Virtual Skin: Actual, Literal Porn

     As a masturbation enthusiast, I have occasionally been exposed to the unassumingly huge world of pornographic video games.  That's right, since our world is constituted by digital myths this blog that was supposed to be about feminism (or something) is actually about video games.  Surprise!  Okay, well, it's also secretly about feminism, but I won't tell anyone if you don't.  But I digress.  To make a long story short, I've got beef with the people who make porn games.  And yes, that includes the more progressive stuff, but I'll be gentle and just ignore it in lieu of being too critical of what is largely a marginal genre within an invisible but extremely popular category of video games.  I don't want to write another piece about the "dark underbelly" of gaming, complete with lurid descriptions of what objects you can insert into which digital orifices.  Instead, it's more important to me to express my grievances with a genre I actually like, and maybe to somehow justify why I enjoy it despite its frankly unnerving fixations.

    Generally speaking, the only thing that really defines a porn game is the presence of explicit depictions of sexuality.  While some are nothing more than interactive fucking simulators, most have another game attached, which provides context and a series of decisions for the player to make to determine when, how, and with whom they're going to get their dick wet.  One thing anyone with a passing familiarity with these games is that their structure is, for lack of a better word, male.  This is usually literal, since the archetypal smut protagonist is a man in his 20s or 30s with a single-minded determination to get off and a surprising level of skill at achieving that goal.  To be honest, this is a really fun and empowering fantasy.  It's easy for me to enjoy as a trans woman because the ideal male protagonist has as little of a presence as possible, with some games going so far as to not even show his face.  Actually, it's my enjoyment of these games that is the reason I have grievances, and boy do I have them.

I actually like this game a lot, but this is one of the only SFW examples I could find.

    For starters, I hate the universal sex-doll treatment that most of the characters in these games get.  Then again, I hate it less than them looking like literal children, but it's not great.  I have mixed feelings about this because I also have mixed feelings about "realistic" portrayals of sex in porn.  I've watched videos of people making passionate love, and I have to admit I felt like I'd walked in on something I shouldn't have.  One of the paradoxes of getting off is that if it's too fake, it's gross, but if it's too real you almost feel guilty for watching.  My point, though, is that too many porn games fall into the former category.  This is, I think, partially a matter of taste, but frankly even the more "mature" titles tend to exaggerate the anatomy of their female characters straight into the uncanny valley.  From what I hear, this is part of the appeal, but what bothers me is how monotonous depictions of women tend to be.  Women can be attractive in ways that don't involve the size of their breasts or the lightness of their skin, and you can only jerk off to so many femmes fatale, dumb sluts, and innocent college girls before it starts to get boring.

They say you can tell a woman likes you by how much eye contact she makes.

    My second complaint is that the protagonists of these games are often extremely unlikeable.  I get that being a horny loser doesn't exactly do wonders for your personal magnetism, but so many of these games feature protagonists who are shameless about behavior that verges on illegal, from manipulation to blackmail to actual, literal stalking.  House Party is a great example of this.  The game is an immersive sim set at, you guessed it, a house party, and your goal is to get laid.  Terrain like this is already fraught for anyone who has attended college as a woman or has been reading the news for the past five years.  This feeling of dread is only exacerbated by the things you can do to get the party-goers to sleep with you.  For example, you can trick one of them into taking her clothes off by spoofing her friend's phone number and then "daring" her to perform a series of increasing humiliating tasks in front of you.  This is, uh, creepy, and it really kills the mood when you realize that this is the only way you can "unlock" the ability to have sex with this character.  I acknowledge that video games are spaces to explore fantasies that would be unethical to enact in real life, but I would appreciate the ability to choose what part of the fantasy I do or don't engage in.

    Lest you all think I'm suggesting we make porn games less interesting, my third complaint is with all of the stuff that isn't porn.  You see, despite what the uninitiated might believe, most X-rated games are actually two games being packaged as one.  The first game is the interactive (or hands-off) adult scenes, also known as h-scenes for reasons I'm going pretend I don't know.  The second game is what one might call the frame, or the metanarrative if this were a graduate thesis.  In movies, this serves as the justification for why two characters are having sex.  In video games it serves a slightly more complicated role, since in addition to giving context to the action it also builds tension for the player, so that when the flesh thing finally goes into the fuck hole we feel a sense of pride and accomplishment.  This part is also almost uniformly monotonous and/or contains the turn-offs I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and while making it better is a lot of work I would argue that most games should either trim it to its bare essentials or put the effort in to make it compelling.

Ladies and gentlemen, the new face of evil.

    My point is, adult games have a lot of room to grow.  In addition to the above complaints, it's important to briefly address the elephant in the room.  In a lawsuit against Epic Games, Apple used the presence of adult-oriented content as a rhetorical tactic, lambasting them for allowing the presence of such perverse titles as Sisterly Lust, whose premise I think you can ascertain on your own.  The thing is, we still live in a culture with a puritanical view of sexuality, which expresses itself in both right- and purportedly left-wing thought.  We need to stop projecting and performing shame about what we get off to.  The more we try to control sexual content on the Internet, the worse things will get for the people who rely on it to make a living.  The only way to make it better is to bring it out into the open and critique it, and to stop performing and projecting shame about sex.  If we do that, maybe some of you will find a way to enjoy it for once!