A Dating Sim, for those of you who never typed “Boobs” into google, is a game where you laboriously complete a series of simple tasks over and over again in order to impress one of a small selection of virtual women. Once your ability to pump virtual weights and so on has sufficiently aroused one of them, you get to have jerky, virtual sex. Hooray.
It’s a ridiculous simulation of love, the gameplay usually involves little more than clicking various buttons to make your various studly stats go up, and it sets women up as some kind of strange hive-queen creatures who sit around ignoring you until you can buy the prized opportunity to do it to them. Like most attempts at showing romance in games, it sucks any semblance of humanity out of the lovers involved by reducing passion down to a set of meters and bars.
It’s also kind of brilliant. Hold on to me here; These crude sex-sims contain, within their sweaty little folds, a brilliant, brilliant idea.To a man, Dating Sims are nothing but meaningless grind-houses or ridiculous quiz shows- boring, time-wasting, laughable- yet people play them in droves. Huge dark throngs of these things grow across the underbelly of the internet, like countless sweaty mushrooms. Why so popular? Hit the jump to find out.
Well, because of the tits.
No, wait, ok, don’t go away. This is an actual meaningful game design thing here. Sex, or at least a few drawings of it, is a goal in itself. It’s something that people will actually play through an entire shitty, boring game to get to. Is there any other goal in games that can do this? Games are all about the goals – saving the princess, stealing the money, getting the ball through the hoop- but none of them mean anything to you in real life. If a game sets up compelling reasons as to why you want to achieve the goal then you can certainly care about it within the context of the game- but unless someone makes a game that prints money, there’s no other thing that can actually directly affect the player in real life. Nothing else can actually tug on your physical hormones enough to make you suffer through hours of terrible game design, just to reach it. Porn is the ultimate goal.
You think I’m kidding? Let’s drag our eyes away from the detritus of the internet and look at the few well-regarded games that have tried this. Bioware’s games have always had optional romances, usually without any real in-game reason to vertically express horizontal desires at all. If they were normal sidequests, people would complain about completing the task for nothing. With the prevalant promise of asari booty to string a player along, almost everyone tries at least one of these. And by trying to get to the bit where the camera shows half of Liara’s ass, they engage with her on a level beyond the usual quest-reward mechanic. Because of the outer goal of sex, Bioware doesn’t have to offer any actual in-gametrinket for engaging with a character- and because you’re not talking to her just to get to the next quest or find the +ten set of just-got-laid armour, the conversation changes. The conversations stop being means to an end, and become ends in themselves. Talking to a sexy character is, effectively, its own reward, in the way that normal coversations are and in-game conversations so often aren’t.
It would be hard to talk about sexy NPC’s in games without talking about “Vampire: The masquerade – bloodlines”, a game that perfected the art of the sexy NPC. Bloodlines is a game about sex and death in equal measure- mixing the glitz and glamour of LA with the seedy supernatural underworld. I don’t really want to post spoilers for it, no matter how old it is, but there’s a Moral Choice style side-quest in it late in the game that really uses that sex like a weapon- you can read this article for a detailed account. The right thing to do is almost obvious in-game, but when a character is reaching out of the screen and tugging directly on your hormones, the lines start to get reaaaaal blurry. Because sex is an out-of-game goal, a situation develops where the player is considering putting their wants before the needs of this NPC- after all, she’s not even a real person, right?
Bloodlines Magnum Opus, Jeanette.
Even renowned highbrow art-game The Void gets in on the action. The Void is, oddly enough, kind of like a dating-sim set in the afterlife. Put simply, the game is a set of chambers, with a women in each one. You have to give these women “Colour” in order to pass to the next chamber, and the next set of women. The more color you give to these women, the more naked they get, and the more they dance around.
Don't worry: It's art.
But disregarding the argument about good taste, this is actually about the best decision the designers could have made. To put the sensually writhing females into perspective, the Void is a cold, desolate afterlife, populated by nothing but hideous monsters. Surviving your travels through the game world is like trying to suck at tiny morsels of food as you slowly starve to death. It’s a world that slowly grinds you down as surely as the repetitive tasks of a dating sim. And so, in a stroke of brilliance, your ultimate goal is to rescue the only thing worth saving in this barren wasteland- the only thing that the player actually cares about- these women. The game uses this goal of sexual gratification brilliantly to actually make you go through the game’s artistic, deliberately un-fun design.
Sex doesn’t have to be an exploitive bit of teenage stupidity that games need to get over- it can really be a valuable tool. For a long time there’ve been chin-stroking articles wondering if games could ever set themselves free of the need to be “Fun” – well, imagine the kind of deliberately un-fun games that could be made by using Sex like this. Imagine a survival horror with tits!
Well. I mean… yes.
I don’t think there are enough developer hands out there that are skilled enough to work sex into a game meaningfully. Too many games exude juvenile perspectives (do I have to say God of War). The Witcher and Mafia II come in for some criticism – despite having laudable adult goals – for sticking in sex as a collectible.
We might bemoan another uninspired browngrey FPS, but if a developer chucks porn into the ring, that means boring shooter could become successful for all the wrong reasons. The first-person porn shooter, FPPS, if you like. And I wouldn’t want grind justified by porn.
The other thing is, all the examples quoted here equate gamer with male hetero. If the game integrates a player’s sexual gratification into the reward/carrot structure, then it’s doing gaming a disservice by forgetting that not all players are straight men.
Your words are wise, Harbour Master. I should have at least mentioned Thane.
Really, I suppose, it’s like any other sensitive issue- You really shouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole unless you’re going to try and do something with it.
Yesterday I was going to reply to this post. I have gone as far as typing out the first line and I have decided that what I had to say was irrelevant. After a night of sleeping on it I examined the reason why I thought it was relevant and realised that in a way, it ties up to the whole thing after all. So here .
The essence is yes, what Harbour Master said regard to not all people being hetero males. I never felt that I had the right to come into a discussion regard to how heterosexual male protagonist’s on a heterosexual male player’s sense of sexual achievement could be, because it is simply not who I am. So in a sense, for a game that tried to use sexuality as a further mean of solidarity between the player and the character, if not done well it becomes the very isolating factor.
I have to stress that overall, Bioware do well when it comes to diversity and inclusiveness. Which is why the choice regard to sex on Mass Effect was a tad bizarre. It’s not just it took off the same sex romance in the last second (which IMO is far worse than never included it to begin with), the other thing that bothered me was that when it comes to the opposite sex, it was defaulted that if you are not a outright asshole toward the opposite sex, it was romance by default.
As a result, instead of having the sex as an elevating reward, it turned into a burden, a trap that players had to navigate through. For a reward that should be worked toward, they dropped the ball here.
This may sound petty, but because how well I related with my Shepard up until that point, it felt like me as a player was violated a little bit. I don’t even want to carry the save stats over for ME2 because I don’t want to deal with that particularly handsy opposite sex NPC.
Coming down to it, I think it was a good idea to have sex in the game, but it was handled poorly and didn’t live anywhere near up to the potential of what it could have been.
The one game that had lots of people excited over how it’s integrates sex into the game well is the up coming Atlus game, Catherine. Not something I’m personally interested in, but I’ll throw in the words anyway because from what I hear, the people who are interested are calling it the game that’s Doing it Right.
Love this piece – great observation.
I’m glad you decided to post, Sel! I’ll admit I never considered any perspective other than my own when writing this, which is a stupid thing to do at any time. Sorry if I left you out in the cold there.
I actually had the same thing happen to me- playing as an imported female character in Mass Effect 2, I had to stop talking to Jacob altogether. I can see how sex could become alienating even with the best intentions.
Going back to dating sims, games like that know their audience before they come in the door. But putting sex in a normal game could really open up a whole can of worms no matter which way you handle it, because you’ve got no real idea who’s playing it. Bioware’s games obviously try to give you a big range to accomodate different desires, but put sex in a linear game and there’s always the chance that you’re alienating 50% or more of your audience.
The solution, I think, is that the sex always has to be optional. It works great as an incentive to explore the world/get to know a character/collect 50 maguffins, and doing it that way means a player can always opt out if it’s not their thing.
ALSO THOUGHT: Games never know what to give you for beating the hardest mode, because once you’ve done that giving you an in-game reward like a powerful weapon is useless. Usually they fob you off with concept art, but you know what would work great? The only out-of-game reward in existance: SEX.
Ahem. Tom, thank you! I’m taking this as a liscence to plaster a “TOM JUBERT APPROVED!” stamp all over this.
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