You better hurry up and justify yourself to this guy pretty quick, or he's going to think you don't have a "life" and aren't "getting girlfriend". Yeah, if you tell him thousand more time, he'll probably understand and you can be cool again.:heh:

My girlfriend and I are both eroge players. She's also not the only woman I know who plays eroge.

Eh, the way I understand it, eroge covers all games with erotic content. Doesn't matter if it's a nukige, nakige, utsuge, moege (no seriously, it's a genre) or what have you. So yes, some are porn.

Many others, not so much, as other have pointed out - though there's definitely a certain stigma about it. I met a Japanese exchange student who was a VN enthusiast at one of my anime club's sushi nights, he was perfectly okay with talking about ero-free VNs like Ever 17 (well, okay, Ever 17 has some implied sex but you get the point) but asked me to keep it down when discussing titles with actual ero because he felt it was shameful to talk about them around women - his words, though I wouldn't put too much stock in his choice of words as his English was still a bit awkward at the time.

Hmmph, what's wrong with porn anyways? :/

Stupid Victorian attitudes.

As a woman who occasionally... plays?... these sorts of VNs, I would greatly appreciate less enforced straightness. Because seriously, I get tired of being forced to play either a sex I am not or a sexuality I am not.

This goes for all gaming, too. Follow Bioware's example, you dipsticks. Stop forcing me to be straight. Or male. I don't want to be either.

Quite close I'd say. Eroges are just games that have 18+ contents in it. It's usually your bread and butter VNs, but occasionally they have a bit of other gameplay as well.

Nukige ('extraction' game, if you know what I mean) is a subset or genre of an eroge. There are various other genres like Nakige (crying game) or Moege (moe game).

Things would be so much easier for you if you were an avid yuri fan. :heh:

This does raise a great question though: How hard is it, as a female eroge "player," to find eroge where the player is a female capturing the hearts of males?

I think you're basically right, but again it's all about definitions.

If you look at it from a classification perspective, a single explicit scene renders the work adults-only (rated 18+), and causes it to "contain pornography". If you say that "any work that contains pornographic content, I will label 'porn'", then yes, by that definition, all eroge are porn.

To some people, porn itself is indefensible. I recall, for example, the Vice City debacle where one single hidden explicit scene caused a major uproar that caused the work to pulled from shelves and widely demonified in the Western media. This in a game that contained copious violence, immorality, crime, and sleaze of all kinds (it's called "Vice City"), but one "adult scene" (that you weren't even supposed to be able to access) caused people to lose their freakin' minds.

So if you take that particular view of the situation, then all eroge is "porn". It doesn't matter how much story content or whatever else there is that give the work literary/artistic merit or whatever else.

But I don't think that's really the issue that the OP's "moron" is getting at. This isn't a slam of eroge, really. It's a slam of eroge players. And I highly doubt the tone would change even if you were just talking about "visual novels" in general, or even just "otaku-centric games" (or anime, or whatever else). It's the good old "'otaku' are losers who need to get a life" argument, stemming from that commonly-held bully view that it's Right (TM) for people to live lives according to "accepted social norms" (with "socially-acceptable" interests, hobbies, and beliefs), and people who don't choose to do that deserve to be ostracised and shunned because they're not aligned with the groupthink. It's the same mentality that used to get "nerds" shoved into lockers in High School 20-30 years ago. Some people haven't grown up from that mentality.

The irony of all this is that the purported "moron" is on an anime forum. Even if this person thinks "90% of all anime sucks" and he only likes "the good anime", he's still partaking in a hobby that is not exactly considered socially-acceptable in most mainstream circles. Even less "participating on anime forums".

Anyway, all this to say: don't give bullies the time of day. They just want to feel big and powerful by making fun of people who are bigger "losers" than they think they are. But he's still wasting his time on an anime forum making fun of other anime fans, rather than "having a life" or spending time with his "real girlfriend". (I'm sure his childish forum bullying makes him seem like quite a catch in her eyes.) Perhaps the forum administration on that site should be encouraged to "help" this troubled soul stop "living a lonely and desperate life" on the forums and go back to the real world where he clearly thinks he belongs.

Not that hard,they're called "Otome" games and there's definatly a market for them.As well as anime adaptations of those games from time to time

You... Really never heard of Otome games :heh: ?

(and then he whispered, "Skyrim")
Sadly, even bioware kind of ran away from the the romance in DA:O in the sequel. Wimps. ;)

So are there eroges that don't have romance routes in them? I've always thought that romance routes were a prerequisite for eroges.

B-b-baka! I am a man as pure as the fresh winter snow!

Well, I've probably heard of them before but the amount of times I have to look up all of these fancy Japanese words used to describe genres, types of characters, and all manner of things in general is very high.

For this reason I am unable to comment on most of the things, you, Sumeragi and your associates say to each other because I literally have no idea what they're saying. :heh:

There are definitely games featuring sex where "romance" plays no part (for example, those with more "black" themes, incl. various sex crimes, perverse fantasies, etc.). There are also games featuring sex where "story" plays no part (for example, mahjong games where a sex scene is a reward for victory, or certain "simulation" games). I suppose, in a broad sense, there could also be various RPG and mystery/horror games that happen to contain sex scenes, but don't have "romantic routes". (This aside from games that don't even have "routes", but follow a linear path.)

Personally, I don't have much interest in these sorts of games, but they definitely exist, and they'd all fall under the broad "eroge" category. What most people are generally talking about here on an anime forum, though, is going to be your story-focused visual novel/AVG style games that contain some adult content (the sort that could probably be sold with the adult content taken out and still work perfectly well as a story game). These are obviously the sort of eroge that are most similar and related to anime (and most likely to be adapted into anime), so most likely to be popular among anime fans.

If I'm not mistaking Hitomi my Sister is one.... just not sure.....

Almost stupidly confused that with Kana Imouto. Such a long time ago. :heh:

Though let's not get to examples because there're just too many of these. I'd say the majority of eroges if we lump all of the different genres together are these "mindless" ones, though I don't have actual data to prove that (maybe you could visit vndb or getchu and mine for data there). The ones that got popular in the west (the ones that got listed in that 4chan "VN guide for noobs" pic) is really only a tiny fraction of the overall eroge market. I can certainly understand when people accuses eroge of being mere porn, but I also understand that it's NOT all there is to it. It boils down to how accepting any particular person is to the whole culture.

It's Hitomi My Stepsister.....:heh:

Well, to some degree (there are exceptions), the games that get popular in the West reflect the games (or at least the sorts of games) that get popular in Japan. But you're probably right that, if you're just counting numbers, there are probably more "nukige" than story-centred games (or at least games that can't standalone on their story vs. those that can). That's mostly because these so-called "mindless" games cost less to make, but will still have a certain small but consistent audience. Sex sells, after all. With a story-centred game, you have higher cost and higher risk (it's more difficult to win over the wider audience), but also higher potential reward. That's why you have companies like Frontwing, Unionshift and many others that mix their portfolio with some "fetish" titles, and some more "mainstream" (such that it is) titles. It's sort of like getting regular base hits, while swinging for the occasional home run. There are of course a whole slew of companies that make a business of just constantly churning out "base hits", as they've found a way to serve a loyal ultra-niche market and stay in the game that way.

Actually, it sort of reminds me of regular video games in that sense. There's your centre tier of mainstream hits, but a whole ton of minor games from small companies that reach their audience but most people have probably never heard of. There are a whole ton more small-budget/niche games if you count by number, but you'd get a different picture if you just looked at each year's Top 20 in sales.

Eventhough there are a few nukiges that also have a decent story like Harumade Kururu (well not entirely sure if you can call it a nukige in the 2nd part though)
I agree that mindless games are cheaper to produce, that's why even Pallete is making a nukige ....

edit: i didn't see that many nukiges in the top 50 eroge sales of 2012 of getchu
http://www.getchu.com/ranking/salesr...012.html?gc=gc

So i guess it's a low risk, average reward situation for the companies

I am a yuri fan, however... I end up usually with yuri that contains no yuri.

Either it's porn without plot, or it's a romance where the romance never gets explicitly shown. Or it's "Class S," which makes me rage.

Too many yuri works revolve around the "Class S Friendship" horseshit. Japan wants to have its cake and eat it too--you can't accept lesbianism on one hand (to make a profit) and then call it childish and "just practice" for being a good wife on the other.

Pretty much every yuri series, manga, light novel or VN is centered around school-age girls. It's never adults, or even college students. It's always dumb teenagers, and while their romance is always very intense and real for the characters, the story almost always ends when they finally manage to admit their feelings.

There aren't ANY stories (as far as I know, I could be wrong) that deal with lesbian relationships that last, that have to stand up against adversity, against social pressure, against family and institutions. Hell, Japan seems more willing to examine the long-term issues of gender identity mismatches (Wandering Son) than to really deeply explore a lesbian relationship.

I guess the male-dominated system just feels threatened by the fact that two women could live their lives in content and happiness without a cock involved?

My host's mother went with me to get eroge and other otaku stuff with her son tagging along when I was on exchange in Japan...www

I do...coz that's what it is. No matter how much fans of popular titles like Mushroom's games and Muv Luv try to hide it, these games are proudly...PROUDLY called eroge by fans. So don't get yourself turned away by the eroge label

You are thinking of nukige, which is what these are not.

That's not it either.

Eroge just means anything with sex scene

I agree wholeheartedly of course