Joyful Stick: Mods And You
Good day my lovely deviants. Welcome back to Joyful Stick. Miss our last entry? You can read it here. As you can probably tell, it’s been quite some time since that. Before getting into our main topic I’m going to explain why.
Joyful Stick was a series I originally started as a “warm up” for my other projects, such as fiction stories and editorials. In a similar way, Jack’s Sack also filled this role. Both series kept me writing and engaged with my craft. Both also kept me more engaged with the larger NSFW community as well. Thanks both to support on patreon and gifts, these respective series more or less could continue in perpetuity if I wanted them to. There was always the promise of a new entry either weekly or bi-weekly. Except there was one problem.
I got bored.
Sex toy makers do go through trends and changes with their products, but it’s a long wait for new models to go from an idea to being available. This often meant I was left reviewing extremely similar toys, with little to add to the conversation or recommendation from the previous review. Though I found alternative means with which to generate revenue from them (like fansly), these reviews rarely “popped” and often were ignored in favor of the other content I created with the toys. Quite a few of you enjoyed watching me/hearing me use them over reading a review, and I can understand why. The last entry of Jack’s Sack was in April of 2022.
As such, that series won’t be returning. Any toys sent to me will be reviewed on my fansly in either audio or video form as per request of the person that sends it. These reviews will be behind a paywall, available either a subscription or a one-time purchase on my fansly page. If you’d like to see that series continue, I suggest following me there.
Joyful Stick had the opposite issue. With two major platforms supporting a wide variety of NSFW releases (that being Steam and Itch.io), there was a veritable ocean of content from all kinds of creators. However, curation and coverage of these titles is extremely rare. While I’m well aware I’m hardly alone in covering adult games, these kinds of discussions are in the niche. I can’t name anyone else off the top of my head that does these styles of reviews. Likewise, the NSFW/Adult game community suffers from a major issue-that being an ongoing bout of “hentai-itis”. It made finding games that had quality writing and gameplay exceedingly difficult. Many titles started to become a slurry of indistinguishable characters and engines before my very eyes.
The only review I actually remember well is the one I did covering Ghost of Tsushima. A title that, while mature and incredible, notably wasn’t pornographic in nature. Following that was my review-cum-editorial of Bloodborne PSX, which also notably wasn’t a porn game. Both of these reviews stay in my mind more so for what I personally-as a player-gleamed from them rather than what they were able to accomplish. Both are great, go play them-but their existence in my life brought more than any RPGMaker title with giant tiddies ever could.
I found it extremely difficult to write anything for this review series that matched that level. So, I got jaded. Burned out. Bored, and disinterested.
As December came in 2022 and I was going through a depressive episode, I began to ask myself what I truly wanted from my creative endeavors. Addressing the obvious, growing gap in my writing was first and foremost. It had been months since I wrote anything, even longer for series like Joyful Stick. I thought back to those prior reviews-and the answer became readily apparent.
Joyful Stick is returning, as made obvious by this entries existence. However, it’s no longer going to focus just on the games themselves. I always felt a bit shameful measuring anything with arbitrary metrics of “buy or don’t”, as I felt it cut into the artistic endeavors of the developers. Rather, I’m going to focus much more on what the title itself is trying to say, along with my personal reception and the communities.
I absolutely, positively will review anything gifted to me. This includes Non-NSFW/Adult title. If I feel as strongly about something as I did Ghost or BBPSX, you can expect a write up on it in due time. I’ll try to veer towards coverage of NSFW/Adult games, as there’s not nearly enough done for them. But I am no longer going to limit myself to those only.
So.
Got something you want me to check out?
Drop me a line, and if you’re so inclined I’ll give you means to gift me it.
As always, I’ll gladly answer questions on twitter.
Now without anymore delay…onto our review.
One Thick Robot Changes Everything
Haydee is not an great game.
Not really.
It’s not terrible, but rather something a bit worse-exceedingly average and simultaneously aggravating in ways too familiar to even draw inspired criticism. It’s a third-person shooter that has enemy variation you can count on one hand. There’s minor puzzles and platforming, which are either brain-dead simple or inherently crafted so badly that asking for a guide would be meet with a sneer before someone tells you to “get good”. It’s three hours long and feels twice that.
But Haydee had exactly two things going for it-Haydee herself, the tit-ular character, and Steam Workshop accessibility.
Haydee is a faceless, curvaceous robot with her assets on full (if tasteful) display. Her upper body is covered in white-plated science fiction clothing meant to simulate combat armor. Her long legs and ass lead to the floor running free of a blue-tinted singlet. Yes, every part of her jiggles as well. While not an especially inspired design, Haydees presentation launched a thousand Source Film Maker videos and several careers. If we’re to make an argument on whether that design was inherently sexualised or not, I think therein lies the answer.
Players get to gaze and look at Haydee through an over-the-shoulder camera which can be rotated freely with the mouse. Her movements are likewise exaggerated, requiring additional button presses to make her squat then get back up, haul herself over platforms and more. The water effects in the game are a far cry from sensational-but getting Haydee wet predictably adds an appealing shine to every part of her.
It’s no wonder then that I heard about the game through the porn first. Before I was even made aware that Haydee had a steam page, I watched her deeply impregnate several Dead Or Alive girls, tit fuck several men and jerk off folks with her ass cheeks. Her design, albeit horny, was just “sci-fi robot generic” enough that I had no idea what she could have been from. Upon finding out there was an entire game with this character, I purchased it the moment it went on sale.
And.
Well.
Yet, Haydee continues to be something I come back to every so often specifically because of the community response to Haydee herself. The reaction to a character who was realistically “thick” and proportioned right at the front stage of a game garnered the title enough success that a sequel was released. I’m not purchasing the sequel and have zero interest in playing it. A community of fervent supporters also began cranking out mods, reskins, new levels and more within the same month of the titles debut.
Which lead to the discovery of one of the greatest collective efforts of archiving I have ever seen.
Nude Mods, Censorship And More
Nude mods and alterations which add sexual content to games aren’t a new concept.
I remember reading a preview for Morrowind in an issue of PC Gamer in middle school that very specifically joked about “the harem of nude, big tiddy mages” available through community efforts-and that was the specific reason I bought the game. A Gameshark code to make Kasume in Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore nude was available at some point when I was a freshman. With sweaty palms, I fervently typed in fifty lines of code to get a character model with as much anatomical detail as a barbie doll. Someone had legitimately sat down and figured out how to remove her layers by reverse engineering that specific part of the game and building a code to alter it. Rumors of a “nude mode” in the original Tomb Raider are almost as old as I am.
These aren’t new concepts, but industry and platform reactions to it absolutely are. It’s a mixed bag of ethical reasoning-fighting sexism in the industry and creating safe environments and platforms for everyone is always a good thing. Puritanicalism is not. Some companies fumble this, others don’t. There’s no right answer saving abstaining, which in of itself can be particularly insidious.
Steam handled this a few years ago by announcing they would allow any content that didn’t represent a direct threat to it’s user base, adopting the “new grounds rule” of “everything by everyone”. Except this wasn’t a hard and fast rule-Red Candle Games infamously had their title removed after place holder art was left in by accident. Similar layers of censorship have also occurred with other titles, often after pressure was applied by the public or a government entity.
In regards to adult titles, Steam has a hypocritical stance. Titles themselves can often have any number of NSFW/Adult things or themes within them (over half the games purchased for this series were on steam). However, things uploaded to the Steam Workshop abide by a totally different set of Terms of Service. Quite specifically, adult content is more or less forbidden, with uploaders and creators resorting to clever titles, hiding what’s actually in the file or altering the mod with minimal censorship to abide by Steams rules. Most of the time users simply circumvent this by going to larger, more lenient mod databases such as Nexus.
The Haydee community had a radically different idea.
For all the obvious reasons, Haydee is a title that had an abundance of sexualized content in it’s mods. Total reskins, posers, levels mimicking BDSM dungeons and more abounded. Of the most wild I personally saw was a “barefoot sounds” mod which…made Haydees bare feet sound like bare feet. An overwhelming majority of these were pulled from the Steam Workshop, often without notice to the creators. As the last seven years of my life have been devoted to sexual entertainment, I can’t even begin to quantify how devastating de-platforming can be to an individual or team.
While these were often dual uploaded on other platforms, the Haydee community decided to fight back in a unique way. As the Steam Discussion features for games has a totally different terms of service from either Workshop or Steam itself, they created a thread with a google-drive archive of every single mod pulled as a result of censorship.
As of this writing, it’s over twelve gig and features over two hundred mods.
It’s single handedly one of the most ambitious community efforts I have ever seen for what is otherwise an un-extraordinary game, the direct response of attempted censorship. The mere fact this is pinned at the top of the community board featuring content in flagrant violation of Workshop’s TOS lays bare how pointless crusades against such content actually are-and made me come to the following realization.
Censorship in of itself is a pointless practice compared to efforts like proper age gating and other means of restricting adult content. Removing adult content from your platform does not stop people from being horny. As a sex worker, we’ll either exist in spite of your TOS or because you directly allow us to. One is going to be a much bigger pain in your ass than the other. As sex workers and adult content drive a sizable portion of website traffic in all cases, adjusting the TOS and allowing us to ethically conduct business is paramount to maintaining your own.
This efforts of the Haydee community reminded me of the countless times a “NSFW Purge” has been rumored to occur at some point on twitter. Except SWers, porn and more make up so much of Twitter’s traffic that there were internal talks to simply allow us a platform of our own within twitter’s ecosystem. Getting rid of us would have killed the site, just like tumblr.
Censorship isn’t the answer, ever. Rather, it’s a band aid on an issue to show investors and nothing more.
-j