Explicit content in games, audience appeal, and solutions?

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I find it odd that people call out MS for transgressive sexual content when it’s full of things that should elicit “shock value” along with the comedy and absurdism. It’s been a long time since I looked at it, but from what I recall the “sex scene” was a single frozen moment in time, and essentially a tableau you could examine. There were implications and well-chosen frank language in the description, but nothing was actively happening - like the “porn” is one image basically along the lines of an Avril painting - but people react like it’s that absurd non-sequitur bear-costume scene in The Shining.

I read the novel of Wicked which is not at all just the fun Broadway musical…(it’s a very adult novel that takes Wizard of Oz’s underlying political satire and surfaces that) and while I found it fine if a little overlong and dry in places, there were several descriptions in that book so memorable that I carry them with me to this day in an “I did not expect to experience a scene so personal with this beloved L. Frank Baum character” context. Fieryo taking a shit in a bowl was that. And in Wicked because those blunt and visceral moments were so spread out, that novel forever exists in my mind as “That book with the pooping scene.”

I think CMG does that turn of phrase thing but more consistently and better. It’s not just the occasional naughty scene that makes you clench. It’s weird how one description of a pending sex act icebergs above everything else cool and well-written in that game. (And please forgive me if there is more sex in that game and I was just not good enough to encounter it…)

Maybe it’s that the “surprise” sexual content is between two men (or at least one is painted as NB?) Is that maybe the “transgressive” element that pisses people off? Or is it possibly that it was a surprise for people? I’ve always thought it can be more of a problem to have one drop of potentially unexpected sexual content in an otherwise standard narrative than it is to be transgressive the entire way through. And maybe a tone thing? Midnight Swordfight on the surface implies fully dressed swashbucklers clinking swords together and maybe people were shocked that swords aren’t the only thing unsheathed. If it were called Midnight Sausage Fight - on the order of how Mathbrush jokingly declared robotsexpartymurder “title as content warning”. (Of course that would be stupid, but I’m sure I remember fighting with a literal sausage was one of the possibilities in MS…)

Most everything I’ve read/played by CMG is full of impactful visceral language meant to cause a reaction. Eat Me is adorably disturbing and full of potentially sickening smells and tastes. Down, the Serpent, and the Sun is one of my favorites for how bluntly it relates the actions of a hero hacking his way out of the insides of a giant beast in a way that fairy tales and Bible story parables usually skip over. And Taghairm…surely has the highest rage-quit percentage of any IFComp game.

Without any intention of comparing myself to CMG (there’s no contest - CMG is an actual author while I’m writing instruction manual text) I rarely get the same pushback for the sexual or violent content in my games - and that is likely because CMG is a better writer with a more mainstream audience - so good at producing a turn of phrase that metaphorically touches the gooey tender parts of your sensibilities in an unexpected way while I’m just describing people’s hair color in the same situations.

It’s possible for any author to wallpaper describe things like “Two people against the wall are preparing to have sex” and that would probably fly by barely noticed in most narratives. But in my opinion that’s the sign of good writing when the words chosen make people able to identify or relate or sympathize or get that weird ASMR-butt-twinge just from words.

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Nope, you got it! The sex scene is one paragraph, and the bit that players seem to find so shocking is a single sentence that’s actually a joke (when time is frozen, you don’t know which direction people’s bodies are moving during sexual congress, to spell out the joke in less sensational terms). There’s also nudity in the game, and there’s an overall phallic theme that’s even present in the title (though people rarely mention that).

All things considered, I understand perfectly why some players would want to avoid M.S. It has sex, violence, and profanity listed as content warnings for a reason! But it’s almost ten years old and it’s still getting hit with the same “shock value” charge as the day it was released, specifically in the context of whether it’s recommendable. These reactions have steered me away from writing similar games. Not necessarily forever, but I certainly weigh the potential time investment against the community’s prospective response.

Emily Short said this about Mentula Macanus: “To the puzzle-rich, erudite, but chaste and sometimes rather lonely universe of Curses (and much old IF in general), it adds dimensions of chaos.” I think she hit the nail on the head. Introducing anything mildly outre into the “erudite, chaste” IF scene is likely to shock someone.

Anyway. I don’t want to sidetrack this thread too much. I just wanted to point out the indirect chilling effect these conversations can have. Which, again, is no criticism of the conversations themselves! Content warnings are important. It’s important to recommend the right games to the right players.

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See…that was my thought. At one point I decided to carefully throw caution to the wind and write Cannery Vale - under a pseudonym literally so I could disavow it if the community came after me with pitchforks, and that got XYZZY nominations and an award. I never would have even considered submitting RSPM if not for the warm response CV got.

Maybe the trick is to gate the most explicit content. Cannery Vale is by no means an all-ages game, but it defaults to basically an R mode, and the player explicitly opts-in to the “hard R” or “X” mode. What that involved was basically creating multiple ways to solve problems and get through scenes. There was usually an explicit route and a less explicit route. And even if you were in hardcore mode, you could still steer away from the more explicit stuff at most every opportunity. And tame mode restricted the player from entering some of the locations that weren’t plot critical but did hold extra lore bits.

Possibly the easiest illustration of the gating: At the ruined carnival, there’s a fiberglass statue of Poseidon whose legs you have to walk under to enter the midway. In tame mode, he’s described as having a loincloth. In the middle mode, he’s described as naked as all self-respecting sea-gods are. On the explicit mode, there’s description of actual genitals and damage that implies he looks as though guts are running down a leg.

I suppose that’s a bit of artistic compromise - you ideally want to write your vision of the scene, but it’s true that many works can be rewritten to serve as appropriate for different audiences. In IF it’s possible to just do that on the fly. Sometimes the paragraph description that causes outrage can just be rewritten “Two people prepare to have sex against a wall.” and that’s literally all it takes in some people’s minds to downgrade from smut to literature. RSPM even jokes about that - in the less explicit mode the sexual description employs touch-feely emotional language and “trains running through tunnels” types of cinematic euphemism. It doesn’t take away from the game and maybe allows more people to play (although many reviewers sagely commented that if you play a game called “robotsexpartymurder” and are surprised to be unexpectedly offended that’s your bad.)

I have mod powers, so we can sidetrack…

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Sometimes this is true. When I considered editing M.S. years ago, I thought about adding different modes to the game, like PG-13 and R-rated versions. The reason I didn’t is because, in this case, it would actually change the meaning of the story.

I could honestly write a whole essay about the significance of that sex scene. This is part of what discourages me when people say something is “extreme just to be extreme” or “only exists for shock value.” I’ve come to largely distrust such assessments.

But I’m certainly not opposed to ratings-filtration mechanics in general! For other games, they can work very well. I’ve used them in Fallen London a few times to (hopefully) achieve a dramatic effect with the filtration mechanic itself.

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Exactly. If you’re writing a story about the horrors of war, it would be compromising to omit violence or descriptions of it. If you’re writing a farcical treasure hunt romp with some occasional racy jokes and sexual humor, the story will likely stand up even if you file those down for wider appeal. Like a comedian understanding not to do the “blue” version of their set when performing at a state fair carnival as opposed to a 21+ nightclub.

To expand, I think this can also be done less overtly by “feeling the player out” early in the narrative via choices they make and weighting a stat. In parser if the player takes the time to repeatedly examine bits of a nude statue that can imply they are curious and want that level of explicit description that could filter in later. In a choice game, you might tentatively give the player a choice node like

This is truly the bad part of town. Sex workers ply their trade, and there’s a dude surreptitiously urinating against a wall in an alleyway. Your goal is north, in the much better part of town.
You want none of this business. Hurry past all this to your goal in the better part of town
Shout at the vagabonds about their decaying moral fiber as you steer clear.
Whistle at the sex workers appreciatively, but steer clear
Ask the sex workers what the going rate is
Yell at the guy to warn him he’s going to be arrested for public urination
Yell at the guy - “Nice junk, bro!”
Sidle up to the guy and join in; you could use a piss yourself.

I have frequently done this in some of my AIF games that are primarily heterosexual-aimed for the most part, but if the player expresses interest in extra stuff that’s joked about or same-sex relationships, extra jokes and opportunities may unlock that I wouldn’t necessarily offer in the base game. AIF of course not being important literature with a message in most cases.

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I’ve written a few more explicit works, and I usually go into them knowing that the target audience for them is niche, but vociferous. A lot of the traffic to my projects (NSFW or not) comes from people browsing NSFW and LGBT tags over on itchio- by multiple times the attention I’d get from submitting to contests hosted by the IF community, even.

They also compose a substantial chunk of returning players (I have 2-3 people who have played literally every single thing I’ve ever made and added it lovingly to their collections, who first found me through NSFW games), and word-of-mouth push by putting it in curated collections or interacting with it in such a way it shows up on their followers’ feeds. They tend to try out a bunch of my other games too, after taking a little bite out of the more explicit pieces- like Origin of Love or Idle Hands.

I think it helps that the subject matter that I write tends to be of more interest to the LGBT community, who tend to also be more comfortable with themes of (especially religious) horror or sex. Like, I knew that Idle Hands would not be of interest to most of the IF community, but ‘idolatrous bug-devil fucking simulator with nonbinary protagonist’ got eaten up expeditiously by people outside of it, and I really enjoyed the mental exercise in writing a sex scene without an emphasis on the combination of genitals being involved. Pretty difficult, but it forces you to be more creative about your language, and the displays of sensuality on show.

It’s kind of just a matter of deciding ultimately, I write what I want to write- I often joke that I write specifically for a) my pleasure, b) Jinx’s joy, and c) my other meowmeow friends’ opinions, in that order, and that part of that is compromising in terms of the audience who would be receptive to it. I wouldn’t have entered Idle Hands into something like IFComp, because it’d have placed poorly, even if it was expanded. But it was a great fit for the Porpentine inspired Neo-Twiny jam, and it found it’s people.

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This post contains some mild spoilers for Midnight. Swordfight.

I confess I don’t understand the big deal with the MS sex scene. I was also worried that I’d missed something as I haven’t found all the endings yet. “Transgressive” is an interesting word to use in describing it because it implies hurt to someone, some violation of a boundary. I would consider a rape scene transgressive. Coming upon people hiding behind something frozen in the act is voyeuristic for sure, and I guess it’s transgressive in the sense that you’re watching something that the characters took very few pains to keep private at a big party. Although in Aftermath when you’re asking about it, it doesn’t seem as if you seeing it was problematic.

I don’t read content warnings because there’s not much that will trigger me to upsetness. Religious/political propaganda will surely disgust me more than a coprophilia scene, although I’d quit both. But if people get their feathers in a fluff about a scene with wacky semi-public sex (slapstick was a word just made for that scene), why are they playing a game with a content warning about sexual content? Did they not read it? Or were they expecting from the tone of the game that they’d have a romance-novel heaving bosoms kind of interaction with the Countess? Maybe the whole romance interactive novel thing (which I hear is big although none of that is my thing) has people primed to expect a certain style of sex in games with that CW?

Anyway, I burst out laughing at that scene and found it surprising but completely in line with the whole tone of the game.

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I may be wrong, but I feel like people have way stronger reactions to sex and surrounding explicit content than to, let’s say, violence and gore. It’s easy to desensitize yourself to something you most likely never had a direct contact with, something you probably don’t expect to happen to you. Sex, on the other hand, is a strangely human thing - unless you’re asexual, you probably think about it as of a thing that you might participate in and you have some thoughts and feelings on it. And usually, we’re taught that sex is a “dirty” or “wrong” thing, directly or indirectly. This leads to a strange place of conflict: it’s something everyone thinks about, but nobody can talk about. Sex is human, but also somewhat animalistic and… I don’t know, crass.

Now, I feel like on some subconscious (or conscious, I don’t know) level, people perceive interactive fiction as a “pure art” - at least I know that there are people who think so of the form, due to how it reminds them of static fiction. Therefore, they expect some strange “decorum” to be met. Explicit sexual content doesn’t fit into the perception of “pure art” - it’s too messy, too taboo, too… revealing.

“Pure art” is allowed to dive deep into the human psyche with all of its strangeness. It can explore the complexity of murder and gore - we can think of the reasons, analyze the clues and weapons, cringe violently when the descriptions get into minute details. There can be something “intellectual” about it, I suppose. It’s removed from our experience, a neat little hypothetical thing to wonder about. But sex is in our heads, and seeing it spelled out loud when you’re told to keep it in there your entire life, when you’re taught that it doesn’t belong in a “civilized” space or “pure art”… this can make people uneasy. Suddenly, things get challenged, and people really don’t want to ask: why does it make me feel this way? Why does it make me uncomfortable? It violates a boundary that was never really set in a conscious way, and instead of confronting that, people would rather make it an objective issue. “It’s unnecessary”, “it doesn’t belong here”, “it’s here just for shock”. It’s easier to frame it as a problem with the story than to sit down and reflect on yourself.

I don’t know if I even make sense, I didn’t sleep well, but good gods does it feel great to let it out

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Pure art is also about transgression and exploring trigger points in the human psyche, so the very same argument can be used to defend the opposite conclusion. And neither is wrong.

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Funny story.

My latest game for ParserComp 2024 was The Samurai and the Kappa. This is based on Japanese mythology in the early Edo period of feudal Japan. It is very authentic to the myth and the customs of the time. As a consequence, I added a content warning.

I made it public two days before submissions closed, but did not promote it. In those first two days, I had almost 500 views and couldn’t understand why. When I looked at the referring links, I could see that they were mostly NSFW-related links on itch.io. All the people following those links are going to be horribly disappointed, as the adult content is very mild.

The lesson to be learned from this is that if you want people to look at your game, select Has sensitive content in the itch.io metadata.

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There are a lot of topics that in theory could make me feel uncomfortable. Photopia sure as hell made me feel uncomfortable. Art in fact should make the observer feel something. After all, we do not grow by staying complacent in our comfort zones, we grow by pushing our boundaries and taking on new experiences.

Having said the obvious, I feel that everyone is on their own path for enlightenment. The comfort zone of one person might be huge, while the next reader might be overwhelmed by content at the boundaries of the first person. That is why content warnings are essential, and sufficient, IMHO, for gatekeeper duties.

Someone who sees the content warning (which should be in the first moment of the game itself, since story files have a way of being passed around without any outside context), and then proceeds to publicly criticize the game for the advised content, well they are being rather silly, and it would not be the game that would make the bad impression to me.

Of course, there is a societal boundary for content, and breaking that boundary risks societal consequences. There are certainly topics that are not appropriate for interactive fiction or fiction of any kind for that matter. Sadly this boundary appears to be eroded more and more by reality itself.

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The thing with this approach is that I would almost certainly pick this option:
Shout at the vagabonds about their decaying moral fiber as you steer clear.

Because I think it’s the funniest both in use of language and the image this situation brings up in my mind. And I would want to roleplay the sour finger-wagging moral guardian.

This means that as a player I would want more of these kinds of situations, and preferably more explicit, so I can act even more shocked as my personage. If a stat would interpret my choice as wanting to steer clear of this sort of content, then I would miss the kinds of interactions with the game that I would like the most.

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This might be what some people think. I personally disagree with the categories “pure” and, by implication, “impure” art. Art is just art to my mind, with the only distinction that might matter (to parrot Henry James) being whether it’s interesting or uninteresting.

Lots of famous static fiction, of course, features sex. Lots of it was legally challenged too, and got called scandalous, but still. Books like Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, Dangerous Liaisons, The Man Without Qualities, etc., etc. The list is long. (And that’s staying above-board. Not getting weird with stuff like Maldoror, Delta of Venus, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, The Torture Garden, etc., etc. Another long list.)

You’re probably right about the whole subconscious-boundary situation, though. I also think this is most likely true:

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And I agree with both of you, the mindset in my post is very far from what I think.

Someone recently gave a one star rating to my work, let the lights bleed, which does center a sexual experience, but isn’t a porn game… but I think this is what this person expected, based on their posting history. Some people will imagine that NSFW=porn, then will get mad at you for not providing them with what they wanted, even though you never offered it in the first place.

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I haven’t played the game in question, so this is not a comment on the game specifically. I also have not read through the whole thread. And I might regret commenting.

But just because someone comes to a different conclusion, doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t engaged in self-reflection, or that they don’t have valid reasons for whatever their boundaries are.

A review that one person sees as silly, might be a review that someone else appreciates.

Being unnecessarily critical of reviewers can have a dampening effect on would-be reviewers.

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Boundaries are great to have! I have many friends who are sex-repulsed or want to avoid sexual content for one reason or another (be it religious, trauma-based or… whatever other reasons there may be), and I’d hate it if anyone gave them a hard time for it. I’m not talking about people who have legitimate boundaries, but about people who see sex as an inherently “dirty” thing that is always unnecessary and serves only to the detriment of the work.

Of course, I do think that sexual content should be criticized as much as all the other content. There can be plainly bad scenes, scenes that are harmful, actually unnecessary sex scenes (although I guess this one depends on what your definition of “unnecessary” is). It’s not above criticism and it shouldn’t be. But can we really deem “there’s sex in here, therefore, it’s objectively bad” as proper criticism? Why not address what exactly is wrong with it? Is it really something that needs to be pointed out as a negative? And if so, why?

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Re: robotmurdersexparty, does it have any men having sex in it? if it does, maybe I’m wrong here in comparing why RMSP (which I haven’t played) got less fluffed feathers than MS.

I will just point out otherwise that gay sex (specifically between men, especially if it’s anal) is constantly seen, historically and today, as more dirty, crass, and "transgressive"ly shocking than cis heterosexual sex. Hell, gay people in general are culturally seen as “inappropriate” for all ages, inherently sexual in themselves.

MS came out in 2015. Gay marriage in USAmerica had just become legal in all 50 states. Most people around here weren’t great on the queer front, culturally, and in the obscure medium of IF, full of those “chaste” puzzles in the realm of the mind, I can’t imagine it being any better.

ETA: (I dunno if Chandler’s USAmerican but the majority of IF players are, to my understanding; that would be MS’ audience)

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I certainly agree with all of this!

The issue with M.S. in particular (which I know you said you haven’t played, and there’s no need) isn’t that people are setting boundaries; it’s that they’re making assertions about why the game exists. Objectively wrong assertions! Shock value for the sake of shock value is not the intent, but this claim has been made repeatedly over the years. It was made more often back in the day, admittedly, when I was still hanging around on platforms like euphoria, but it keeps resurfacing.

A lot of positive comments have been made about the game too. Don’t get me wrong! Including on those same platforms back in the day. It placed well in IFComp, after all. I should train myself to ignore the negative comments. After ten years, if they’re still cropping up, they most likely always will. It’s the assignment of uncharitable motive to myself that rankles, though. Maybe I really should write an essay about that sex scene…

Yep, you’re right! I’m from the USA.

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:eyes: i would read it…

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By the way, I liked let the lights bleed, and I’m not in the habit of dispensing praise easily. I think I get what you wanted to convey, despite the fact I find it difficult to interiorize most of the feelings expressed by the protagonist. But the intersection of objectification and self-hatred is a classic theme, after all, and I’m no stranger to it. The work manages a difficult balance between raw and subdued. The connection with The Preacher’s Daughter (which is definitely disturbing as a concept album, and nobody complains) was immediate to me. I’d encourage you to keep on writing.

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