INTRODUCTION

Sex and video games really have a lot in common. This was a casual thought I had briefly, but the more I inspect it, the stronger it feels. And 'feels' is an important word to keep in mind. While I will do my best to back that which I can up with facts, the major purpose of writing this is to organize my thoughts in relation to my current project. As such, there will be a lot of editorializing. I'll just try to be honest when it's happening.

Perhaps it's irresponsible to look at sex from the angle of game theory. It certainly sounds cynical to me. After all, I don't want to start minmaxing my sexual performance, at least, not consciously I don't. But as I’m designing a game about sex and sexual relationships, I can’t help but think about player incentives and sexual incentives and how we can expand the conversation of both. In fact, reading about player incentives in video games in tandem with reading about sexual motivation and the psychology/physiology of the sexual procession has created some interesting parallels in my awareness. What I’m not trying to say is that video games are somehow hijacking our sexual faculties, but rather that the procession of video game play parallels the procession of sexual play, even if the physiology of these plays are completely unrelated.

My research into player incentives in video games led me to a knowledge-stuffed article called “Game Reward Systems: Gaming Experiences and Social Meaning” by Hao Wang and Chuen-Tsai Sun. Their research sought to explore and categorize reward systems in video games and illustrate the link between these rewards and player fun. I highly suggest you read it for yourself as it’s been a great launching-off point for my own research, providing ample resources to inspect. As such, the majority of my formalism about player incentives comes from this paper.

Neglecting the myriad motivations that players have for playing video games, what is the procession of gameplay? I’m not talking about the mechanical question “how is a game played?”, but the existential question “why is the game played?” or perhaps, even more fundamentally “what is game play?”. Richard Bartle, a British game researcher, suggests that there are four types of player, specifically in Multi-User Dungeon games, but the taxonomy can be applied broadly. There is the Achiever, the Killer, the Socializer and the Explorer. Wang and Sun propose a two-axis classification for players, built on the backbone of this theory. On one axis you have self and others and the other axis you have progress and casual. The Achiever would typically (but not exclusively) fall into the Self-Progress quadrant of this classification, seeking to beat challenges provided by the game. In the opposite Others-Casual quadrant you’d find the Socialite, not seeking out so much of challenge or proficiency as interaction with other players, utilizing the game as a sort of social filter for like-minded individuals.

SEXUAL MOTIVATION

So, then why is the game played? Even with these two simple systems, we find an incredible variation of fauna of motivations. Looking at sexuality, there is a similar frustration with the question “why do we have sex?” As an organism, we have sex for the sole purpose of creating progeny. As an individual, however, it’s a more complicated question and very quickly the answers become as myriad as with gameplay. For a long time there has been “the big three” reasons for sex - love, pleasure and procreation, but as time has progressed, this has felt insufficient to describe the multitude motivations for sexuality. UT-Austin conducted a study of 1500 undergraduate students and their attitudes/motivations toward sexuality and found four umbrella motivations for sex:

• Physical reasons such as pleasure, stress-relief and relieving depression
• Goal-Based reasons such as making a baby or improving someone’s utility (whether social status or income)
• Emotional reasons such as love, joy or gratitude
• Insecurity reasons such as keeping a partner around, relieving self-esteem issues or feeling pressured

It was about at this point in my research that I realized what the question, both for sexuality and gaming, really was. I wasn’t asking “why do we have sex?” or “why do we play games?”, I was asking, more specifically “what is the fundamental process that motivates gameplay/sexplay?”.

In the 1960s, William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson conducted a series of sexual observation experiments. The pair observed nearly 700 individuals, measuring physiological response to sexual behavior. They observed somewhere around 10000 sexual acts in their research, including numerous forms of intercourse in various positions and male and female masturbation. In their research they described a “Sexual Response Cycle” of four stages:

• Excitement or Arousal - In which the individual initially shows a physiological response to sexual stimulation. For men, the penis becomes erect, for women the clitoris becomes erect and initial expansion of the vaginal canal as well as natural lubrication begin.
• Plateau - In which the individual reaches a stable physiological point. Women experience increased blood flow to the genitalia and men reach full erectness and may present precum.
• Orgasm - In which pleasure peaks, muscles contract and men reach a point of ejaculation
• Resolution - A sexual refractory period in which pleasure diminishes and the body rests. For men and women this is a period where sexual behavior is not mechanically possible and varies from minutes to, reportedly, as much as a day.

THE MOTIVATION RESPONSE CYCLE

The first three stages of the Sexual Response Cycle look a lot like the physiological underpinning of playing video games, though they are likely chemically dissimilar in many regards. One of the forms of player motivation explored by Loewenstein and Rozin was “anticipation”. Dopamine appears to be released in much higher levels in the anticipation of a reward than at the time of reward. Anticipation of a reward is a fantastic motivation to action. Game Designers can create systems that are scrutable to the player, transparent in how they offer out rewards, giving players actions vectors to achieve the desired reward, while with each subsequent playing of a task (given sufficient reward) they will have the anticipation to carry them through. Much of game play seems to progress through its own Motivation Response Cycle. After a player learns the structure of the game, they progress through three stages.

The first stage is Excitement or Arousal - In which a stimuli in game has initiated the promise of a reward, much like a sexual stimuli. This stimuli however falls within the language of the game and is a patternistic response to understanding a task the player has competence in and understanding the rewards to. A simple form of Excitement would be an NPC that offers a quest. The player can assess their level of skill, experience and character strength from what they understand of the game so far and measure that against the reward or perceived reward. Some games even go as far as to explicitly list the reward (1000 Gold, a new sword, a magic spell, etc.) so the player can more easily assess the cost-reward balance. This is merely positing on my part but I’d think this would be the apex point of dopamine release, the excitement of a task the player understands how to do and knowing what they will get for doing that task.

The second stage is Plateau - In which the player performs the task that is expected of them. This is the actual mechanical tasks such as shooting enemies, finding items, solving environmental puzzles, etc. Most of the content of the game exists here and, arguably, all of the challenge of the game resides here. It is the player “doing it” (pun absolutely intended).

The final stage is Orgasm - In which the player is rewarded for their efforts. The doing is done and now all there is to receive the reward. According to research by Robert Sapolsky, this would be where the dopamine is actually lowest in a player’s system, however, that is not to say that the reward is not important. Given insufficient reward the whole system breaks down. Excitement doesn’t happen because disappointment has now colored the possibility space of reward. If excitement doesn’t work, the player now may very seriously consider not even trying. Reward is important in the mix here.

Given the procession of activity and response, we have, in some general sense, the game loop. After an initiation (tutorial or learning period) the player has now been activated to be an agent of this loop. However, I want to explore an alternative to the reward structure or, at least, to Orgasm-centric game loops. 

ORGASM-FUN

There appears to be two kinds of game when it comes to their relationship to reward and, more importantly to fun: Plateau-Fun Games and Orgasm-Fun Games (or Ejaculatory Games as I’ve so lovingly been calling them for the last week). Let me start out with saying that this classification is not one of value or quality, merely of focus. In writing this, it’s admittedly been tempting to classify Orgasm-Fun games as somehow inferior to Plateau-Fun games, but I think it’s just that the sins of Orgasm-Fun are more readily transparent in my research. If I show any bias in one direction, I apologize in advance and I will try to keep my head on straight while talking about these classifications.

During the development of Spyro the Dragon, Insomniac's Chief Creative Officer Brian Hastings coined the phrase “toy factor” to describe the incredible satisfaction of just handling Mario in Super Mario 64. To Hastings, it wasn’t just about giving the player tools to solve problems and then surrounding them with compelling and challenging problems, it was about giving a sense of satisfaction to the “doing” as well. It’s like Alan Watts said “Same way with dancing. You don’t aim at a particular spot in the room because that’s where you will arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.” Insomniac sought to make a game where the dancing was worth being the whole point. That is, however, not to say that Spyro is a Plateau-Fun game. It’s more of an example of a game balanced between Plateau-Fun and Orgasm-Fun. The levels are structured simply, but deeply, allowing users to get to the end without too much hassle, but providing greater reward (120% completion, for one) to players that want to explore more and exhibit more mastery of the mechanics. There are hundreds of gems in each level, dragons to get and a percent read-out. Orgasm is abundant in the game, from the bite-sized level structure to the bosses at the end of each world to the myriad completionist goals (eggs, dragons and gems). Each portal serves as a trigger, offering the player with a new opportunity to succeed with moderately evolved challenge and consistent reward. This is Orgasm-Fun at its finest, and I truly mean that as finest.

There are plenty of examples of Orgasm-Fun being utilized to motivate players through dreadful and boring gameplay. The apex of this (possibly by design) is Cookie Clicker. I have to admit, the only reason I’ve given Cookie Clicker as much thought as I have is that in college I was one of its victims. There was a solid 2 month period where an embarrassing number of my waking hours were utilized to expand my cookie empire. For the uninitiated, Cookie Clicker is a game where:

• You click a cookie to get cookies
• You spend cookies to buy power-ups to get more cookies

I’m not even being reductionist here. We could discuss the achievement system that brings in social reward, but that’s probably outside the scope of this essay. The point here is that this is a game without Plateau-Fun. You click. You get a cookie. That’s it. The initialization period is brief (click the cookie. You’re done) and before you have the chance to question it, a new power up unlocks and you begin to figure out the scalability of your operation. There is immaculate feedback to make you feel like your clicking is worthwhile, there are milestones to give you a sense of goal and give you the Motivation Response Cycle, just in a deeply condensed fashion. All these years later and I’m still bitter about the whole ordeal. It feels like a hijacking of my well-intentioned faculties. This is Orgasm-Fun perfectly distilled and optimized. And sex games are certainly among the worst offenders of Orgasm-Fun.

WARNING: HIGH FOCUS OF ANECDOTAL REPORTING

Years ago I discovered a website exclusively featuring erotic flash-based games. I don’t know if I’d get into weird territory linking out to it, so I’m not going to. Anyways, I spent a wealth of my free summertime hours playing the wealth and variety of games they had. Dress Up games, Match games, Breakout clones with nudes behind the blocks, dating/sex sims, harem games, you name it. It was a bizarre thing that I started to notice that I was less interested in looking at erotic imagery without the confines of a game surronding them. Some of the games I was able to reason that they were at least moderately fun. Namely the Meet n’ Fuck games, while not great games, had a level of reward that felt commensurate with the level of challenge. But for every game where there was this balance, there were three where you were expected to master the game to a fairly high degree before you were able to advance beyond the first level. Match games where you had 30 seconds to make 20 matches (with a 0.5 second animation to flip the cards back over for each one you got wrong) or seemingly rigged poker simulators where your odds seemed unusually low of winning a hand, much less a procession of hands. I feel like I’m just griping now. The point to be made here is, I kept playing them. Long after I’d grown sick of another losing round of Breakout, I’d continue to play for the promise of the reward. Long after I’d grown too sour to give a care for improving my skills or in learning anything about the mechanics, I was motivated by the Orgasm-Fun well beyond the parameters of fun. Wang and Sun mention this in their paper, saying “Reward systems can be viewed as player motivators or as compromises for easing disappointment”. At their worst, rewards can salve a LOT of disappointment and frustration, depending on the player.

PLATEAU-FUN

But what about Plateau-Fun? Orgasm-Fun is pretty easy to find examples of since most games have rewards of some kind (even if it is just the immediate gratification of feedback). In my personal experience, I’ve often heard games that over-focus on the “doing” with less of a reward architecture as being ‘boring’. Games like Proteus or 0N0W. Not to mention, research into pure Plateau-Fun games have really only yielded a few examples, each of which come with concessions.

Issues that I take with your run-of-the-mill walking simulator is that these aren’t REALLY Plateau-Fun either. Games like “Beginner’s Guide” aren’t interesting because the “doing” is particularly well-honed. They are more akin to an interactive essay, where the reward is based on unlocking new areas and new information. Proteus isn’t fun because the walking is great, it’s fun because of the aesthetic rewards and the discovery.

Perhaps the closest I’ve found to a pure Plateau-Fun game would be Abzu, the 2016 swimming adventure created by Giant Squid. While it’s still not perfectly Plateauish, it does a lot to encourage the player to operate in the moment and witness the world. In Abzu you play as a swimmer in a gorgeous ocean surrounding, swimming through beautiful ocean cave corridors surrounded by wonderful sea life. The swimming mechanic is truly one of the best ever made in video game history. The character effortlessly avoids obstacles and speed is a factor that is not granularly controlled, but incredibly sensible. As well as this care given to the “doing” of Abzu, there is a “meditate” mechanic where you view the fish and the environment while basking in the quiet orchestrations of the game’s perfect soundtrack. You are explicitly given a mechanic of presence, of dancing. There are “concessions”, however, that likely make it a more engaging game overall. There is a story and there are many environments to venture. This is not a weakness of the game at all, however, it does bring to light flaws in my conception of pure Plateau-Fun games.

One game that seems to wrestle with this frustration is Jonathan Blow’s “The Witness”. A puzzler with a Myst-esque feel with Journey-esque visuals, The Witness is deserving of its own essay. Before I continue, I do want to implore you that, if you have not played this game, go do so before you finish this essay. It would be unfair for me to taint your personal experience of that game more than I have, perhaps, so far. 

For now, what I will say is, in my view there are three levels of play to The Witness. At first The Witness presents you with an incredible progression of path puzzles, each one displayed on a little square panel that blocks out your entire view for the duration of your solving of the puzzle. These puzzles at first free you, giving you access to the outside world and opening new areas of the map. They become the Motivation Response Cycle needed to keep a player engaged. Over time you are introduced to new fauna of the puzzle, but they are all fundamentally built on the same principle of creating paths on a square panel. Even at the point of being enamored with this level of play, I thought the game was brilliant, but then I noticed the next level of play.

As I became attuned to solving these path puzzles, my thinking while playing was really reshaped, to the point that I started to see the patterns of the puzzle echoed in the environment. At some point, to my delight, I realized that there were path puzzles in the world around me. Pieces of buildings would build the path and I’d just have to scoot around into the perfect position in the environment to align the perspectives of the puzzles. Once again, I was delighted! The genius of the game seemed boundless and I was having such incredible fun the whole time.

At some point my knowledge of the puzzles became enough that I was able to unlock a door near the start of the map. In it there was a panel with a strange polygonal version of the path puzzles. Later I would learn that there were diagrams hidden around that would show you various videos if you put them in at the bizarre panel. These videos were all wonderful, from James Burke to Richard Feynman, they all seemed to explore epistemology and systems of knowing and learning. But it was one of the later videos that I unlocked that really struck me and unlocked, for me, the final level of gameplay.

The video started on a quiet-looking woman sitting in front of a skyblue backdrop. She started speaking and very quickly hit a point. The woman was Merle Antoinette Roberson, an American spiritualist teacher and she implored the audience to “stop looking for what you want”. She goes on to explain that it doesn’t mean to close off, it’s not a cynical “stop looking” but rather an invitation to stop, to be in the moment, to not be driven by goal or reward, by dream or fantasy. To be. It was then that I realized that the puzzles were a vessel for teaching. It seems like the game that Jonathan Blow wanted to make was a beautiful island simulator, allowing you to walk free and engage with the scenery. But doing so would leave the game “boring” and lacking the motivations to keep players engaged. So instead we were provided with a course, starting with a very gamey puzzle, evolving in complexity until it became the major part of our focus, enough that we could see the puzzles in the environment and then, hopefully at the behest of Roberson, we could forget the puzzles altogether and just look at the environment. But why can’t we just look? Why can’t we just dance?

CONCLUSION AND SEXY AFTERNOON

I don’t have the courage to explore this question entirely bare, nor do I have the experience as a game developer to achieve it. That said, as I’m exploring the types of play in Sexy Afternoon and the kinds of behavior I want to incentivise, my focal point will be in Plateau-Fun, the “doing”, the sensual or the dancing. I want to create experiences that feel good to play mechanically and that can be reward in their own measure. There won’t be dangling of the carrot with regards to sexuality and nudity. All characters are ready and willing sexual participants, that said, this game will also side step the ejaculatory nature of a lot of sex sims. I’m continuing to explore use of minimal UI in the sex sim game, which I’ve taken to calling a touch sim game since there are no strong indications of rising pleasure or the incentive of ejaculation/climax. This will be a game where activity has fuzzy boundaries, players will spend time with an activity on its own merit as long or as short as they want.

That said, I’m still in the early stages of all of this. I know that reward will inevitably slip into the architecture of the game. Arguably, even feedback to the player is a small form of reward. But I want to be judicious about reward’s use, be honest about what I am incentivising with it and never abuse my players. Maybe it’s impossible to codify Plateau-Fun and have a game that anyone wants to play but, regardless, for now it’s my dance, it’s what I’m “doing”.