What's Your Genre?
Author: /u/Far-Opinion-8644 [1]
WHY
I love it when folks approach H-games like a real art form and if I can advance that conversation, I'm always happy to do it. I'm a dev whose worked on several projects, and I want to get devs (and fans) thinking about one of my favorite writing topics, genre.
When you manage your genre wrong, it can completely ruin the flow of an H-game. How many times have you been playing a game that is pretty erotic during the H-scenes, but then gets lost in some action-adventure tangent that feels like a wild tangent? Often times, that's a product of bad genre management. Genre is instrumental to knowing how and why a game is engaging with people, why they get sucked in...and sometimes sucked off.
Genre is a loose word, used as a sorting tool. But people get tripped up, because genre is used to described several diffrent sorting mechanisms. In general, for most games, there are three diffrent types of genre. Genre of mechanics, like first-person shooters or visual novels. Genres of setting, like sci-fi or super heroes or modern realism. Then there is Mode of Engagement. What "feeling" is the game trying to make the audience feel. Adventure draws out stirrings of travel, Horror draws out fear, Thrillers draw out suspense...
...And erotica? It turns you on.
What makes an H-game
H-games treat eroticsm as one of the main modes of engagement. It can be paired with most genres of setting, and most genres of mechanics. However, an H-game is by definition trying to arouse the player. The measure of wether or not a game is a great H-game is wether or not it's very good at arousing its players.
That might seem wrong though? Can't you think of H-games that aren't even very erotic, but just have a good story? Well, sure. But, that means that they're games with multiple Modes of Engagement, and the game is a Good Romance, not a Good H-Game. Generally, most H-game stories will use a second genre because eroticism is hard to advance a story with, especially if you want it to be anything deeper then an unending fuckfest.
This factor, trying to balance eroticism as a genre vs romance/action/etc is often where games fuck up.
Common Fuckups
One common fuckup is a failure to blend your game's genres. The genres in a media piece blend together in ways that can and should be mutually reinforcing. A common and effective genre pairing for Eroticism is Romance. It's easy to make the love story serve as build up for a sex scene and a sex scene serve as a capstone or plot-progression for a Romance. The two are reinforcing each other, often allowing scenes to fufill both modes of engagement at once.
You definitly CAN combine eroticism and action/adventure/horror/etc. A large chunk of my H-game writing has been on a dark-fantasy epic warfare/political drama. The problem is setting up so that the two are mutually reinforcing. A good erotic socio-political drama will clearly establish why Sex advances the drama and is a natural consequence of the drama's progression.
CAUTION
When someone fucks up the blending process, you get stories that are awkward mishmashes. These games often feel like the sex is on the sidelines, totally disconnected from everything else in the game. If the sex feels completely skipable without losing anything, the genres are blended poorly.
The same is true when a player desperately skips through all the talky/fighty bits of a narrative to get back to the fucking. That's often a sign that a player is invested in one genre (Erotica) but not the other.
Dodging Pitfalls
The questions to ask yourself are: "Do the sex scenes advance the story I am trying to tell?" and "Do sex scenes feel like a coherent and meaningful consequence of my non-sexual progression?"
A common pitfall, especially for new games, is when the genre switches suddenly. When a developer realizes that they're making an erotic game, but doesn't nail it down to "I am making a Realistic Modern Romance/Erotica" and start adding an elaborate but half-baked espionage plotline fifteen updates into a project.
I can think of dozens of projects that started as silly, sexy romances and then tried to turn themselves into sprawling dramas, but the radical genre shift makes it all come across as awkward. A lot of this could be prevented by just...knowing what kind of story you're trying to tell.
That's not to say that you can never make a project that introduces new genres of engagement over the story, or that never expand in narrative scope as it continues. It just pays to understand how and why the genre is changing, so you can plant your seeds early and so you can make everything fit together in a more cohesive way.