💌 In which I get on my soapbox for a bit

Moral panics, gay minotaurs, and more in Mr. Hands' Naughty List #25

Apr 18, 2021

Hello, lovelies!

I wasn’t aware of this beforehand, but yesterday was National Horny Day! If you’re looking to celebrate it belatedly, you’ve definitely come to the right place. 😉 Every day is horny day as far as I’m concerned!

If you are as interested in the goings-on of the adult gaming industry as I am, you can keep abreast as it were by subscribing to my newsletter.

Now let’s get into it!

Tech’s moral panic against porn

This week has not had a lot of great news for lovers of adult content. VICE reports that MasterCard decided to tighten its rules for adult content, now requiring "clear, unambiguous and documented consent" on all of the platforms using it as a payment processor. XBIZ outlined what this all for adult content creators means in an article.

And while the idea of documented consent sounds nice, don’t we already have laws against non-consensual sexual activity? Why does MasterCard need to step in and act as a moral authority as well?

Meanwhile, Discord introduced more stringent rules for NSFW servers. If a majority of the boards on a server have mature content, the entire server must now be marked as mature. This then makes the server inaccessible on iOS devices due to Apple’s rules about mature content.

This is unlikely to be a popular move by Discord, so I suspect that they caved under pressure from Apple. Due to the outsized influence that Apple must have on Discord’s bottom-line, they are essentially dictating their views on porn on another platform.

These news items combine to form an environment where it’s now just a little bit harder to talk about adult content and make money with it. And this tends to impact queer communities most of all, who often turn to adult content creation out of necessity.

@eevee has a thread where they explain it much better than I could:

eevee @eevee

thinking about "cracking down on adult content harms queer communities the most" there's rarely an explanation attached, and if there is, it's something that sounds like it could be solved, like that transition discussion or the word "lesbian" are mislabeled as porn well,

Should we really leave the decision about what kinds of art are acceptable to a small number of tech behemoths to decide?

Reserve a room in the Minotaur Hotel

Minotaur Hotel is a gay romance visual novel set in a magical hotel. In the game, you will become the new manager of the hotel and meet Asterion, its doomed keeper. He is the minotaur from Greek legend, sentenced by the gods to spend eternity in the hotel.

As the new manager, you are tasked to deal with the hotel’s menagerie of fantastical employees. The choices you make as a manager affect your relationship with them and Asterion as well.

While these types of stories (the gay furry kind) aren’t my personal preference, I do think this game’s art looks excellent. And I hear its writing is top-notch as well!

With over 150,000 words, this game should provide you with plenty of hours of playtime. And with multiple endings to explore, will you let your heart be stolen by a minotaur?

You can find Minotaur Hotel at the excellently named minotaur.gay.

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

Sex Positive Gaming has put up an excellent video review of Mythic Manor.

Hypnosis game developer creates adult games for “hypnoslut” gamers:

Founded in late December, Nyx Gaming is part kinky development studio and part hypnokink performance art created from “a few queer game devs discussing their shared interest in hypnokink, erotic videogames, and making bad sex jokes online.”

Oprainfall reviews the visual novel Riddle Joker and seems to quite enjoy it:

Riddle Joker is a masterpiece. […] Whether you’re looking at the visuals, the writing, the soundtrack, the erotica, or anything else, it’s a breathtaking visual novel.

Blerdy Otome is here to save your weekend with five wholesome indie VNs:

Sometimes I just want to turn off my brain and play a game that makes me feel good—games where I can just sit back, relax, and enjoy some chill vibes.

The Daily Dot reports that Nintendo has cease & desisted Bowser’s penis:

According to 3D adult modeler AkkoArcade, Patreon pulled a 3D prop modeled after Bowser’s penis from the site after it received a copyright claim from Nintendo of America.

LewdPixels wrote about how to add Steam achievements to your Ren’Py game:

First you should determine which goals you’d like a player to achieve. A mixture of easily obtained achievements and ones that are harder to get will satisfy most of your player base.

A mod for The Witcher 3 added new voice lines without the original actor:

Instead, the reason it's so scarily accurate and realistic is thanks to a combination of lines spliced together from existing game dialogue and, importantly, new lines made with a speech synthesis tech called CyberVoice by a Russian company called Mind Simulation.

VICE writes about how the crusade against YouPorn will not end well:

The Gab post described Pornhub as a "cartel," and said that if Canada […] fails to sentence Pornhub employees to the death penalty, members of the Christian group will execute them themselves.