This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
There's a lot less 'adult' games out there than you might expect, even for a pretty shallow level of curation and taste.
F95 doesn't have literally every porn game (or even every recent porn game; Fek's Spellbound (cw:m/m) has a surprisingly interesting central mechanic and afaict no f95 thread), and its filtering tools aren't the best, but the widest tag search gives a little over 2k items for 'cheating'. I don't have a good grasp on netorare/netorase/netosi, but the whole category of cheating is probably not really what erwgv3g34's after, and a lot of games will get marked for a kink for having one or two scenes even mentioning it rather than any real serious focus. I'd be surprised if there's more than a couple hundred, and as much as the ones erwgv links are Bog Standard In Progress VNs, even moderately good writing or design would probably put them at the top 10% of the pack.
There's a lot of furry games (F95 gives about 1200), and we tend to be pretty omnivorous when it comes to material. But a lot of those are either tech demos, like most VR games or very-early-prototypes, or games with maybe a couple story paths or a handful of animations, like VNs or platformers. There are some games that are complex enough to be worth visiting a few different times, most of which I've either bought or donated for. But if you wanted a list (and, uh, were pretty open-minded), I'd still probably given dozens, not hundreds. Even of the one-shots, a pretty sizable portion are not great, even by the standards of LLMs or AIgen. You can run out pretty quick without being some supergooner.
That's most severe for adult media and for kink, because there's a lot of kinks that range from personal nonstarters even in tiny doses (eg, I personally don't like hyper period, no offense to those that do) to possibly illegal in many countries (ignoring the obvious examples, people have gotten pretty seriously legal concerns over producing a cartoony CBT game). Many of the better games for my interests are text-only, because the nature of what they are means producing more than a handful of paperdoll-style images is agonizing work even with a lot of artists willing to work for near-peanuts!
But it's not like it's specific to porn games.
A year or so ago Rayon brought a big conversation about Palworld. And it's never been that clear how much (if at all) AI was used in producing the game. But it's a genre with a mere handful of serious competitors, and even the most 'successful' ones are often much worse. Over a year later, Nintendo has brought a pretty deadly legal threat against Palworld; they don't have a game that can actually compete with Palworld's not-exactly-great implementation yet. Maybe Legends ZA will break the pattern in October, but the last Legends game was pretty much just a joke. ARK I remains notoriously unplayable for the vast majority of people, it has a 'remaster' that manages to be buggier, and ARK II is in ETA:soon mode and has been for three years now. Kenshi or Grounded, if you have a wide enough definition? There's a couple attempts in Roblox for dragon manager games, I guess? But that's an insult to gatcha.
Base-building survival game with critters seems like it'd be inundated with clones; it's not exactly the goats-on-fire of SFW gaming genres. And that's not really happened. AIgen isn't there, yet. Maybe those limitations are why nobody's been able to step into the space, and maybe it'll never get there. Or maybe AIgen will act as an attacter for the sorta people who make very shallow games. (after all, most AIgen on f95 is glorified VN)
More options
Context Copy link