I conducted an empirically grounded study about sexual play in an online multiplayer sex game[1] named 3DXChat (SexGame Devil, 2012) for two years (2020-2022), and I selected some materials from it to develop the publications that compose my dissertation as well as presentations and this blog publication. In November 2024, my first publication came out (online first) on Porn Studies. The article “Tagging in 3DXChat animated sex game porn production” is open access and can be found here.

I wrote the first draft of this article in the summer of 2022 while I was waiting for the reviews of other submissions and exploring one element (the tags) that might be so trivial nowadays, we might not give much thought when developing our ideas. In the literature and research practices, I saw the tags as relevant to discovering, delimiting, and collecting data online, but sometimes, they are not the main material of a discussion. Thus, I built up my discussions in my article by putting the tags in the centre.

Tags were the information that offered me an entry point and a connector to a broader context of production, consumption, and circulation of pornographic content on free platforms. I found that few tags could be close to folksonomy (when people create their tags to index and classify their contents online), except for references to the game from where the people meet, play, and create content. I understood these tags, for example, as being relevant to present the game to a broader audience. People who access, watch, and upload content to porn platforms do not necessarily have an interest in sex games. However, the content discovered through tags and/or recommendations made by platforms gives them access to these possibilities.

In 2022, I made an oral presentation, “Porn Cinema and sexual playfulness”, at the Central Eastern European Game Studies event that took place at Tallinn University. I presented some of the data I used in the article that was published, but there I presented a broader overview of the intertwinement of animated porn production and sex play. To me, it is a simultaneous movement of expansion beyond the virtual boundaries of the game to reach mainstream domains with high traffic of access worldwide in the free porn sites; and of contraction, in the sense that all of these efforts are mobilised because there is a game that offers a “template” for these playing-porn performances with structured mechanics (game code), customisable avatars and virtual environments, and is tailored perhaps primarily for a specific audience to diversify their ways of playing.

After the presentation, I knew that I had to expand on this topic as there are not many contributions about animated pornography (e.g., Brownlee 2019; Paasonen 2018 and 2019) and game animated pornography (e.g., Välisalo and Routsalainen 2022; Lankoski & Välisalo, 2023). Both of them are marginal discussions in the porn literature, and I had the privilege to not only have plenty of material to work with but the experience of being in the environments I can talk about and playing experience. Thus, I want to continue this investigation soon, as I have much more to share.

Meanwhile, I shall return to the article. Working with tags offered me a good example of the serialisation of pornography, which was something that I had not thought about before reading Sarah Schaschek’s (2014) work. I felt a bit stupid for not noticing how something so predictable could still seem so creative and evocative (from pleasure to distaste and all in between), but it was part of the learning process. Thus, I used the recurrence of tags as patterns to identify the “porn matrix” that influences sex play in games and, to a certain extent, limits these forms of engagement. For example, I hardly found non-heterosexual sex play in the games and animated porn tags; there were also ambiguous racial and gender dynamics in the ways black male avatars and trans sex players were framed through the tags within the game context.

To conclude this contribution, as I mentioned before, there is still plenty of work to be done when it comes to exploring tags more in-depth as well as animated porn content related to games. There are certainly different methodological paths to guide these upcoming productions, but I would stress the need to engage with porn and sexualities literatures. Sex and games can be a more fruitful experiences than what we might know about. It certainly involves engaging with less positive examples and cases, but they should not be the reason to give up on investigating or to describe the totality of games and playing experiences.

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[1] Sex game here refers to a commercial product available to be played in computers and laptops when connected to the internet. The game is updated from time to time to include playing features (e.g., accessories, clothing, sexual animated positions), correct coding errors (bugs), and improve stability and security of the product. The game aims to be a virtual space for sexual interactions, for example, mediated sexual intercourse and engaging in sex centred conversation; however, players do not need to be there and interact with each other solely to have sexual experiences. Still, it is a type of interaction that is privileged in the space, unlike other titles, in which such connections and activities are not central to what the game has been planned.

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References

Brownlee, S. (2019). LEGO Porn: Phallic Pleasure and Knowledge. In R. C. Hains and S. R. Mazzarella (Eds.), Cultural Studies of LEGO, 197–219. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-32664-7_9

Lankoski, P. & Välisalo, T. (2023). Pornographic Games on Steam: Genres, Modes, and Milieus. Proceedings of DiGRA 2023. https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/1934

Paasonen, S. (2018). The Affective and Affectless Bodies of Monster Toon Porn. In P. G. Nixon & I. K. Düsterhöft (Eds.), Sex in the Digital Age, 10–24. Routledge.

Paasonen, S. (2019). Monstrous Resonances: Affect and Animated Pornography. In E. van Alphen & T. Jirsa (Eds.), How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices, 143–162. Konninklijke Brill NV. doi:10.1163/9789004397712_009

Schaschek, S. (2014). Pornography and Seriality: The Culture of Producing Pleasure. Palgrave Macmillan. doi: 10.1057/9781137359384

Välisalo, Tanja and Maria Ruotsalainen. 2022. “Not my proudest fap” – Among Us porn videos and audience reception. 2022 abstract proceedings of DiGRA 2022 conference: bringing worlds together. Available at: https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/1404