penny for your thoughts on why porn games are so often management games? is there something about the two genres that simply meshes well together, or do you think its more of a cultural thing, each taking inspiration from the others?
(With reference to this post here.)
There are a few factors in play that influence why porn games with any sort of serious depth to their mechanics tend to be management sims* of some description:
Most porn games (and most resources for creating them) tend to live in VN and VN-adjacent spaces; if you're starting with the conventions and technologies of a visual novel, doing a management sim is one of the more straightforward ways to achieve mechanical depth without moving too far out of your comfort zone.
Management sims tend to be text heavy and don't inherently demand much in the way of graphics (they certainly can be graphics-heavy, but that's more of an opt-in thing than a baseline expectation), so if your main prior experience is, say, writing erotic fanfic, a lot of your skills will be transferable to this new medium.
Many porn game creators have a background in tabletop RPGs, which informs their idea of what a mechanically rich game is "supposed" to look like; if you're translating the conventions of crunchy party-based tabletop RPGs to a single-player video game, a management sim is one natural outcome.
There are a lot of kinks that are fairly common in nerd spaces where gamification lends itself to a management-sim-like framing. This is more likely to be the case if you're of the domly persuasion (consider, e.g., corruption/breaking, puppy play, etc.), but it's not unheard-of from the sub side of the equation.
I wasn't being entirely facetious in the initial post: some nerds really do get hard for spreadsheets. Talk to any hyper lactation or hyper jizz fetishist, for example, and there's even odds they've run all kinds of numbers on their OC's fluid output; now consider how many pornographic management sims have at least substantial subsystems devoted to those very kinks.
* For clarity, when we say "management sim" in this context, we're talking about games where an in-depth simulation of logistical resource management is the central focus, not necessarily games where you manage a business. These are overlapping but not identical genres!
blakekathryn
jacobvanloon
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