Porn Game Tropes: The good, the bad, and the fugly

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Burt Reynolds Mustache

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Ya btw I understand not all tropes are bad, we have just been putting up mostly the bad ones. Sometimes a trope is a good thing because it gives the player/viewer/reader something familiar to latch onto. Typically it's put in a bad light because you don't notice them if they are done well but bad ones. Oh you notice them.
Yeah, not to mention the bad tropes are usually the funny ones TBF. I think the better thing to do is try to differentiate a character even if its based on a trope. The reason I started the thread is because it really became uncanny at just how many of the games on this site had nearly identical characters and plots. Something works in one game, so the next person uses it, and then the next, and so on. Suddenly you have a ton of MCs that are basically Max from BB or the Dad from DMD.

I mean someone did the just did the Yoga trope, which was on my list too, SO MANY games have Yoga in them it has to be nearly 2/3s if not more. After a while you can just get tired of it.

Then again, I don't remember many tropes in what I played of your game, I remember the main character standing out as different than the norm, which I found refreshing.
 
Aug 22, 2017
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My least favorite ones are probably the "No Life Dad", "The Creeper", and "The Gentleman".
...
I doubt many people like "The Grind"
I think they, together with "Retard in Lechertown", belong to a trope group that should be called "The writer has no idea how adult heterosexual interactions work" and especially, has . The basic dichotomy I see is that of the "Proactive male/reactive female" vs "reactive male/proactive female" tuples.

"Proactive males" work out to males creeping, tricking and whittling down "resistance" over time, which works out to those much hated gameplay tropes like "the gentleman" and "the grind". When the reality of heterosexual interactions is that women are sexually a lot more proactive that is even culturally acknowledged - outside of porn that involves actual women.

To make an example: Instead of "the gentlemanly creep", women dress lewdly and engineer "wardrobe malfunctions" to intentionally and willfully provoke titillation in the men they're interested in. That is the other side of the medal that is "creeping and peeping" - it's not necessarily something a man randomly does, it can just as well be something an exhibitionist woman tricked a guy into doing. Why did she leave the bathroom door open? Everyone knows how guys' eyes wander. Or, why would she not only wear something that would give full view of nipples, cooch and ass when bending over in a particular way, why would she then also bend over that way anyways? I merely wonder how adult men cannot understand that such things are fully intentional, even when it is skillfully engineered to be or accompanied with "I'm such a ditz! LOL"

Women are also very well capable of progressing the "Stairway to Heaven" on their own to extract what they want from a guy - be that a free drink, a ride home, a shoulder to cry on, and to not a few women, sex itself acts as a tool to "extract" a relationship from a guy.

The irony is that porn games are apparently largely made by men who have never witnessed, much less understood what women actually do when it comes to sexual things. Sad to say, they're nerds, who know how to operate DAZ3D or an IDE with some skill, but not a woman.

Edit: And to put something in perspective: When we're talking about porn games with male protagonists, it becomes hard to conceive of a plausible female initiative that doesn't simply leave the male protagonist utterly powerless and reactive. Not doing anything, except wait for women to do their lewd things. That is simply a fairly boring game in the end with a boring male character. This means we can make the argument that all of these tropes are actually necessary to allow for the type of games we have, now matter how much I hate them with a passion.

We can talk about how to construct a different game with a proactive male protagonist where the females are still proactive sexually, and we come to the conclusion that we're talking about a game where the male protagonist simply murders a lot of dudes (which is, for many women, the ultimate aphrodisiac) and then you end up with something like Duke Nukem, where babes throw themselves at Duke simply for his competency at murdering aliens. But Duke Nukem isn't a porn game for the most part.

A better writer than me may have better ideas on how to make male protagonists more proactive without the interactions with females ringing wrong. Maybe play an out-and-out rapist? How about a game where you're the and you're a genius at what you do, there's plenty of opportunities for mechanical and puzzle-like challenges. I don't need to explain how many people would be greatly put off by the prospect of playing such a character, however. Alternatively, just let porn games be dominated by female protagonists, who can be more convincingly proactive for all the reasons mentioned - and the game mostly consists of "hunting for dicks", which again, will turn off a lot of male players.
 
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Burt Reynolds Mustache

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@IhaveNoPornAndIMustFap Great points all around.

I think the biggest issue is that it is really hard to have a proactive female in a Life Sim style of game, and those games are very popular. Banality sims don't really need a lot of connective tissue. You can write scenes and slot them in whenever because you don't have to worry about them flowing from a previous scene. The player is just trying to move on to the next scene so they just keep at it. It's especially true when the gameplay loop is "increase stat", "check to see if interaction changes", "wait for new sexy scene", and then "repeat new sexy scene to increase stat". Then we start all over again. Even games I kinda enjoy, like My New Life fall victim to this loop.

I haven't played a ton of Japanese life sims, but from what I remember the big thing that they had that made the constant repetition mean something was a time limit like until the end of the school year or what have you. That meant that your choices were at least somewhat meaningful, and you often didn't have time to go for every girl by design. Not a giant fan of that but it at least makes you think. This lack of consequence is something that is a problem in games like BB, School, Love and Cousins, Man of the House, Your Choice, and to a lesser extent Summertime Saga. Without any sort of stakes, all you have left is mindless clicking, and the sexy stuff. In order to keep lings as game-like as possible you also segment the sexy stuff into easily digestible single act scenes, so the player keeps wanting to move to the next "level". It's an easy way to keep things going with a bunch of girls at once too.

Dreaming of Dana avoids the worst of these problems, not so much because it's a life sim done right, but because it's such a basic sim that it would likely be better served as a VN. But at least its random events can evolve as player relationships do. It helps keep it from feeling like one is constantly grinding towards the next sex act. It also isn't very dissonant when you're playing a mind control or corruption game, because well, the slow advancement can be hand waved away by whatever macguffin is allowing the mind control to happen.

However I don't see much of an excuse once we get into the VN side of things. You can easily have characters with their own motivations, own goals, and own ideas about sex without making the player the sole motivating factor in their lives. @Philly_Games does a great job of this in Depraved Awakening, the women in that game all feel different, and all act out of their own desires. @Ptolemy also does this very well in Intimate Relations. And they aren't alone, though they are a minority. And that's not even talking about games with female protags like Good Girl Gone bad, nearly all of them have proactive characters by necessity, but you went into detail with that already. Where VNs can go wrong is in how granular they get with their points systems. I think a simple system, even if hidden, can probably work better than a general love/lust point system, especially when you are juggling like 4-5 ladies.
 

faecrykt

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Hey guys. At some point I want to fix up the OT, and add a bunch of the new tropes we've posted since then to it, assuming it will all fit in one post. So the question I have is, do you guys who have posted tropes mind if I add yours as well? The plan will be to link to the original post, and credit everyone of course.

I'll likely do it around the time I fix the Stairway to Heaven and Genteman tropes in the OP.
If you find my trope apt, you can use it as you see fit.

Regards.
 

Fitzgerald

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I'd actually suggest approaching TVTropes itself and ask if you can add a series of "porn game tropes" - They have lots of sex tropes already and I'm not sure what level of explicit they allow.

I keep thinking of additional examples for some of the tropes but they can't be added to the posts and much less the posts of others. We can still use the thread to post new tropes and ask for comments / rewrites.
There is an absolute zero-tolerance policy for anything involving both sex and kids, and anything involving rape is given very little leeway, but otherwise this discussion would be fair game. Properly written, neither of those should be a major problem.
 
Aug 22, 2017
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There is an absolute zero-tolerance policy for anything involving both sex and kids, and anything involving rape is given very little leeway, but otherwise this discussion would be fair game. Properly written, neither of those should be a major problem.
TVTropes has tons of rape and pedo tropes, incest too, simply because they're tropes that show up in fiction (and nonfiction) a lot. When I say explicit, I mean in terms of the language. How would you even explain something like the "Stairway to Heaven" with euphemisms without it becoming a illegible cluster fuck? Can you straight up write about the differences between handjobs and blowjobs and lubeless anal without some moral guardian popping a vein? Do they have tropes that are marked 18+? That's what I don't know.
 
Jun 1, 2017
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I think this might have been touched on, but one of the tropes that shows up in seemingly every single porn game from Japan that even touches on rape, and in quite a few but not as many from the West, is the "Getting turned on/enjoying rape", where it seems like any woman who gets raped turns into some sort of nymphomaniacal homunculus neigh upon the instant she's penetrated. I don't understand the appeal at all, frankly: If you hate rape and just want to see a girl getting fucked silly or whatever, why would you go for a game with a rape dynamic; and if you're a rape fetishist or whatever, it seems like the victim getting into it to the point where she's on a non-stop orgasm train would kill your violation buzz.

I personally enjoy many H-games, especially HRPGs, involving or revolving around rape, and it always makes it harder to enjoy when the girl suddenly becomes some sort of bizarre masochist out of nowhere. It's even more annoying, somehow, than the whole "don't do that, you'll make me cum!" shtick that seemingly every female character has.
 

Devon Rehab

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Even though TVTropes deleted allot of their fetish/porn trope related stuff years ago, they still have some articles related to subjects like rape and incest, and other's that aren't taboo subjects on the site but discuss tropes that sometimes show up in hentai games and anime in those sections.

I bring this up because I read the faux action girl trope and it mentioned that often in h-games the supposedly badassed female warriors in those games rarely get to show off their skills, sometimes being defeated off screen, just to get to the rape quickly. They even give a good title we can use for this as a adult game trope, since whoever wrote that section cuts off before using the word rape and instead says "Good heavens, just look at the time!" For those that don't keep up on their meme, there is an image marco of the character Pyramid Head from the game Silent Hill and a clock with the numbers all replaced with the word rape and captioned with those words.

A good example of this trope in action is the Taimanin series of h-games. The demon slaying ninjas might get some scenes slaughtering orcs or other demonic mooks at the start of the game and if you unlock the good ending more slaughtering goons and maybe the boss demon or at least a high ranking baddie organization member, but in between that it's wall to wall rape.
 

Burt Reynolds Mustache

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Yeah TV Tropes can be pretty prudish. Maybe we can do a wiki for porn game tropes eventually. Heh.

The Rape isn't Rape trope is on the list of ones I want to do.
 
Nov 9, 2017
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Not sure if this is a trope but the female protag who's supposedly so virginal that she's never even heard of the word "erection" let alone seen one. Usually the 18yrs in games. Never mind the fact that most teenagers have seen more people fucking from easy access to porn on the internet
 

Lykanz

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"all that no longer needs to be done!"
The thing is, when writing a story you're bound to eventually run into tropes and/or clichés, as much as you try to avoid them. There's really no way to write something without making use of it.

You either make good use of them, or make fun of them.

Also, in literature (that includes erotic stories) there's virtually nothing that hasn't been done over and over.
 

El bacca Del Chew

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The thing is, when writing a story you're bound to eventually run into tropes and/or clichés, as much as you try to avoid them. There's really no way to write something without making use of it.

You either make good use of them, or make fun of them.

Also, in literature (that includes erotic stories) there's virtually nothing that hasn't been done over and over.
I do agree,
There's hundred of ways of serving chicken, it will remains chicken but with differents flavours and "colours".

My main concerns was that so many dev are using the same cliché (in narrative/forms/story wise) over and over.
They don't even try/be able to put some salt or pepper on it, just past and copy.
 

Lykanz

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I do agree,
There's hundred of ways of serving chicken, it will remains chicken but with differents flavours and "colours".

My main concerns was that so many dev are using the same cliché (in narrative/forms/story wise) over and over.
They don't even try/be able to put some salt or pepper on it, just past and copy.
That's what usually happens when you use the "sex as a reward" trope in your game. Do something enough and you'll get a new sex scene (yeah Beggar of Net, I'm looking at you).

My main concern is on how incest is treated in those games. It all seems... Too easy to get into your family's pants. There's really almost to no moral conflict to it. You just do some things for your mom and suddenly she wants to bang you.

Don't get me wrong, incest is one of my favorite fetishes.

Also, don't even get me started on the step-mom/sis bullshit.
 

Burt Reynolds Mustache

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That's what usually happens when you use the "sex as a reward" trope in your game. Do something enough and you'll get a new sex scene (yeah Beggar of Net, I'm looking at you).

My main concern is on how incest is treated in those games. It all seems... Too easy to get into your family's pants. There's really almost to no moral conflict to it. You just do some things for your mom and suddenly she wants to bang you.

Don't get me wrong, incest is one of my favorite fetishes.

Also, don't even get me started on the step-mom/sis bullshit.
What's wrong with the steps? As a concept it feels a lot less odd than regular old incest.

As for moving too fast: Well fantasy is fantasy, so there is that. In porn, the how is usually less important than the fact that it should actually happen to most. A lot of people seem to want the slow ass advancement you see in a lot of incest games. Not my thing in general, so I usually get bored to tears after a whole lot of flashes, flirting, and the like that leads to nothing. But as I have said in the past, that fetish is something I tolerate because its so pervasive. If you want to avoid it, you don't have a lot of options.

The sex as reward mechanic BoN and others use isn't awful in and of itself, but when it is tied to a horrible grind you get the "Stairway to Heaven" which I'm still reworking the trope entry for, but it's worst when it's grind like hell to get one scene, grind that scene, over and over until there is a new one, grind the new one, until after a while you can finally stick it in her butt.
 

Lykanz

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What's wrong with the steps? As a concept it feels a lot less odd than regular old incest.

As for moving too fast: Well fantasy is fantasy, so there is that. In porn, the how is usually less important than the fact that it should actually happen to most. A lot of people seem to want the slow ass advancement you see in a lot of incest games. Not my thing in general, so I usually get bored to tears after a whole lot of flashes, flirting, and the like that leads to nothing. But as I have said in the past, that fetish is something I tolerate because its so pervasive. If you want to avoid it, you don't have a lot of options.

The sex as reward mechanic BoN and others use isn't awful in and of itself, but when it is tied to a horrible grind you get the "Stairway to Heaven" which I'm still reworking the trope entry for, but it's worst when it's grind like hell to get one scene, grind that scene, over and over until there is a new one, grind the new one, until after a while you can finally stick it in her butt.
What's wrong is that it gets tedious after a while, it's always the same thing, same order, same old.

But maybe that's just me being cynical.
 

Burt Reynolds Mustache

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What's wrong is that it gets tedious after a while, it's always the same thing, same order, same old.

But maybe that's just me being cynical.
I meant the steps as in step-family. I do think the overall steps on the stairway are pretty boring.
 
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