Muddle said:You become an active participant in being the sub. While this works great for a moment in a game, I'm not sure if you could make a satisfying game around it as the core mechanic.
This post makes a sharp point that I feel I should hone further by pushing against it a little bit: Yes, trying to make a big game with lots of MC sub content is probably a pointless exercise, but I think there's a lot more room to do interesting things with small, experimental games (probably just interactive fiction), and a lot more fetish potential in doing those things, than you'd think based on "well games are about the player being control of things and this would be the opposite".
Just to list out a few of the basic things you could do, or that I have seen done, with the UI in a text-and-menu or text-and-links format (Twine games, Fenoxo's Flash text games, etc.):
- Your set of options is limited to just "obey"
- You have an otherwise normal-sized set of options, but they are are all different variants of obeying
- You can click on options, but what your character actually does is something different (you can pull the "every option does the same thing" trick here on occasion)
- You can click on options, but the ones that would defy control just quickly loop you back to the same menu
- You normally play the game from the sub's perspective, and when controlled you still read the sub's scenes, but your option menu is in the dom's perspective
- Scene text is edited after you read it, to represent the dom editing your memories or perception
- Your choices and scenes make it seem like you're not under control, but things are recontextualized afterward (e.g. like "would you kindly?", though where it was a plot point and big reveal in Bioshock, to make it work for a fetish game you'd have to pace it a lot faster)
Etc. etc.. And of course, other ways to interact with a game would get other twists on their method of interaction. Again, agreed that it's probably not enough to run much of a game on! But I just think there's plenty of room for smaller, highly focused experiences to do a lot with the theme.
At a more abstract level, and as a bit of an aside, games are a lot more *intentional* than you tend to think when playing them. The way I like to think of it is: However closely you think you're paying attention, chances are that it took hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of times longer for the authors to create the experience than for you to go through it. You might feel like you have control, but even in the most freeform games, pretty much every action you can take has, at least in some general form, been carefully considered, designed, implemented in every detail, balanced, and tested - and has seen several other possible actions go through part of that journey before being taken out of the game. Your control over a game is precisely what its authors give you, and they *know* what they let you control and what not.
