Welcome to the...

So I was recently thinking about the anime Welcome to the NHK. If you haven't seen it, I don't blame you. It wasn't hugely popular, but it was funny. Basically, the main character is a shut-in or more appropriately, a hikikimori. I won't go into huge detail about the show, but pretty early on, the main character and his neighbor begin working on a "Gal Game" which is pretty much a dating sim/ sex game.

"What a peculiar subject Resi," you might say, "just what made you think about this?"

Well, come on, we all know what the internet is for here, but I never realized how big the demand for porn games was. Several of my favorite animes are based off of eroge games. What really amazes me is just how much story is actually put into them.. clearly it's enough to make an anime out of it and sell thousands of mangas when clearly the object of the game is to have sex, which could theoretically be accomplished in 1/100th of the time simply by going to a porn site. Instead, extensive story lines are played out through countless menus of questions and answers expecting you to memorize all sorts of things about the girl you are pursuing. It's a really intriguing concept to me now.

See I live in the 3% of the internet that is not porn-laden. However, I've been mostly desensitized to it without ever having watched it. I can't even decide if this makes sense or not. There's so much porn on the internet, that even when not looking for porn you see enough of it to think that DP is child's play. Now, I don't really know if the fact that the characters are illustrated helps or hurts, but the fact of the matter is that porn is so ubiquitous that to get people to enjoy it, they create a backstory for each character in the game, intertwine plots and send you reading enough text to write a term paper so that you can get to the pornography. This reward system seems to really get results in Japan, and doing a quick google search shows me that there's more adult flash games than you can shake a (your) stick at. I'm really surprised that there's a demand for games where you play Snake until the girl's clothes come off and dress up games complete with "devices" to make it interactive. Why go through all this work when less than two clicks away you could be watching porn? Still Strip Snake and Dress Up Kasumi have thousands of plays and downloads.

In the end though, very, very few people would actually pay money for these little Flash games... yet in Japan, the eroge game market is booming (with special editions that sell for over 200 USD). My friends and I have joked about developing an eroge game before, but now, I'm beginning to take it more seriously. It's a chance to write up a story, develop characters, and then let players pick which one they like the most and have sex with them. Then those become best-selling animes with huge fan-bases. Really, what I'm trying to say is that I feel stupid for not realizing the quickest way to a career in video games or writing is through porn. Welcome to the age of the internet.