Most of the games here aren’t doing this, but it comes up in a few of them and in a lot of other Kink Games or outright Porn Games I have tried: sex/kink content exclusively as an obstacle or failure state. Why?

It makes thematic sense for vore and similar, and there’s a lot of kink tied up in power exchange, fear, helplessness, and force. But it comes up more frequently than that, and even when it’s “thematic” it still feels disappointing? Like, I’d rather play a game that wants me to engage with this content rather than one that tells me I’m doing it wrong if I do.

It’s hard to integrate sexuality into game design! But I feel like presenting it as an obstacle, without careful writing around it and further expressions of kink integrated into the game, borrows a lot from the intellectual tradition of “sex is a bad thing that bad people do and you are bad if you do a sex” and it gives me this weird contradictory sense that a game going out of its way to present itself in a sexual way is, nevertheless, embracing Puritan sex-negativity and not in any kind of fun way, just in an uncomfortable and unexamined way.

I think Mark Rosewater has it right in his oft-repeated point that games need to be designed to point players towards the fun thing and creating tension around “do the fun thing or do the right thing” usually feels bad. I think there is a lot of room to play with denial/avoidance themes in kink, but it takes careful attention to theming and presentation to make it not come off as the other thing.

i'm not a fan of this kind of design either (i once played such a game and could not figure out where the sex scenes were because it was fairly short and i just happened to never die!!), but i don't know that it's deliberately sex-negative.  i think it might just fall out naturally for the wrong reasons —

• most such games seem to be platformers, where the player is constantly in motion, and stopping them (sex is a very in-place activity) is kind of antithesis to the mood of the game, but the only natural stopping point is defeat
• sex does often come with a climactic moment at which point you are done with the sex, so, there's a rather strong parallel there
• "what if a thing i like were done to me" is a very common background radiation kink
• and of course a lot of other games do it so it becomes just a thing to do

i don't really know what the solution is though, other than to simply develop a lot of kinks and base the game around those instead

or just go super cartoon with it and have penetrative-sex-based mechanics.  land on stuff with your butt and use that to jump higher idk

This is a pet-peeve of me as well. Putting the content the player actually wants to see behind lose-conditions is just bad game design. You are supposed to reward the player for playing well. Not for intentionally failing at the game.

I think this trope is so prevalent because many game designers think in stock game genres that are simulations of conflict resolutions through violence: JRPGs, action-adventures, fighting games, shoot-em-ups, platformers... these are all genres where you usually kill or be killed. When you then try to add sex to these game mechanics, then there are really just three possible ways to do that:

• Sex when the player defeats an enemy, which essentially turns the player into a rapist. Sure, some people are going to enjoy this. And I would have to lie if I said that I never enjoyed a game with non-consensual sex. I am a dominant and a sadist, so the fantasy does appeal to me. But it just feels wrong to me to create such a game, because it stands in dissonance with my own personal moral value that BDSM without consent is abuse.
• Sex when the player is defeated. This doesn't have that unfortunate connotation, and allows the player to experience rape fantasies without feeling the guilt of being the assailant. But it rewards the player for losing which is, as I mentioned before, just bad game design.
• Sex shown separated from the game mechanics, for example in cutscenes between levels. Which leads to the porn feeling disconnected from the gameplay and shoehorned in.

So what's the solution?

We need to stop thinking in traditional genre conventions and figure out more original ways to gamify sexuality.

[begin shameless self promotion] In my submission to this jam, Tentaculord, I went for the tentacle sex trope; a mainstay of hentai and almost always framed as non-consensual. But with the twist of having a "victim" who explicitly and enthusiastically consents to being dominated and violated. Consensual non-consent can be a good way to frame an adversarial game mechanic in a non-rapey way. In my game before, Fling League, I framed it all as a sports competition with consenting participants. This "game within a game" framing can also be a good way to make an inherently violent game mechanic seem less violent. [end shameless self promotion]