Earl's Musings: The Power of "You"

So, I hadn't ever actually considered this before. I think probably because I hadn't played many games that don't feature it, if any, but it was brought to my attention by a fan, and once I thought about it I realized it was something that I had, at least in part, encountered but never considered a factor. That is the power of the word "you" in porn games.

By using the word "you", a porn game can really help it's immersion. It's not Jillian's fingers going inside Jessica, it's Jillian's fingers going inside you. It helps you picture yourself as being on the receiving end of whatever sex things are happening. It makes the sex, potentially, more personal, and easier to get invested in. It's also a double-edged sword. While "you" can immerse a player, it can also destroy that immersion, and I think that all boils down to how hard the word tries to sell itself.

In Shield High, "you" doesn't actually refer to you. It's a roleplaying game. The first sentence of the game tells you that you are not you. You are Jessica now. You are always addressed as Jessica, or Jess, and Jessica has some rather distinct traits that never go away no matter what your choices are. She can be sculpted a bit by your choices, becoming more submissive when a slave, or more brazen when in charge, but a lot of her is set in stone. She'll always love movies. She'll always not wanna get up and fight Karen the next day. She'll always be fairly nice to people when a conversation first starts. And in some ways, that all, in my opinion, helps you become Jessica. You aren't creating a character for you to be, you're being given one, and told to make her decisions.

So, why do I think this helps? Well, by being given a character, by being told, a little bit, about who "you" are, you almost never have a clash between the text and your understanding. You didn't make Jessica, you didn't decide what she wants and what she doesn't. So when you're told you find something hot, it doesn't conflict with your understanding of "you". This is not so true when you're given character creation options. And the more choice, or freedom you're given in deciding your character, the less the game can adequately tell you what "you" feel, because the less the game knows about you.

A game that lets you make a character, build their appearance, and their backstory, suggests you can pick their preferences. And if you can pick your preferences, then the game can't really tell you what your character thinks about things. Which poses a major problem in a porn game, because a major part of porn games is saying if something feels good or bad. Which, is a very simplistic interpretation, but it's a true one. At the end of the day porn games are about finding very elaborate and flowery ways of saying "You did the good sex" or "The bad sex was done to you".

An interesting observation is that games like Skyrim, or Fallout New Vegas have a lot more freedom from the "you" problem. They don't immerse you as well or as easily, but without words being used, you can quickly ascribe thoughts to your character. You can decide she loves being fucked by these bandits in the wild, or that she loathes her husband for forcing her to suck him off and so on. And as a brief aside, the msex Veronica mod I've mentioned previously does wonders with the word "you". Some acts that have no animations instead give you a simple pop up, a few sentences telling you what you do, and how it makes you feel. It works, because to get there you have to have volunteered so much, the motive of your character is obvious.

As I think on it, I think the type of game that would make the best use of "you" would be something like Skyrim, but more stable and built with an idea of porn in mind, that uses simple pop ups of a few lines to describe the feelings, or inform you of minor details. Skyrim has a mod that gives something like that in relation to sex, but it pops up as text in the upper left, and it never attracts attention very well. But with a pop up, and a game built for it, you only need two or three sentences, and constructing accurate ideas of your characters feelings in just two sentences is much easier, and could easily be built into a system of measuring your activity, and creating a profile of sorts.

Anyway, those are just my thoughts on the matter. It's not really a lesson that will change Shield High at all, but it might well change how I handle a game in the future. Assuming I get there.

Pudding Earl.

Patreon released on time. Pudding Earl forgets he has a blog.

Yes, I got Patreon release out on time. Some might even say it was early, as I had most glitches fixed within 30 minutes of beginning work, and the next problem only took about 20 minutes to solve. It turns out the method that removes the text option to ask for help looks for the character's name, and I was listing them as "Mistress." This caused many more problems than you might expect.

But either way, it was out a few hours earlier than usual and then I just...forgot to post here. Until now. So here I am, informing everyone that release was on time as always. Public release is now going to be locked in to the date I've had planned since the get go, and thus will be coming out on the 7th, the same day as my next book.

Anyway, that's it for the moment, musings resume next week as I already have a topic in mind for once.

Pudding Earl

A brief thought a day before a release

So, obviously I'm releasing in...about 24 hours. Most of the content is in working order, I'll need about 30-45 minutes to test all my romance content one last time but last time I checked it seemed to pick up and work. Being enslaved is in a state of half-working. The vast majority of the events work, though one seems to be a bit iffy. I can fix it quite easily I'm sure, with a little bit of tweaking to some numbers and an extra line or two of code here and there.

But the event that frees you? That's fairly broken. I'm not sure how exactly I can fix it. And the more I play the more I feel like my game is held together by tape and needs a few minor tweaks to stop things over-writing each other so readily. I'm certain I'll get to it eventually, probably during one of the many spring cleaning updates I'll be bothered enough to rework the bits that have become broken under the slowly growing weight of the content.

But, this problem got me thinking. For a game like this, where each update comes on an exact date with more or less whatever I've managed to do by then, are such problems to be expected? Is it reasonable to release the game with a bug that I'll have fixed in a couple of days, knowing if I held off I could fix it but not because it's release day so I'm releasing? Is there even any real grounds for people to complain? I mean, beyond the obvious reporting of bugs, is it something that is reasonable to be upset about? I'm not sure. I hope to not find out tomorrow, as hopefully I can pinpoint the bugs and fix them, at least in the short term while I try and sort out a way to fix some of the deeper issues that might resolve this whole problem.

Anyway, that's it, release for Patrons tomorrow with some of the wonderful content I promised, and some less wonderful versions of content I promised that will likely get expanded on a bit in the next update.

Pudding Earl

Earl's Musings: Player Slavery and why no one ever does it probably

I'm sure I've mused about player slavery before. But in checking the list of posts I apparently haven't. So in that case, here we go, player slavery! It's one of my favorite ideas. The idea that when you lose you don't stop playing, you just become a slave. It's hot to actually experience your consequences instead of just reading a bad end story. But now that I'm adding it to Shield High, I COMPLETELY understand why it's so rare. It's such a difficult thing to make happen.

I am of course, still making it happen. Just expect slavery in this update to be slimmer than I'd promised. I'm finishing up the random events right now, and then I'm going to start building your outs. Now, I imagine my issue isn't one that most people encounter. My problem is that writing some of this content is mindnumbingly boring. I will actually have to go back and redo this event one day probably. But the main problem you encounter is "How do I make this still gameplay?" So, since shitting on Fenoxo went well, I think I'll review some other games and how they do it, and give some thoughts on the matter.

Shield High(RAGS version): Ah the vanity, putting my old work at the top of the list. Wonderful job me. Player slavery was a thing that appeared three times in Shield High. You could be Karen's slave, Andriana's slave, or Stacy's slave. Karen's slave is questionable because getting there required losing a nearly unloseable fight. However, once you were a slave, you had a pretty simple thing going on. You'd arrive at school, go and see your Mistress to get your random prescribed sex scene where she bosses you around, and then you had to try and find the plot that lead you to escape. This plot was entirely dependent on which girl enslaved you, and once you got free, I'm pretty sure the game broke. In hindsight, it wasn't the best system. It worked, but the single avenue out aspect of it is pretty lame. Overall it was a basic system that fitted the basic game but I'm not gonna call it good by any means.

Skyrim: Skyrim is probably the biggest lewd game I know. If you have a fetish for bondage and glitches, it'll be heaven. If you only like one of those things, I really hope it's glitches, but bondage will work out too. The slavery comes in the mod Sanguine's Debauchery. It's a pretty straight forward mod that makes it so that when you lose a fight you might be taken as a slave by someone who beat you. I haven't played out a full term of slavery. Why not? Because it's fucking boring. At first at least, it's a lot of sitting around and getting fucked. I'm under the impression there's more down the line, however Skyrim isn't stable enough for me to have found it. Honestly? Despite it's problems, it's still pretty good. For being modded in, it's a good solution, and I imagine a system like this built into a core game would be more enjoyable. The core problem is that you need something...more.

That having been said, there is Submissive Lola, which I do enjoy a lot. You can ask to be a slave to your companion, and once a day they fuck you (when you ask them if they want to, which is appreciated) and otherwise you go on with your adventure. However returning to towns can often result in short side quests, fetching your master something, or being paraded through town naked. There's some other things, instead of fucking you your master might apply a limitation, and you can also ask for spankings to help improve the rate you level up at. I may or may not be considering a similar feature for Shield High in the future.

Fallout New Vegas: Much like Skyrim, it's a buggy piece of shit. It's focuses are scattered and seemingly random, and overall the porn mods just aren't finished. However, there is "msex: Veronica" I think it's called. It lets you submit to or dominate Veronica and Cass. It's a bit like Submissive Lola, but I found it to be overall a more pleasant experience. You could set how long it would take for your Mistress to want something, from about 40 seconds up to 8 minutes. When the time was up, she'd talk to you, and give you a task. Sometimes it was a simple fuck, other times it was not being allowed to wear clothes, or move. Or you'd have to fuck the nearest stranger. It's a good system overall, though the not moving one was rough because it felt arbitrary. You got a small wander space, but no indication of how big it was. Otherwise however, I really enjoyed this system. Of all of them, I probably liked it the most. Content-wise it felt like it interacted with the world the most.

And so now that I've listed four methods of player slavery, the rant about why it doesn't happen much. The simple answer is making enough content to make it worth the limitations is hard. How do you make something that could go indefinitely feel fresh? I don't think you can. And that's before you consider every other question. How long should slavery last for? How much of the game should it dominate? Like, being a slave for 10 minutes every time isn't bad. But it's also not fulfilling if you're into that sort of thing. But being a slave for an hour every time might get dull. Perhaps there could be a middle of the road solution? I don't know. I've not yet solved this dilemna. All I've solved is knowing that making slavery content is hard, and I regret ever deciding to do it.

I feel there's more I could say but...1 it's long and 2 my brain is frazzled right this moment. So I shall stop here, write some book instead, and then write a bit more of this porn.

Pudding Earl

P.S. Once again, looking for recommendations on places to try out some porn games and places one can buy porn games. Suggestions on both appreciated greatly.

Shield High 0.683 release!

Yes, I'm finally doing the public release for it. I anticipate that next month will be the last month of the release date drifting, as I'd always intended it to be the 7th, and then got impatient. So next month, 7th will be the day of release. This is done in no small part to coincide with the release of my next book, to keep my release schedule stable.

Anyway, here is download: http://www.mediafire.com/file/lf9aeru488rul0y/Shield_High_JS_0.683.7z

So what's in this update? Essentially, the ability to take some initiative on plots instead of just waiting for them to happen to you, you can now go out and make some trouble for other people. At present there is only two full plots, one for Melanie, one for Iris, and then a stub of a plot that was in there because I wanted to write something involving this idea. I'll be fleshing that one out eventually, but not for a while longer. I want to replace the event with an actual fight, which means making a new set of fight mechanics.

The addition of Melanie means there's now a bet manager. The one I made in my last attempt at Shield High was atrocious, so I learned from my mistakes and made it nothing like the last one. I'm happy with how it works for now, but it will need some tweaking in the future I'm sure. For the moment however, it works, and that's what matters.

Next release is romance plots and enslaved events. I don't know how many enslaved events you can expect, since it's going DREADFULLY slowly, but there's 5 romance plots, each of roughly twice the length of your average sex scene, so that's a good sign. I will, at the very least, get the cycle of being Karen's slave done, but I've got enough time to get escape options sorted out too I'm sure.

And finally, I have a request for a future musing. I want to talk about porn games in a broader sense, but I'm not confident that I've seen the full scope of them, and before I go making baseless accusations, I want to make sure I've seen as much as possible. As such, please throw in the comments any games you enjoy, places you go to obtain porn games(both stores and forums) and anything else that I might need to look at before I go ahead and make a fool of myself.

I hope you all enjoy the update!

Pudding Earl