Earl's Musings: Art vs Writing

Oh wow, exactly one week since the last post. I was really worried thinking about this before that I'd have been gone too long, but hey, here I am, back on time. This is a topic I've been sitting on since around Christmas, but now I can finally actually talk about it.

So, porn games are really weird in the way they exist as a thing to market around. With a normal video game I can just show you some screenshots, maybe a video of gameplay, and you either know if you're interested or not. With porn games however the gameplay isn't the focus. I mean, it kind of is, it needs to be fun, but no one looks at a porn game and says "Oh damn, that looks *fun*." No, everyone who looks at a porn game is trying to decide if they think it looks hot or not. Will they get off on playing this game?

And that, is where a really big issue crops up. Cause people are inherently visual, so if I show you some images that are really sexy and up your alley, you know that you're going to enjoy the sex content. Except, you don't need to play the game to see still images. In marketing to you the game, I'm giving away some of the content, and diluting the overall experience that you're gonna get playing it. And art, by it's nature, is still, once you've seen it, you've seen it. To be fair, this same restriction applies to writing, but writing is, overall, quicker to produce, as such you're not stuck in one position within the writing for an extended period of time, like you are in art. The result of this is that games with heavy art feel like they're really easy to get someone to play, but then struggle to hold up over time. Especially on replay value.

Writing on the other hand is the exact opposite. How the fuck do you market something that has no pretty art to show off? That's a somewhat serious question, if anyone has any ideas, please for the love of god tell me it might make working on Shield High easier. But it's just as much a rhetoric one for the sake of the discussion. Just screenshots are harder sells when the screenshot is comprised largely of text. However, once you've gotten someone in, keeping someone in with text is easier. There can simply be more of it, and you can keep a scene flowing and more interesting than with art, since there's nothing that your dialogue and descriptions can be conflicting with in front of the viewer. The big downside of this, is that since art takes more time to make a single piece of, it's generally viewed as being a more valuable skill set than writing. Hell, I make this mistake sometimes, and I am writing a porn game and know exactly how hard and painful it can be. But since I can do it, it feels like anyone can, until I read some other writing and realize just how wrong I am.

A QUICK SIDE NOTE: I am in no way claiming to be a great writer. Just good enough that some of you, my adoring fans, have told me that I'm the best in my particular genre. I would never claim such a thing, however if someone else were to do so, which they have, I would be being dishonest not to repeat them.

Like most musings, I feel as though this has been a directionless ramble, so I'll give a brief summary of what I think, and then wrap it up because I really want to finish this burger in front of me. Games that use predominantly art as their source of porn are really easy to get random people interested in, but are difficult, if not impossible, to make truly great products. Games that rely on their writing meanwhile, is where some of the best products can lie, but also some of the very worst products end up, and are generally pretty difficult to market. That having been said, going forward I think I'm just gonna put out screenshots, since in writing this I do recall looking at CK2 mods, which often were just screenshots of events being started that turned out a good way to hook people, so maybe I'm just being over dramatic.

And as a quick aside, Animation-driven stuff is a whole other ballpark of quality that I'm not even going to consider touching here, but probably is just the best of both worlds.

Pudding Earl