Between Pleasure and Power: Game Design Patterns in Clickbait Ludoporn

"Between Pleasure and Power" examines "clickbait ludoporn," a genre of free, browser-based, sexually explicit mini-games distributed through porn-style websites. The work argues that this genre, a hybrid of play and pornography, has been largely overlooked by human-computer interaction, games studies, and porn studies despite its substantial popularity, and it proposes the genre as a "brink game" with critical potential. Its corpus consists of 18 games drawn from three websites, selected from top-ranked entries in July 2019 and judged by ratings and view counts that indicate a sizeable audience.

The central finding is that these games encode a closed teleology of pleasure in which players know the endpoint in advance. Their paratextual features, including multi-banner browser layouts, teaser texts, and social sharing tools, combine with mechanics such as text choices, dress-up options, orgasm progress bars, cum buttons, mechanical sex, and intertextual references to franchises like Aladdin and Pokémon. Together these elements frame arousal as a linear progression toward phallic climax and fix gendered roles in a "men act, women appear" formula. The genre's normative, heteronormative, and goal-oriented design reflects a particular, narrow articulation of pleasure and of who it is for.

A further argument concerns the economic and affective logic behind these choices. Mechanics that treat sex as quantifiable, linear, and disposable, and that objectify non-player characters without enthusiastic consent, are linked to revenue models built on advertising and impulse purchases. The author also suggests that reward systems may fuse cognitive and sexual arousal in ways that encourage prolonged play. Proposed alternatives include camp aesthetics, fuller consent-based options, and more inclusive representation, though these remain largely theoretical and rest on a qualitative sample.

The study closes with six defining design features that shape which pleasures are considered available and appropriate, and it explicitly avoids moralizing in favor of asking how pleasure is articulated and for whom. Planned future work will broaden the sample to test the taxonomy's robustness and explore speculative, queer-oriented designs for underrepresented audiences.