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.
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