Love is an incredibly complex matter, one we haven’t even fully figured out in real life. Also, art has no rules, and imo artists should be able to create what they want.
I love romance, though I agree it often doesn’t mirror reality. I admit that I often flee to ROs because they are easier than real people lol. It can be dangerous in the way that games can create unrealistic expectations, and therefore make you feel worse in the long run. I’m a sinner for Wayhaven Chronicles, although I agree that romances - to be realistic - should have a system that’s not “insert kindness until sex/love comes out”. Which is what I do almost always do with ROs because, as every other human, I have issues and need cuddles. However, it rarely feels authentic in the sense that 1) I know they’re programmed to like me if I show that I like them & 2) not everybody is an openly kind person, I often want to choose options that are rather neutral/negative for the romance, but know that would not advance the romance, so I act unlike myself. Games are enablers which allow me to project my desires alot. Ouch. Is that healthy? Hm.
Videogames are an art and like that could have multiple purposes. but main primary objective that nobody should forget is having fun. That’s part of name.
Of course that doesn’t mean romances in games should be shallow or not be deep. There are several games Like Bioshock infinite or Last of us that explore deeply friendship and concept like parenthood.
The problem is when you have to include interactive choice enter game mechanisms due there is no way allow choices within a game code structure. There is no mechanism in the actuality that allow present the totality of human spirit and love in a simulator. Neuroscience hasn’t figured it out or AI science. So game developer writers has to do wonders to trying make engaging relationship while allowing choice and player engaging. It is one of most difficult if not most difficult stuff to design in a choice games.
Due each person conceive relationship love and attraction very different.
It is no fair demanding from games a perfect depictions of relationships and feelings when even people can’t agree on that. And to be really realistic you need hours and hours and hours of conversations that would make voiced games overpriced and choice of games like 15 millions of words. And probably most of people will find that terribly boring and stop reading or playing
Plenty of games adresses serious topics. If people don’t want to play them, what good does it do?
I must admit that I have a hard time believing you are arguing in good faith when the topic of your thread is named. “Love is a reward.”
That + your langue in the opening post makes me defensive, because people very much shame others for liking romance. ALL THE TIME. Romance is the most trashed genre.
Also COG and Hosted has very different romances and romance mechanics between the individual works. So when you make it sound like all are alike, I don’t believe the sincerity of your arguments.
Keeper is very different from Wayhaven, which is very different from Waywalker which is very different from Study, which is very different from fallen hero. There is no common thread and mechanic between them, so we cannot discuss them as if there are.
The official COGs are you best bet, because they are somewhat alike mechanically thanks to the guidelines.
Also from the way you describe it we have very different view of how romance works in real life. Maybe its because I am ace and doesn’t have the physical attraction aspect. But since I accepted that I am bi, I’ve never ben surprised by who I fall in love with. I have types, and I am by now old enough that I know what they are. (And how to avoid them).
Also if I look amongst my friends those who had ‘superficial’ reason for getting together and or being attracted to each often lasted longest (and some still are together). If I have to venture a guess, it is because they had realistic expectations.
Also I am personally of the notion of romantic love has an aspect which is inherently selfish. And I don’t automatically think that is wrong. Dangerous, yes. But I think most people need some selfishness in their life.
If we can’t even agree on what is realistic in real life. How should we agree on what it is in games?
Games which focuses on romance or characters have the room to explore them in depth. Others mostly lack that room. And it is unrealistic to demand or expect that.
It’s that simple.
Now we can discuss what we want to see more off. What we prefer. What we absolutely don’t want and other stuff like that.
But we have to accept that:
There is going to be game mechanics no matter what. And for some people those mechanics will always feel like insert x to win. That’s just how it is. People have different level of versimilitude and you can not write somethin which doesn’t breaks someone’s immersion.
There is going to be limit to what can be discussed in the game no matter what. Because conversation can never flow as freely as they do in real life, since the NPCs and the MC can only say and do what has already been written for them.
Different games have different focus and that is fine. With very few exceptions I don’t play games without any romantic content. Because I don’t want to. But I try to not go into those games threads and declare that I won’t play it. Unless, specifically asked.
This whole discussion brings up a lot of good points. I really like romance in games and romance games, so I’ve played quite a few. There are A LOT of different mechanics developers have used to include romance. At times, it does feel a little sociopathic, where I’m obsessively trying to figure out the right input to get my wanted output. Life is Strange is a brilliant game, but it’s very “say the right thing, and good things will happen! Manipulate your way to victory!” I recently read a review of a game that even makes fun of this tendency: the MC (who is a pretty horrible person) plays a romance mobile game and, as a joke, mimics their PC’s actions to get a fellow classmate to fall in love with them.
I’m glad @MockTurtle brought this up, so I know I’m not alone in getting this slightly creepy sociopath feeling. It’s a complex question. I have two perhaps helpful thoughts. First, remember to respect players’ interpretative abilities. If we’ve figured out that real life romance isn’t about saying the right lines of dialog, they have too. They understand the video game art medium is in its infancy and has limitations. Perhaps they go elsewhere to fill the void: I wanted more depth to my Stardew Valley Shane romance, so I wrote 20k of fanfic. In addition, these mechanics do represent good examples of the empathy and vulnerability necessary for real life romance. Giving favorite gifts, saying kind things, listening, offering support in troubles times, cuddling: those do build relationships.
Second, I think we just need to keep creating more and more complex games. Create games like @SirEdmund suggested where the first kiss isn’t the end, but a beginning. Include the chase, but also the established relationship. Do the whole marriage plot, and then go beyond it, until MC and LI are elderly grandparents. Make different LIs have different preferences. Maybe a LI hates marriage, so they and MC just stay in a committed relationship without formalities. Some LI’s want kids; others don’t. If we have a wealth of games, we have a wealth of different experiences to offer players. It’s going to be challenging, but more art in the world is never a bad thing. We’re devs. We can do it.
I found it hard to believe that anyone would like to play them.
I’ve been re-reading my post again and I am becoming aware that it might sound as I’m some sort of grinch who couldn’t enjoy romance in videogames and decided to ruin the fun for everybody else, and that was not what I was going for. This is most likely my fault for being unable to express myself adequately and for that I apologize.
I want to be clear that I LOVE ROMANCE as a genre, I wouldn’t have created this thread if that was not the case. My original intention (although I admit I wasn’t very successful at communicating it) wasn’t simply to point out the things that I didn’t like and denounce them, but I was expecting it to become a framework that will allow us to explore different ideas, unreached potential of games, and facets of love that are not usually portrayed, and how we might be able of incorporate them in the medium.
If by focusing in the aspects that I found problematic as an introduction has made people take a defensive position, I might have done a mistake. But I still feel that the problems I see with the portrayal of love in games are there.
Again, this issue concerns Choice of Games and Hosted Games, in the sense that they belong to the game industry and therefore, they have potential to fall in the same pitfalls that a lot of games often fall into. But I repeatedly stated that this is not something that happens exclusively to choice of games, but rather some pervasive problems that framed the way that love is approached in the game industry.
And no, the fact that different games have different mechanics and threads, doesn’t mean that they can’t fall in common issues, nor that they don’t have room to be open to other ideas. I didn’t feel I was implying that all CoG games were alike, but that’s part of the reason that I didn’t want this thread to be asociatted exclusively with CoG games. I might be willing to change the category to off-topic of this keeps becoming a source of confusion.
I’m not demanding that, but I feel that the way that games keep perpetuating the same mechanics on how love operates can also perpetuate problems, and at the same time limits the possibilities for innovation and new ways of portraying romance, which could be a step forward in the game industry and open the gates for new ideas. I’m of the opinion that decline is inevitable without innovation, and I feel that the possibilities for innovation are being constrained by the way the same mechanics are being aplied.
I feel that some of the post I’ve read are responding to arguments I did not make, as if I had described the way that games should portray love… when the reality is that I don’t know how it should be either, I just pointed the things that I found problematic and I hoped that this discussion would evolve to a point where we would share different ideas to explore this subject more deeply. It seems that it didn’t go the way I planned.
I’m willing to stop pressing the issue further is this lead us to a point where we can actually find a common goal of discussing new ways of portraying romance and love in games.
The problem is I don’t think there is actually a technology that allows a new way to produce games engaging and realistic. I think for that we need AI tech to the AI could behave like the robots in Choice of robots. But then it would not be a game. The AI will feel something and thinking so it won’t be a game it will be real.
The romances in games could be improved. But couldn’t be as deep as you seem to want. No single writer or coder could design and predetermined what all people wil choose or would want to develop in a romance. Nor program al the intricacies of human feelings. It is impossible. Same you can t introduce yourself in a movie. Each art has its limitations.
I think what @MockTurtle (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong Turtle! ) is trying to get at is that some people want more to a relationship than just the ‘dating’ stage which is what is usually portrayed in video games/media. In addition to avoiding having to become a ‘yes-man’ or surrender your own agency as a person (or as much as you can be in a video game) in order to win a relationship.
Pursuing a relationship should be more like a story of its own, rather than just a side quest. Instead of the climax of that storyline almost always resulting in sex, maybe it can result in something else that’s meaningful to the characters or help them grow as characters i.e. the MC has acted as a support member for an RO who is trying to kick the habit and that climax could culminate into the RO finally deciding to kick the habit for themselves.
That’s true, but the fact that we might not be able to recreate human interactions is not the problem. We just limit the way that these subjects are explored in games by returning to the same mechanics.
To put an example, this is something I said in my original post:
Now, this is something that games could actually address and try to explore, but it is often put aside. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel to get there, but it’s crucial that we express more interest in these subjects to get there. I still believe that love has a place in games, and that games are ready to tell new stories and leave aside the idea of love as just a reward.
Ah that’s a totally different matter… That asking for change Game dynamics to be more realistic. and I agree. I think the problem is most games time line is few months or even less so is impossible going beyond rhat. But I liked Choice of robots romance during years. And so for but for that games has to develop in a extended time frame that most of games don’t. I think Seas of infinity saga and Choice of rebels saga will do that because will extend in decades time romances.
I enjoyed the relationship progression in Stronghold - I got a strong sense of the characters having become more familiar and comfortable with each other over the years they’d known each other and been together.
Good call! I forgot about the CoR romances! Yeah… I, personally, want more of that kind of romance than what we’re almost always getting i.e. dating simulators.
@HannahPS I hated that in Stronghold I found myself forced by population to choose who bang or single forever BEFORE EVEN KNOWN HALF OF ROMANCES NAME… Literally forced by an angry mob MARRY OR ELSE lol… I choose else thinking oh maybe later on I could have a fling… nope 50 years of pure hand romance
As it is, many games use romance as the first selling point (even if they don’t have a true romance, but thats a discussion for an entirely different topic), so it’s definitely relevant.
Yes it is very relevant. However I suppose all depends of what the writer want to write and like the 99% of those authors aren’t in the forum and don’t really read any criticism whatever we post here have a very limited usefulness. Sorry If I am being too much sincere. I don’t know how say that more tactful.
Hey, as a fellow fan of (good) romance stories I’m glad you started this discussion.
Loving relationships are hard work in real life, aren’t they?
Unfortunately preventing the player from “repeat and choose differently” isn’t an option But the author could always try to mask the “right” decision by not making it too obvious. Or make the kind/flirty response the “wrong response”. Take in account characters’ personalities and morals, when designing choices.
Example 1:
Character A, who is a romance option, struggles with trusting people. If the player continually offers to help them, A starts suspecting them of interior motives and the relationship suffers. Because nobody can be that good, right?
Example 2:
MC and character B are fighting for their lives. MC takes the what would be mortal hit for A. They both fall to the ground, A cradling MC’s head in their lap. “Why would you do that?” A asks.
MC says: “Because I love you.”
Eventually MC gets better, but A can’t ever look them straight in the eye. They feel guilty about what happened and hate the fact that MC was willing to die instead of them. Slowly they start to despise MC because of what happened, wrecking their relationship forever.
Example 3:
A and MC are together on a mission. Then the MC is given a choice of saving a little girl or killing a murderer. What will they do?
I partly agree. Give characters preferences for certain personality traits and send them on their merry way. See how their morals affect their view of the MC. Make them respond to what they perceive to be MC’s wrongdoings.
Maybe
So, part
Could this be solved by adding parts from ROs perspective? Let the reader see through RO’s eyes, preferably on a second playthrough.
Maybe the author could write a dialogue between a RO and their friend, where they are discussing RO’s problems with MC with MC overhearing the talk (or not). What would the MC do?
Tbh, I like not knowing what the Ro is feeling/thinking. It leaves room for mystery/uncertainties (like in real life, where we also get to see one side of the relationship - our half. Sure, we can guess for the other party, but will never know for sure.)
A byproduct of the medium’s/genre’s limitations. If romance is not the focus of the game, it is hard to write complete, fulfilling love story for different ROs (and different MCs), while successfully dealing with the main conflict of the story (eg. the invasion of aliens). Not saying it can’t be done, but it is hard.
Then we get people smooching amidst apocalyptic missions despite that they are supposedly running out of time and should be in fact out there dissembling the bomb etc.
Part of the problem is probably that writers don’t know what to do with the characters, after the relationship takes off. How to add the necessary tension? Is it okay to make a romanced RO jealous of MC’s childhood friend, forcing the player to deal with their partner’s jealousy while they are trying to save the world?
Could be that the most common/realistic relationships problems seem a bit, uh, mundane compared with the main conflict of the story. Who wants to argue with their in-game partner about how to divide household chores? Okay, not the best example, but you probably get what I wanted to say
This!
The game’s creator could also track relationship progress between the MC and their RO by breaking it into different components: like, trust, respect, friendship … Then the RO can like the character, but not necessarily respects them and decides to break-off their relationship.
I think that @carawen takes this approach in her The Shadow Society (the relationship is a result of different variables rather than one single love/hate bar). @jeantown and @malinryden also do a fantastic job by making the non-playable characters react to different MCs and how MC’s actions affect the relationship between the characters.
What do you think about Guenevere’s approach to love and romance?
If this is the case, then I guess I wonder what you would like to see change? How would you innovate to address what you see as a “love as reward” dynamic in most romance games?
My friend and I are currently trying to pull together an 18+ dark fantasy romance spy thriller sort of deal, so I’m very curious - our LIs have set preferences, and while you can romance them without hitting those preferences, you’re going to end up with a different romance than if you did check off every box … I don’t know if that’s necessarily a “love as reward” mechanic though - I mean, isn’t that just life? You either check the boxes for a person, or you don’t. Games can only get so deep in the exploration of a romance or a relationship. We’re trying to balance it by having a respect stat and an affection stat, but even still - it’s always going to be somewhat mechanical, to an extent?
If you’re meaning that you want to see more games focused on “after the first date” dynamic though, then I’ve completely answered the wrong question! I do love the exploration of the relationship as it becomes established, but I guess it would really depend on the scope of the game - something like Wayhaven can explore that a bit more in depth, because the story is meant to cover a significant portion of time - but even still, it’s going to be done over a course of 7 different game “chapters”, so to speak.
The problem is that this can easily come off as a cheap “gotcha” moment. Sure it can work, but it is difficult to pull off realistically.
The problem is that you need a LOT of RO in one game to make this remotely fair. Or we end up with subconscious biases sneaking through. Such as the Bi ro always being loose and flirty, the gay man always being morally dubious and so forth.
And they will end up sneaking, because we always those biases because of the stories told to us.
If it is too restrictive it can also end up killing roleplaying because there suddenly is one true path. And then we are back to it being a game of guess the right answer for the good end - a bit like a lot of otomes I’ve played over the years. In fact this one would properly end up feeling more gamey to me, because I would become aware of how little I could discuss these relationship breaking things with the RO (something I could in real life.)
MC: “But you don’t understand there are dragons pouring out from a hell gate.”
RO: “I don’t care. This is the fourth apocalypse this month. You are not getting out of doing the laundry.”
) is trying to get at is that some people want more to a relationship than just the ‘dating’ stage which is what is usually portrayed in video games/media. In addition to avoiding having to become a ‘yes-man’ or surrender your own agency as a person (or as much as you can be in a video game) in order to win a relationship.
But the author could always try to mask the “right” decision by not making it too obvious. Or make the kind/flirty response the “wrong response”. Take in account characters’ personalities and morals, when designing choices.