🔗 Strawberry Jam 2 on itch

I’m running a game jam, and this announcement is before the jam starts! What a concept!

The idea is simple: you have all of February to make a horny game.

(This jam is, as you may have guessed, NSFW. 🔞)

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I think there’s a lot of interesting potential at the intersection of sex and games, but we see very little exploration of it — in large part because mega-platforms like Steam (and its predecessor, Walmart) have historically been really squeamish about anything sexual. Unless it’s scantily-clad women draped over everything, that’s fine. But un-clad women are right out. Also gratuitous high-definition gore is cool. But no nipples!!

The result is a paltry cultural volume of games about sex, but as boundaries continue to be pushed without really being broken, we get more and more blockbuster games with sex awkwardly tacked on top as lazy titillation. “Ah, it’s a story-driven role-playing shooter, but in this one part you can have sex, which will affect nothing and never come up again, but you can see a butt!” Truly revolutionary.

The opposite end of the spectrum also exists, in the form of porn games where the game part is tacked on to make something interactive — you know, click really fast to make clothes fall off or whatever. It’s not especially engaging, but it’s more compelling than staring at a JPEG.

So my secret motive here is to encourage people to explore the vast gulf in the middle — to make games that are interesting as games and that feature sexuality as a fundamental part of the game. Something where both parts could stand alone, yet are so intertwined as to be inseparable.

The one genre that is seeing a lot of experimentation is the raunchy visual novel, which is a great example: they tend to tell stories where sexuality plays a heavy part, but they’re still compelling interactive stories and hold up on those grounds just as well. What, I wonder, would this same sort of harmony look like for other genres, other kinds of interaction? What does a horny racing game look like, or a horny inventory-horror game, or a horny brawler? Hell, why are there no horny co-op games to speak of? That seems obvious, right?

I haven’t said all this on the jam page because it would add half a dozen paragraphs to what is already a lengthy document. I also suspect that I’ll sound like I’m suggesting “a racing game but all the cars are dicks,” which isn’t quite right, and I’d need to blather even more to clarify. Anyway, it seems vaguely improper as the jam organizer to be telling people what kind of games not to make; last year I just tried to lead by example by making fox flux.

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If exploring this design space seems interesting to you, please do join in! If you’ve never made a game before, this might be a great opportunity to give it a try — everything is going to be embarrassing and personal regardless. Maybe hop on Discord if you need help or want a teammate. Feel free to flip through last year’s entries, too, or my (super nsfw) thread where I played some and talked about them. Some of them are even open source, cough, cough.

Previously:

• Strawberry Jam (2017)