much as I did when I was younger is happily wanking away to contextless animated GIFs of Tifa giving Cloud a soapy titwank. I don’t know. And I have a strange feeling no-one would admit to it even if they did!

A Jedi in New York: Day 4

Still here! Again, another short entry as it’s pretty late, once again, and we both need our sleep! My legs are exhausted from the amount of walking we’ve both been doing.

Today we went to the Museum of Sex (surprisingly work-safe – the website, anyway) as it was something that little bit “different” to the norm, plus it was somewhere that we could again use our New York Passes.

There are three exhibitions on at the Museum at present – The Sex Lives of Animals, Sex and the Moving Image and a selection from the Museum’s permanent collection.

First came the Animals section, which presented an interestingly “alternative” take on natural history and biology by focusing exclusively on the sexual behaviour of animals, mostly looking closely at unusual behaviour which in many cases, the curator describes, goes against Darwin’s theories of natural selection, against Creationism and instead presents a third possibility.

In practical terms, this meant we got to look at videos of animals masturbating, fucking every possible way they could and even some discussion on homosexuality in animals, including the story of the gay penguins And Tango Makes Three which got banned from many, many educational institutions. It was interesting and, yes, different, as expected.

On the floor above was the Sex and the Moving Image exhibition. As the name implies, this exhibition charted the use of sex (or lack thereof) in movies from the earliest black and white silent films, where sex was mostly implied (with the exception of “stag” movies – early porn films, very few of which have survived due to their illegality at the time, but some examples of which were on, err, “display”) through the more liberal approach that developed over the years, taking in (no pun intended) Russ Meyer and Deep Throat all the way to modern porn and celebrity sex tapes, contrasting hugely with how mainstream film deals with sexual encounters. There were also some shorter videos from Beautiful Agony (NSFW) showing different people’s faces during orgasm, and a selection of sex-themed commercials from over the years.

Then in the final room we had the selections from the Museum’s permanent collection, which included male and female RealDolls (sex dolls that run into the thousands of dollars due to their supposed “realism”) to a selection of sex machines, including a terrifying-looking one that was essentially a rubber cock attached to a Black and Decker drill.

So that was nice.

Anyway, we spent rather longer in the Museum than we had intended, as we’d originally planned to move on to Bodies… The Exhibition and also potentially to go and see Ground Zero later in the day. However, we’d also made plans to meet up with the fine gentlemen Papapishu and Regulus for dinner in St Mark’s Place at a Japanese joint called Kenka which is often filled with Japanese ex-pats, is very noisy, serves traditional Japanese food that isn’t sushi (which I’ve never had before, and which proved to be delicious, even the deep-fried garlic) and serves terrifying “specials” such as bull penis.

So it’s been a good day, only marred by the fact that Jane’s not been feeling too well off-and-on since last night. I’m sure you’ll all join me in wishing her a big “get well soon”.