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.