I love horny games but I'm also afraid of them

I am a pervert.

I would like to make the case that most people are. Not all people, and not all in ways that some perverts consider to be on their level, but most people are perverts about something.

And that means that most things are at risk of being destroyed by those who seek to control our bodies.

It is perhaps far simpler to say that most things can become perverted — a subset of prudish people are always prepared to declare the result of any effort perverted for their own sake. And that means that anything, even the thing you once thought was ultimately pure and righteous throughout, can be at as much risk as the thing you cannot stomach.

Australian anti-porn lobby group Collective Shout's baying to online payment processors such as Visa and Mastercard led to the removal of sexually explicit games first from Steam, and has now struck itch.io. These two rapid censorship plots, as well as Vice owner Savage Venture's attempt to silence Ana Valens' canary-in-the-coalmine initial reporting of Collective Shout's actions affecting Steam, make it even more noteworthy that Valens warned that the same fate could befall even a generally lenient space like itch back in 2021.

Moral panics like these are not new. From the worries of Satan lurking within the dice rolls of Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s to the exaggerated fear of video game violence in the 1990s, a combination of a lack of media literacy, a devaluation of interactive media, and a distrust of the fans of those media often coalesce into terrible and reactionary politics about art, those who make it, and those who consume it.

Mixed with the crueler impetus to control other people and punish them for stepping out of that status quo, this attitude also comes from a lack of curiosity. One man's yuck is another man's yum, at all times, and refusing to at least wonder what someone else may see in something, or develop a more thorough self-critique of your own lack of interest beyond fear or disgust, limits your ability to experience what the art has to say.

I say this also for myself. This column is literally a space for me to be upsettingly curious, to see games as objects, as markers of culture, and as molecular elements of the zeitgeist, just like other forms of media.

Which means not only being curious about my pervert self, but also about the self beside that self. The part that is far more interested in softer, sweeter, no less intimate but vastly less bawdy things. The part that rejects, that pushes away, that is offended by the notion of being called a pervert.

What am I so afraid of?

In early March, I read Sage the Anagogue's PRAISE THE HAWKMOTH KING.

I am not entirely sure how I feel, and I suspect that is (a small part of) the point.

The preview of the game opens with a list of some of the themes that may occur in play, including non-consensual sex, sex between underage PCs, domination, cannibalism, necrophilia, bodily excretions of various kinds, and my personal favourite, mindbreak — the erotic media trope in which assault eventually leads to such an overwhelming betrayal of the body that the victim begins not only to enjoy it, but see it as their sole purpose. The game mentions them not only as content warnings, but as "tantalizing promises".