Monday 10 March 2014

March Open Thread: We Need More of …

According to AIF List, there have been 354 AIF games made going back to the 80s. In addition, there are a lot of games that border/included in AIF territory such as RAGs and some commercial releases (ExLibris has an informative post all about this). What gems, what great ideas have you seen in that long history of AIF games? What lessons from the past (whether thirty years ago or just weeks) do you believe deserve more recognition? Now is the time to call attention to those ideas.

Note this isn’t a thread for Overlooked AIF titles; BBBen is already covering that. I think it would be helpful if we could discuss specific concepts, design ideas, plot points, or other elements that you wish were done more frequently. It could be a setting (fantasy, modern, school), a particular type of character (sister, teacher, wife), a way the sex scenes were written, a goal in the game, or any other element that when you played the game made you say, "That was a great idea, we should have more of that". This way authors can look to some prior works for good ideas, and maybe the community can help find you games that already exist that have the elements you are looking for.

31 comments:

  1. Christopher Cole’s Gamma Gals
    Your girlfriend wants you to have sex with all of the other girls in her sorority and will encourage you and give you tips on how to do so. While the idea stretches reality, it was the best plot motivator for any sex romp game I’ve played. Games where the player has a central love interest that actually encourages his sexual escapades I think make for great adult stories. A sex romp is nice; one with a well written main female character assisting the player is great.

    I also want to mention BBBen’s Crossworlds did something similar and did it very well (I know we’ve come a long way since Crossworlds, but that still gets my vote for best AIF of all time).

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    1. I have to admit that I'm rather ambivalent about romps. It's not that I don't enjoy them, it's more that there's not much to them other than the sex, so if you've played one you've played them all.

      In general I'd like to see more games that force you to actually make decisions, because I've gotten very big on player agency in my old age. Plus more developed characters and stronger stories. All of which is actually very difficult to do, so I'm not holding my breath.

      I'd add that I'd like to see AIF become less vanilla, both in a content sense and in a character sense (eg. how many black characters have there been in those 354 AIF games?).

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    2. By player agency, do you mean a game that forces a player to solve obstacles, or a game where the player chooses between multiple paths and the choice has overall impact on the story?

      You bring up a good point about the black characters, but it is a tricky one. On one hand, I'd like to see more games with a wider array of characters, on the other, because of text, how do you (or should you even) specifically cite ethnicity. I was just going through this in my X-Men game were I was listing ethnicity in character description, then cut it out as being unnecessary and distracting from more relevant characteristics, but am still debating putting it back in.

      Many games (the ones that didn't use pictures) never specify whether a character is white/black/hispanic/asian, though names might give an indication, so in those 354 games I could potentially argue a lot, but that depends on the player's imagination.

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    3. "By player agency, do you mean..."

      The definition that I favour (paraphrased from Michael Mateas) is that player agency is the feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the gameworld, the effects of which relate to the player's intentions.

      That covers both local agency (which is solving puzzles, or even just exploring the environment if it's interesting enough) and narrative agency (where the plot branches according to the player's decisions).

      I agree with you about the difficulty of portraying a character's ethnicity without hammering the player over the head with it. The one definitely black NPC I can think of is from Last Hurrah, and she is a lot of a stereotype. However, the lack of black characters just seems odd to me, especially when you contrast it with the number of Asian characters.

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    4. To EL's point regarding agency: how many times in AIF does an NPC ask the PC on a date? Almost never. (And EL's beloved "Sex Artist" is one of the very few examples.) Yes, we've had a lot of NPCs drag the PC to bed (or onto the kitchen counter, or whatever), but for all the courting scenarios we've played through dates, in schoolyards, etc., how often does it read like the NPC is actually the one dictating the events?

      I realize some will read that as necessitating a dominant/submissive scenario. I think that's a failure of imagination.

      A hypothetical: we know, from finishing Camping Trip, that meek, virginal Becky actually had a side bet with Melissa that really changes the whole context of the game. But because we only find this out at the end, it doesn't matter. How much more interesting would that game have been had we known about that bet? What if (and granted, this is a different game, more like the second GoP entry) we'd role-switched between the PC and Becky? If the PC/Melissa scene in the clearing had the Mike/Becky scene as a playable counterpart, rather than a passive game event? In other words: give Becky some agency, rather than being the receptacle for whatever the PC and/or Mike and/or Melissa want to do with her.

      -- thundergod

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  2. My list of things I'd like to see more of in AIF goes little something like this:


    1. More games where sex is an element of the plot, not the whole plot.

    2. More voyeurism. Spycams, peeping through windows, etc.

    3. More games like A Goblin's Life, in which the PC isn't human.

    4. An AIF whodunnit, ala Make It Good.

    5. More period pieces. The 80's. The 60's. The 20's. The Old West. Victorian England. The possibilities are endless.

    6. More girls you can't have--like the suntanning babe in IPCU.

    7. More use of 1st and 3rd person narratives, like in the British Fox games.

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    1. 1: I think I've seen you bring this up in other threads and I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying that you would prefer a game where the character is trying to accomplish a non-sex related goal (stop world destruction) and the sex happens along the way, instead of being the end point? (such as a Bond movie I guess).

      Just asking for clarification.

      2: That is a good point. I found that the peeping in Meteor really helped to build the eventual sex scenes.

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    2. Regarding 1, Nick can supply his own answer, but for me you've basically got it. Some romps, like Last Week Before the Wedding, make the sex part of the plot in that it's necessary for the item/achievement collection (or at least that's my memory; it's been a long time).

      But a better example -- perhaps the best, actually -- would be the two full-length British Fox games (I'm excluding Magpie, or whatever it was called, because I've never played it). In many cases, there are multiple ways to solve a problem: with cleverness, with violence, and with sex. And you don't have to consistently choose one over the other. There's a plot, and there are plenty of opportunities to have sex, but the two are not the same.

      In a way, Meteor did this as well, though it was opaque to the player until you'd finished the game and learned what was really going on. Once you know, the amount and type of sex you have affects both the plot and the outcome, but the goal of the game is not actually to have sex with any particular character(s). GB didn't, after the SD series, often make sexual congress the end-goal of his games, but many of them still make it plain that sex is the ultimate solution. Meteor doesn't; in fact, one worthy solution can be achieved by having no sex at all.

      -- thundergod

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    3. That's exactly it, Archer. I'd like like to see something other than having sex with all the girls be the driving force of the story. Thundergod nailed it on the head. For the record, I'm not saying I want less sex in my AIF; I'm saying I would prefer to have it occur within the framework of a larger, more compelling storyline.

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  3. 1) More NPC agency, as ExLibris is describing. It's a fine line when the NPC isn't the character you (the player) is controlling, but rather than making the conditions for sexytime finding the right items, or getting the NPC just a little (but not too) drunk, make the NPC an active participant in the decision to have sex or not. Which leads me to...

    2) An answer to the question, "why does the NPC want to have sex with the PC/the PC and her sister/the PC, his entire fraternity, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff?" All too often, the NPC is an empty emotional or motivational vehicle. This is true even for otherwise excellent games. For example, why does Molly want to have sex with the PC (or Gary) in SD3? Why is she willing to have it in public, with her brother watching? Why is she, under the right conditions, willing to include Gary, Becky, Melissa, and Mike in the festivities? The answers to these questions have been the source of endless speculation, but most of it (including from me) has focused on what happens the next morning, after Molly's party. Other than a vaguely-expressed desire to have sex, we really have very little idea what Molly's motivations are. Whereas we have a very clear idea of why Becky wants to have sex with the PC, doesn't want to have sex with Melissa & Mike any longer, and doesn't want the PC to have sex with Molly. I'd like to see more of the latter. It doesn't have to be elaborate (Study Date handled it well in a short and simple way), but it does help characterization when it's there.

    -- thundergod

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    1. Couldn't agree more with #2. Motivation is a key element of creating a believable character, but it tends to just be hand-waved in AIF.

      SD3 is actually an exemplar when it comes to motivation, because not only do all of the major characters have motivations (albeit pretty vague in some cases), but they create drama by bringing the characters into conflict with each other (most notably by forcing the PC to choose between Becky and Molly). Everything Becky does in SD3 flows on from the fact that she's infatuated with the PC (although why she's infatuated with an anonymous character is more difficult to answer), which potentially brings her into conflict with Molly (who wants to have sex with someone because... maturity, I guess?) and Mike (who wants to have sex with Molly and sees the PC as a means to that end). On top of that you've got Alison's desire not to be defined by the actions of her sister (although that being the case, why will she have sex with the PC in front of Mike, Melissa, Gary and Molly?).

      I actually found Jenny's motivations in Study Date to be rather opaque, so I'm interested as to what you thought they were.

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    2. Re: Jenny, I didn't mean to imply it was a complicated motivation. But she clearly arrived primed for sex with the player, and spends a not inconsiderable percentage of her dialogue and her actions trying to make that obvious to the PC. I don't think a game of its length and simplicity needed something more complicated than that, whereas a longer game would.

      (An example of the latter: the Sam Shooter series, in which the depth of Laurie's feeling for and devotion to her brother is slowly but forcefully developed over the course of four games, and unquestionably would have been quite the plot point if the series had ever been "finished.")

      -- thundergod

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    3. Ah, I'd come to the same conclusion. However, that doesn't explain why she's decided to have sex with the PC in particular.

      It's clearly a decision she's made before her arrival, so it's unconnected with anything the player does. The PC is virtually anonymous, so it can't be anything about him. And Jenny is much more confident and mature than the PC, so it doesn't seem believable that she's infatuated with him for some unknown reason. Maybe she's just so genre-savvy that she knows how the game is supposed to end?

      In the context of a game this size it's not really a big deal, although ideally I would have liked something the player did to be what tipped the balance.

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    4. I think it's obvious that Jenny plays a lot of AIF. ;-)

      -- thundergod

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    5. I know I'm late to this party, but my intent was for the PC to be "you", so I didn't want to go into too much about his personality. Jenny already has a crush on you because of something about your personality that I don't know because I don't know you. Also, since it's told entirely in first person, and in my experience people (especially teenagers) are quite oblivious to who likes them and why, I thought it was natural to not necessarily be clear why Jenny likes you.

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    6. For me, the problem with that approach is that you're pulling the player in two directions. On the one hand you're encouraging them to think of the PC as a literal avatar, to a much greater extent than is the case with most AIF. On the other, you're expecting them to think like a teenager. I don't think you can do both at the same time.

      Having the PC's relationship with Jenny be dependent on some aspect of his personality (rather than anything the player has control over) also makes Study Date more of a story than a game. The player can't 'win' or 'lose'. Their role is restricted to working out how to 'turn the page' (ie. what action will trigger the next scene, which is usually spelled out pretty clearly). So, ultimately they're more of a reader than a player and the story is thus more important.

      However, real life typically doesn't make for a good story because it's random, confusing, and inconclusive. Fiction is more satisfying because it makes sense. X happens because of Y. For example, in a movie if the villain's world-domination device goes wrong at a critical moment it had better be because the hero sabotaged it. If it's because Microsoft Windows coincidentally encountered a problem and needs to close, the audience would probably demand their money back.

      So, while I agree that it's realistic that a fifteen year old boy wouldn't know why a girl likes him (although I suspect he'd invent a reason because the human mind abhors a narrative vacuum), I think it's desirable for the player to know what's going on. Leaving Jenny's motives opaque creates uncertainty and invites speculation. Which is fine if that's the effect you're going for, but not so much otherwise. If you combine that with a player who is more experienced (and cynical) than the PC, it leads to suspicion of Jenny's real motives and undercuts the 'first love' aspect of the story. Or at least that was my experience. Which is why I think it's better to define anything that's directly related to the plot because you can never predict what preconceptions the player/reader is going to fill the gaps with (as the recent discussion of Jenny demonstrated).

      I should add the caveat that the above assumes you're interested in the story as a story (as I am). If you're only interested in it a means of establishing the characters and setting up the sex scene, then my comments are pretty irrelevant.

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  4. 3) Jeopardy. I don't mean physical jeopardy, though that would be fine, I mean expanding the central question of the plot beyond "will you have sex with the NPC or not?" This could be making the sex part of/a solution within the plot, rather than just the reward for working through the plot; even some outright romps, like Last Week Before the Wedding, manage this. But I'd like to see failure in some games be more than "you haven't had sex yet," or even "you haven't had sex and thus game over," but something more substantial. Which leads me to...

    4) Competition. Only very, very rarely is there competition for the affections of an NPC. Or a PC, for that matter; usually, if more than one NPC wants to have sex with the PC, the outcome is a consequence-free threesome. Here, again, SD3 stands out: three of the four major NPCs have conditions and limitations on what the PC can do with the others, and one of the NPCs is quite willing to have sex with the PC's rival if things don't work out.

    I'd even say that I'd like to see this made explicit. There's something a little awesome in SD3 making a PC who failed to win Molly's affections watch her lose her virginity to Gary, rather than just giving the player a "game over" message. To me, this adds motivation to and interest in the pursuit.

    5) Exclusion. There's a lot of "replayability" that is really only figuring out the magic combination of events that will allow the PC to bang everybody. I'm of the opinion that a much more interesting form of replayability means that one actually has to make choices, and that some choices will close off NPCs during that playthrough.

    6) Darkness. Non-happy endings, cheating that doesn't end in a everyone's-forgiven foursome, finally having sex with the Designated Lust Object that doesn't result in an explicit or implied future of rabbit-like rutting, but in her walking out (or whatever).

    7) A less prosaic (optional) sexuality. I realize this is asking for a lot of programming and writing, but why is there so little BDSM (even -lite) play in AIF? It's either straight-ahead or violent and rapey (even when it's done with joy in the heart, like the British Fox games); there's almost never anything in between. I wouldn't necessarily want this to be a requirement for scene completion, but actually writing content for "spank [girl]" would almost be a daring revelation at this point.

    -- thundergod

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    1. 4/5/6: You bring up some good points, but I think hit on the difference between light and serious games. In a light game everything goes well and the player is happy, in a serious game the player may suffer multiple obstacles/restarts before achieving the event they want. That can lead to a lot of frustration, but the payoff may be worth it (I say may because it varies from person to person).

      7: On my list of Open Topics is How Can AIF Sex Scenes be Improved. I also find them kind of redundant and that the community has locked into a 'this is how to write a sex scene' formula.

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    2. It's true that what I'm describing suggests a much more involved game than most people are willing to tackle, and one that may be more fraught than most of the "where's the walkthrough?" crowd will want to play.

      But...well, take PAF. Strip it of the genre conventions and the multimedia, and reimagine it as straight text AIF. A game in which there were only three characters -- the PC, the station domme, and her daughter -- would have been *excellent* in this regard, because there's a lot of characterization, backstory, conflict, and plot there. So, in an even smaller way, might have been a game with just the PC and the android (or cyborg, or whatever she was...it's been a while, sorry BBBen). It doesn't have to begin and end like "In Darkness," but something other than "Igor see hole, Igor put things in hole, yay Igor" would, on occasion, be nice.

      -- thundergod

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    3. Part of the appeal of PAF to me was trying to be as successful with as many girls as possible on normal mode. One is easy, two can be a little difficult, while three is a very tough challenge. The puzzles of getting the girls was the appeal.

      I think it obviously falls in the category of personal appeal.

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    4. A lot of the things that thundergod requests are, at least partially, elements in a game that I have been "working on" for quite a while. It was supposed to be a short mini-comp style entry, but I have never completed it. I am really good at starting projects, but terrible at finishing them.

      I promise to try and complete it, but do not promise success.

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  5. I'm not sure what I want to see more of, but I do have a question to everyone out there. Obviously, we'd like to see interactivity, lots of content and branching, consequential storylines, but a lot of one usually means it comes at the expense of another. My question: what would you sacrifice for more of what?

    Me personally, I have decided to sacrifice interactivity in favor of both content and branching plots, but that's my perspective as a writer. As an enjoyer of AIF, I really like fully interactive stories, and I like a balance of all three.

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    1. I think I answered this in a similar fashion in a long-ago thread on EL's blog, but what I really want the most from AIF specifically (aside from the game aspect of it, where of course what I most want is to enjoy the gameplay) is to want to have sex with the Designated Lust Object(s) for reasons other than wanting to read the porn.

      That can come from a clever plot, or interesting gameplay. It can be a really well-drawn character, or a particularly believable scenario. It can even be a truly epic sex scene.

      I don't think there's just one way to get there, and what I'd sacrifice depends a lot on what kind of game it is. But for me, I'll sacrifice just about anything if the game actually makes me care about finishing, or finding out what happens, or the character(s).

      -- thundergod

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    2. You bring up a good point that troubles not just AIF, but all projects; there are a lot of great ideas, but which ideas are most important? Usually consumers don't understand the full costs of the trade offs or time taken.

      Broadly, I think it is impossible to answer. Would I like breadth or depth? Well, I like both, if there was no depth I would hate it, but I'd rather have a lot of characters than a "deep" game. I'd need to know more about the specific game concept to give a concrete answer.

      Hopefully, authors can factor in the requests put here with the costs such requests will take. They could then post in development diaries/their own blog specific queries (should I do A, B, or C).

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    3. I'd like to make an argument against breadth, actually. My experience of broad games, with many possible conquests and different sex scenes, is that they're great fun at first but once I've completed them I don't have much interested in doing the whole thing over again. Furthermore, it's inevitable that only some of the sex scenes really catch one's interest. I really like some of the scenes in GoP2, for example, but the thought of working through the entire game to get to the scene I want seems pretty tedious. (I know you can keep save files, etc., but that's really just further evidence that breadth gets in the way.)

      On the other hand, imagine a straightforward game like Study Date (which I really liked) that had tremendous variation built in, so that every time you played it you had a different girl: different name, different physical characteristics, different clothing, different attitude toward the player, different sexual interests, different preferred answers, and so on. This, to me, would be something worth replaying much more.

      Off the top of my head I can't think of any games that do this, and it's something I'd really like to see. Actually, Goblinboy built in something like this kind of randomization in the daydream scenes in Camping Trip, but it was very rudimentary. Much more could be done, with varying degrees of coding difficulty. In Inform 7, at least, it's trivial to randomize names and physical descriptions; somewhat more involved to randomize clothing and dialogue; and challenging to randomize personality, quirks, interests, and so on. But it certainly could be done.

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    5. Randomization can be done, but it's a bitch to test. Goblinboy-esque random daydreams are fairly straightforward, but introducing randomization to the more complex aspects of your code can be a nightmare.

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  6. Hmm, all these responses please me as I work on my own bit of AIF (if it ever sees the light of day) as I find myself trying to incorporate several of these points, albeit poorly no doubt! =D

    I guess I am in the same school as most. We obviously all want more of about everything. But, I can also see that being ridiculously difficult as Another Wannabe mentions - it often has to come at a sacrifice of one thing for another.

    Personally, I am fairly open to whatever. I don't necessarily hate sex romps, even if there is little in the way of character development/story/etc. It can be fun sometimes. I know if they are all TOO simple it can hurt them, but it doesn't have to be a literary masterpiece all the time either.

    As for your question AW, I guess it depends. Just like video games, one thing is often sacrificed. Open World games ofter have less deep characters and stories. On the other hand, you can get very detailed, realistic people with a lot of depth but often the game becomes more railroaded.

    I think there is a place for both (and those in between the extremes). Sometimes I want to have a huge world to wander with lots of characters to see, and other times I would rather have much fewer people and less locales that are more believable and interesting. I don't think either is right or wrong, but I think just realizing that ANY choice likely comes at the cost of something else is the main thing.

    Don't expect a game to be the best at absolutely everything. That isn't to tell authors not to shoot for the moon of course! There are certainly some games that break away (at least to some extent) from this norm, and I say if you can, go for it!

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  7. I'd like more games where your choiches have different good and bad results. Take Karrek's game for example. I loved it but it's basically just solving a big puzzle. In the beginning however it is implied that there are two routes to a good result: you can either play it casual, or romantic.

    In a small game you could have different methods of achieving the games ultimate goal. In a bigger game I'd like it if your approach (that says something about the personality of the pc) defines which girl you end up with.

    I'd like it even better if such a game doesn't give you the opportunity to do everything in one round. I hope more AIF-creators realise you don't need to put an ultimate option in, where you bang everyone and still end up with your one truth love (or, let's be honest here, you one truth awesome sex-partner). Once you make a game where you can do everything at once, it just becomes a puzzle. Give players real choices and real consequences. That would be my preference.

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    1. I don't want to say too much, because it might never see the light of day, but I'm currently outlining a game that you may like. ;-)

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    2. That sounds intriguing!

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