A Reflection on my Past Views on #GamerGate and Other "Sins"

A mildly political post.  If you're sick to death of these things (and I have mostly been avoiding posting them), feel free to backclick away and come back for the next H-space Monster Girl Bestiary story this weekend.

E3 was last weekend.  One of the games that generated some initial buzz was an indie title called The Last Night.  Here is its youtube trailer:

It looks very stylish and Blade Runner-esque.  There was a lot of buzz about the visual aesthetic.

Then somebody did some digging and discovered that the game dev, Tim Soret, had said some vaguely supportive things about #GamerGate back in 2014.  Cue shit show...



This made me think about some of the things I'd written in the past about #GamerGate, #SadPuppies and similar nontroversies.  Would I in future also be dragged up to the drum and forced to account for my past comments?  Not just comments - I'd even penned a short story depicting a #GamerGate protagonist in a vaguely sympathetic light.  The heresy!

Surely, given that #GamerGate was a vicious misogynist campaign to drive women out of gaming (the media says so, so it must be true), I must be ashamed of my past self.  That if it ever came to light, I'd have to disavow those past comments.

Okay, so I should address that now for my new readers.

Here it comes.

..

..

My views haven't changed at all.



Written games journalism is still infested with shitty horrible people more interested in student-level politics and stirring up shit rather than writing about computer games.  If you want proper games coverage and reviews nowadays you're better off following the twitch streams/youtube channels of people like TotalBiscuit.

SJWs - with their hypocrisy, faulty logic, doxxing, harassment of creators, and other general toxicity - would occupy the position of biggest shitstains on social media if that spot wasn't already taken by ISIS.

My own personal opinion is I don't care what your sex, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc is.  Everyone is equally deserving of respect as a human being.

That said, if you go around harassing people, or try to dictate what creators/artists can or can't create, I'm going to think you're a cunt, dick, ass, knob, penis, duodenum, [insert part of the human anatomy you wish to use as a slur] regardless of your sex, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc, etc.

Hope that makes things clear.

(and no, I don't want to drive women out of computer gaming)

More Succubus Summoning Art - Verdé

Some more delicious Succubus Summoning art.  This time Verdé:

And also completely nude.

Come in close for a hug.  What could possibly go wrong...

Once again thanks to RaidouZERO for drawing it, and Jude Duval/LudedWolf for commissioning it.

(At some point I will get off my ass and start commissioning pieces of the H-space monster girls!)

H-space MGB Profile: Sun Lamia

Name: Sun Lamia
Type: Lamia (Slime?)
Habitat: Cave Ruins.

Description:
A snake girl with the upper body of an exotic belly dancer.  Or a slime girl currently taking the form of a snake girl.  Personally, I lead towards the former.  While the sun lamia appears to have a soft, gelatinous body, she displays none of the plasticity of form observed in other slime girl HSIOs.

The fluid, or jelly, that makes up her body is clear yellow in colour and radiates both heat and light.

Attack Strategy:
Multiple, and targeting different senses.

At long ranges the sun lamia can release a flash of light from her eyes that can both temporarily blind and stun.

At closer ranges the sun lamia breathes out thick clouds of gas that increase arousal and take away the will to fight.  They also have a dance that has a mesmeric effect on onlookers.

All of this is to enable the lamia to get close enough to wrap her coils around her prey.  Unlike an Earth constrictor, this is to deny movement rather than oxygen.  The sun lamia uses her serpentine body to lock her captive's limbs in such a way they are unable to move or offer any resistance once the effects of her aphrodisiac breath wear off.  With her prey immobilised, the sun lamia instigates oral sex with them.  At the point of orgasm she sucks out her prey's soul.

(At this point I don't care if my colleagues consider the concept of a soul to be unscientific, or even heretical.  Some HSIOs, like the sun lamia, are capable of extracting some kind of animating spark from human beings at the point of sexual climax.  We have examined the victims—either dead or in a coma.  There isn't a single decent medical reason for them to be in this state.)

Countermeasures:
As there has only been one encounter with this type of HSIO, what follows is conjecture and theory.

Gas masks or nasal filters might negate her breath, assuming the drug compounds present within it are not absorbed through the skin.

Polarised filters might negate her eye flashes.  There have been some successes in experimentation versus lesser HSIOs with similar disabling attacks.

My concern is that she almost certainly possesses other offensive capabilities we are as of yet still unaware of.  The limited intel we have puts the only individual encountered in a similar power class to some of the higher tier succubi or demon HSIOs.

Also, while her body has been described as being soft, I would expect the sun lamia to have similar regenerative abilities as other high-threat HSIOs.

Threat Level:
High (Medium?).

The only individual encountered appears to have been very old and powerful.  It is unknown whether other sun lamia are this dangerous.

H-space MGB Story: Sun Lamia

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Random H-Game Musing

Every so often I go through a frenzy of brainstorming game ideas.  Unfortunately it rarely amounts to anything as I don't have the requisite skill set to bring these ideas to fruition.  However, by posting them here it might inspire someone who does.

One of the things I've been thinking about is a roguelite monster girl H-game with randomly generated dungeons.  Fenoxo's Corruption of Champions already does this really well.  There is no complex world map here - you head to a location and are presented with a random encounter, some of which open up further locations for exploration.  This is a great example of abstract, extensible game design.  If Fenoxo (or one of their writers) wants to add further scenarios, all they have to do is create the scenario and then slot it into the list of random encounters for a location.  No massive rewrite of the whole game engine required (at least I assume so).

I really like the puzzle H-battles of Monster Girl Quest, but creating a whole Monster Girl Quest is a fuckload of work.  I think an approach that could work is to create a more open game framework that can be extended easily with new encounters.  Most roguelites/likes function on this principle - the dungeon is randomly generated each run from a series of building blocks.

Why not RNG the encounters like every other JRPG?  Now, this is where, for me personally, Monmusu Quest: Paradox is weaker than Monster Girl Quest.  JRPGs are a notoriously grindy game genre.  The first time you encounter a new enemy is cool; the thirteenth time when you're just trying to run through to the next location, not so.  Combat typically devolves to trying to bash the mooks off the screen as fast as possible.  This is where Monster Girl Quest could get away with stretching out the fights with all kinds of delicious bondage holds.  You only had to fight each monster girl once.  If you really liked the fight (and Bad End) you could revisit it in the Monsterpedia.

One of the roguelite elements I think could work is a card-based encounter system.  Camel uses a card-based mechanic to abstract dungeon-crawling in his Card Quest series (knowing what abstraction is and when to use it will save a lot of fledgling game designers/developers a ton of pain).  I think this could be taken further to give the player some choice over the dungeons they romp in.

Hand of Fate is a good example from the mainstream gaming world.  Here is TotalBiscuit's WTF is review of the game, which also gives an overview of the mechanics:

The player starts each quest with an equipment deck and an encounter deck.  The dungeon floors are laid out as a random combination from both the player's and dealer's encounter decks.  The player starts each run with just basic equipment.  During the run they can buy or find better equipment - but only equipment cards that are present in their equipment deck.

I'm a big fan of strategy card games (like Magic: the Gathering) and the concept of tailoring your decks to "beat" the dealer's dungeon sounded very appealing.  As it is, Hand of Fate doesn't quite play out like this.  They have an interesting way of implementing side quests in that completing certain cards' scenarios will reward the player with a token, and this token unlocks the next card in the quest line at the end of the run.  But the strategy element of the player customising their own deck is fairly weak - most of the time you run with the AI's default configuration anyway.

While I was playing around with potential stats for gamebook ideas, the three that seemed to have most potential were strength, agility and willpower.  Depending on which the player specialised in, some monster girl encounters would be more or less difficult.  As an example I thought up three lamia types - muscular, fast, hypnotic.

Muscular is slow, but if she ever gets her coils around you, you're never breaking out.  Agile characters get the advantage as they just dodge her slow attacks.

Fast is... well... fast.  But she's slender enough that her coils can be struggled out of.  Strength characters get the advantage here.

And finally Willpower character gets the advantage vs Hypnotic Lamia.  She's slow and weak, so she relies on hypnotising her opponent with sexy dancing so they don't resist her as she has her fun with them.

Coming back to a card system of dungeon layout.  The player has some control over the encounters.  If they have a low-Agility character they would want to customise their encounter deck so it didn't contain the Muscular Lamia that would likely be Bad End the moment they encountered her.

Or, and this is where it becomes really important for a monster girl sex game, the scenario of being dominated and squeezed in the coils of a powerful, sexy snake queen might be a major turn-on for that particular player, and they want her in the deck for the fun times when she shows up (and losing in these games is part of the fun anyway).

The reverse is also true.  If the player is squicked out by vore, they'll want those nopey Eater monster girls banished as far away from their deck of encounters as possible.  I think that's also a good thing for any H-game that's going to cover a very broad base of fetishes.

I think this concept could work really well.  It's also really extensible.  Dream up a new cool monster girl concept?  Create a scenario card for her and into the game she goes without changing anything else.

Main problem is getting that framework right.  And this is where I always screw up by making things too complex.  I really want to make the fights more interesting than player hits monster for 5 damage, monster hits player back for 4 damage, repeat until someone reaches 0 hit points.  I think Monster Girl Quest really got it right with the various bind and status attacks.  Unfortunately, taking that too far can end up getting a little out of hand - like I did with this Arachne scenario I plotted out for a potential GameBook idea.

So I dunno.

Figuring out the player character stat line is important.

Figuring out what rewards/unlocks the player earns after each run is important.

Figuring out how the fights work is really really important.

I think the fighting is the key part.  If I'm running mainly text-based to start, the other scenarios are multi-choice questions and stats tests wrapped up in sexy descriptive fluff.  The fight encounters determine the mechanics.  Is it sex-on-sex battlefuck, normal-on-sex like MGQ, or full-on puzzles with the player character trying to work out how to get to the next room without being caught and snu-snued to Bad End?

Figure that out and I suspect the rest starts to drop into place.

H-space MGB Profile: Interrogatrix Shell

Name:  Interrogatrix Shell
Type:  Scylla
Habitat:  Unknown

Description:
A kind of shellfish woman.  The woman part is humanoid above the waist, but far too alien to ever be mistaken for human.  Their eyes are octopoidal—yellow, with vertical barbell-shaped pupils.  They have long fleshy tubes in place of hair.  They have a nose, but it seems purely cosmetic.  Respiration is carried out through three breathing holes located on either side of their neck, just below their pointed ears.

Below the waist their body merges into a complex knot of thick rubbery tubes.  Some tubes terminate in bioluminescent light sacs that light up the inside of the shell.  Others terminate in strange structures that resemble part of a human face—just the mouth and jaws, the rest of the head is absent.  The interrogatrix shell uses these false mouths to drive her captives into a state of sensual ecstasy.

The interrogatrix shell's body is housed within a shell large enough to contain both her and an adult human male.  Currently we do not know what the outer shell looks like as none have been found or observed in the wild.  It is even possible the interrogatrix shell is some kind of mimic.

Attack Strategy:
The HSIOs use interrogatrix shells to extract information and secrets from their enemies.  Once a person is placed within her shell, the interrogatrix wraps her soft body around them to hold them immobile.  Interrogatrix shells appear able to produce various complex drugs that have a variety of effects on human physiology, including increased sexual arousal, euphoric feelings of bliss, and a heightened susceptibility to suggestion.  These drugs are administered through both mouth-to-mouth contact with one of the interrogatrix shell's false mouths, and as an aerosol exhaled by other mouths.  The closed confines of the shell enable rapid build-up of the drug in the air.

The interrogatrix also uses her false mouths to stimulate her captive's erogenous zones by licking or sucking on them.  Once the captive is sufficiently aroused the interrogatrix shell straddles their body with her upper female half and initiates sexual intercourse.  Sex in this case is used to break the will of her captive through overwhelming sensual ecstasy rather than for procreation.  The orgasms are amplified to the point that even strong-willed persons are enslaved by the pleasure.  From this point onwards her captive will do whatever and reveal whatever the interrogatrix shell asks them.  As we have never recovered anyone enslaved by an interrogatrix shell, it is unknown whether or not this enslavement of will is reversible.

Countermeasures:
Don't get caught by one…?

Really, I'm not sure what's expected here.

We know next to nothing about this HSIO.

When I was commissioned to carry out these studies it was with the assumption I'd be documenting the various flora and fauna of H-space.  At this point I think it would be a grave mistake to regard the HSIOs as just alien flora and fauna.  This is an opposing enemy force.  The various HSIOs are its weapons and should be documented as such.

Threat Level:
Unknown.

I think we have to assume that any person captured and handed to an interrogatrix shell will reveal everything they know.  God help us if they ever get hold of one of our critical command or research personnel.

H-space MGB Story: Interrogatrix Shell

When LT Stewart Peter Bate woke up to the sound of low, soft murmurs, his first thought was that he was back at home in bed, snuggled up with his darling Erica.  But his lovely Erica—from a good family, maybe a little too prim and proper for her own good—had never sounded so wanton... so in need, sexually.

The bed Bate was lying in was also soft, too soft.  Soft, squishy and moist.  He couldn't move his limbs either.  They felt weighted down and tangled up as if some kind of monstrous python was coiled around each limb.  And the smell...

"Mmm, you're awake."

Bate opened his eyes.  He was lying on, or in, some kind of nightmare.  Raw, oozing flesh squirmed all around him.  Fleshy tubes, pinkish-white in color, surrounded and entangled his limbs like a nest of peeled snakes.  Rising above it all and straddling Bate at the waist was the monster woman.

She had the body of a nude pinup, or maybe even one of those ridiculously busty anime girls made flesh.  Both her bust and hips were pronounced and curvy, but there was not a trace of excess fat anywhere else on her body.

She was also clearly a monster.  Her skin was the wrong shade of pink—pallid, sickly, like squirming invertebrates—and covered in a wet sheen of slime.  She had no hair.  Instead, a mass of tubular tentacles cascaded over her shoulders.  Each terminated in a blind maw.  Similar openings were present on the side of her neck, just below her pointed ears.  They contracted and dilated as if she was breathing through them.  Her face was pretty enough—finely sculpted, with luscious full lips—if you ignored her eyes.  They were yellow and had vertical barbell-shaped pupils like those of an octopus.

He was still in H-space, Bate realized.

And in the clutches of one of the hindigs.

"Mmm, such a nice body," the hindig straddling him said.

She kept making slutty mmm-ing sounds as she caressed his exposed chest with her hand.  It felt as warm and as soft as a loving woman's hand.  The trail of slime it left on Bate's skin, less so.

Bate struggled.  The thick muscular bonds coiled around his limbs, that he'd first taken for snakes until he'd realized they were too soft... too squishy, pulled tighter and tighter until Bate could barely move at all.

"Don't do that," the woman that looked like raw shellfish said.  Her plump lips bunched up in an insouciant pout.  "My flesh is soft and delicate."

What did she mean—her flesh?  Was all this part of her body?  In the dim light he could see she was straddling him, but he couldn't see any legs, or even where her body ended and the fleshy mass he was lying in began.

Where was he?  He felt enclosed.  Looking up he saw some kind of ceiling, so low down it was just above the hindig's head.  It was inlaid with what looked like mother-of-pearl, but wrong in some fashion Bate couldn't quite put his finger on, only that it gave him a queasy feeling in the bottom of his guts.  He saw that the ceiling curved around on either side so that both of them appeared to be inside some kind of pod or shell.  The dim light was provided by glowing bulbs on the end of tubular stalks.  They looked organic in nature.

Bate continued to flex against his bonds.  What he lay in had a similar rubbery strength and texture to viscera.  Or maybe octopi; he remembered some he'd caught while diving.  Maybe it was part of her.  Maybe it was her internals.  Maybe it was delicate.  Maybe he could hurt her.

He gripped and twisted and tugged whatever he could close his hands around.

The only moans the hindig let out were sexual in nature.  She gave a low chuckle.

Delicate, my ass! Bate thought.  Her flesh might have felt soft and squishy, but he couldn't rip or tear it at all.

The hindig laughed at his efforts.  "You squirm so much.  It's ticklish."

Bate had never felt so helpless.

"What do you want?" he demanded.

"Not much, just a little information," the monster girl replied.  Her yellow eyes were bright in the gloom.

"Fuck off," Bate said.

"Oh, you will give it me," she said.  "It's just a case of getting you in the right mood."

Squirming motion started up all around Bate.  He tried to turn his head, and when that motion was denied him, flicked his eyes to the left and right.  Dripping with slime, pink tubes rose up out of the wriggling mass of flesh.  Incongruously, each terminated in part of a human face.  Only part.  The top of the head, from the nose upwards had been neatly sliced off, leaving behind only mouths lined with full, feminine lips.  Despite missing everything else, the lips still turned up in sultry knowing smiles, still pouted as if to kiss, still whispered lewd suggestions to Bate.

"wakeupwakeupwakeupwakeup," Bate muttered over and over like a mantra.

This coffin of squirming horrors couldn't be real.  It had to be a nightmare.

"Why would you want to wake from a dream as sweet as this," the monster girl whispered.

The disenfaced mouths dipped down on Bate's body.  He felt their soft lips brush and sigh against his exposed flesh.  He felt stiff little tongues flicking his nipples.  He even felt one wriggle underneath him and use its tongue to probe around the sensitive rim of his anus.

Two mouths reared up on either side of Bate's head.  They puckered full red lips and exhaled clouds of perfumed smoke into his face.  Bate tried holding his breath.  It was useless.  They were in a contained space; the gas—whatever it was—wasn't going anywhere.  He had to take a breath sometime, and when he did it was laced with the drugged gas.

The effect was immediate.  Bate felt a pleasant tingling all over.  His vision went fuzzy... soft focus.  Like one of those old softcore movies where they used to smear Vaseline on the lens.

The form of the monstrous woman straddling him blurred and shifted.  She became the busty pinup teenaged Bate had seen once in a very old skin mag and went on to become the focus of much of his carnal nighttime imaginings.  Now she was sitting astride him... sitting astride his naked form.

She'd also brought friends.  He felt the soft press of their lips—kissing... suckling...  He felt their wet little tongues—licking... tickling...  But he couldn't see them, even the one that pressed warm lips against his and locked tongues in a passionate kiss.

He couldn't see her because the top half of her head wasn't there.

Bate blinked furiously.

Fantasy, don't fall for the fantasy.

Her lips formed a seal around his mouth.  The fleshy tube the faceless mouth had in place of a throat swelled and a sweet-tasting liquid was regurgitated into Bate's mouth.  He had to swallow and the fleshy tube throbbed and pulsed as more of the liquid was pumped down his throat.  The drug flowed into his bloodstream and he felt warm and pleasantly tingly all over.

"Relax" the pinup astride him said.  "We do not use pain to extract information here.  We give our captives love and pleasure, and in turn they offer up—freely—their secrets."

She let her weight settle on Bate's lap.  His burgeoning erection was drawn up into her and enclosed in warm quivering flesh.

He was fucking her...

...fucking this monster.

And it felt good, really good.

The soft walls of her sex undulated against his cock in slow, peristaltic waves.  She added to the sensation with slow, sensual up-and-down movements of her hips.

"You'll tell me everything, won't you?" she asked him sweetly.  She clutched and squeezed her large tits as she rose up and down on him.

No, he mustn't.

"I'll make you feel so good... so nice."  She finished with a low sensual moan.

Her mouth tube continued to pour drugged fluid down Bate's throat.  Other mouths blew warm scented air into his face.  Others were all over his body—kissing, licking.  He felt them gently sucking on his fingers and toes.  One even had a stiff tongue wriggling away in his ass.  He writhed helplessly in the bed of quivering meat as she stroked and licked and sucked him to higher pinnacles of ecstasy.

"You don't have to hold back," she whispered.

Her whole body throbbed in time to the muscular pulses squeezing Bate's cock.  The openings in her neck swelled and contracted.  Her big bust rose up and down.  It felt like she was putting her whole body into sucking on his member.  Chest, hips, stomach—everything moving in and out as if she was taking in deep breaths... deep breaths of him.

"Just let it all out, let everything out into me."

Her soft body flexed and Bate couldn't hold out any longer.  He came with a loud gasp.

"Yessss," she hissed in triumph.  "Give me everything."

Bate felt his cock swell against the pressure of her walls and then the overwhelming bliss of release as he spurted his semen inside her.  On and on it flowed.  Her body kept working, kept throbbing, kept sucking, kept urging.  Enslaved by it, Bate gave her everything.

Then, once the jangling sparkling tremors of orgasmic bliss had subsided enough for him to regain some control of his body, Bate told her everything she wanted to know.



"This is very bad, Stewart, very bad.  We never thought the HSIOs had the capability or even the desire to question the men they've taken like this.  And if they get access to one of the senior research staff here they could...  No.  It doesn't bear thinking about.  Command must be informed of this.  Now tell me again exactly what the lieutenant told her..."