Dating Sims: Romance for those who don't know better

This article is hosted on The Yorker, found here.


Dating Simulators. It's a genre that's been around longer than you might think, surprisingly constrained to obscure Japanese titles, and even then, ones essentially indie developed and distributed for DOS. For the uninitiated, Dating Sims as a genre are twists on the Visual Novel genre, where your aim is to seduce one or more people; usually female, and usually to the ends of getting the (usually male) main character laid.

That's not to say that all games that deal with romance are Dating Sims, nor is it the same thing as dating in The Sims - it's all built around a core of player wish fulfilment, and with that in mind, the genre is something rather pathetic at best and downright creepy at worst.

Video games deal with a lot of wish-fulfilment - you don't get to fire shotguns, drift in sports cars or be a rock star in the day-to-day for most people, but fostering friends and relationships is something we all should be achieving without much prompting, however difficult and emotional that might be. Trying to condense the idea of a relationship to essentially a set of numbers or dialogue options is foolish. I want to say that it's so foolish that no one would take the sentiment of relationships being a quantifiable game to heart, but you can never overestimate the socially-awkward.

The most recent example of the Dating Sim would be Katawa Shoujo (Japanese for “Cripple Girls”); an indie project developed by team created through the image board and Internet Cesspool 4Chan; inspired by a lone piece of concept art depicting girls with various disabilities as anime stereotypes. Several years in the making, the final game was released recently. You play as Hisao, a boy with a severe heart condition, transferred to a high school for disabled students exclusively. The harem of girls you meet there have various emotional baggage often tied to your disabilities, and as a reward for picking a girl and helping her through her problems, you're rewarded with sex scenes.

Critically, the games have been derided as trash, with a cluster of vocal hangers-on who defend the writing as something of quality, in spite of the whole "solving women's problems with your penis" deal. It doesn't take much digging to see the problematic ideas behind Katawa Shoujo in particular, but alarmed me the most is the plot involving Hanako, a girl suffering from severe facial burns. As a result she is socially introverted, to the point of being written as immature. You, as a character celebrate her birthday with a friend by treating her like she's a child (though she's meant to be 18). That's both considered 'the right thing to do', and of course rewards you with a sex scene with her friend. Creepy.

Writing characters like these isn't difficult - and that's essentially what the problem is. Since the aim of Dating Sims is to make you care for the characters (because it's not going to be a convincing romance fantasy unless you personally fall for the cartoon babes), all it takes is a vulnerable personality (and a vulnerable physicality too in Katawa's case), enough mundane aspects to give a sense of conceivability, a pandering design and bam; instant emotional bait. It's not something solely confined to this genre, or even games as medium (I'm sure you can think of a romance film or 5 that do something similar), but it's rather stark in such a distilled form.

Oh, and if you think that Dating Sims are restricted to just Japan and creeps on the Internet, look no further than Bioware to set you straight. Bioware is a huge name in the Western RPG genre, but they have a consistent and annoying habit of inserting Dating Sim mechanics into their games; often at the behest of actual character development. The Dragon Age and Mass Effect series being the most recognisable examples, the player's relationships with his or her party members is inseparably tied to whether they've had sex or not. With Dragon Age 2, most party members are written as sexually attracted to the player (and only the player, mind) regardless of gender; something that could be argued as progressive, but personally rings rather hollow.

What worries me a little is that Dating Sims - either as a genre or a story-telling element - are becoming more common. It's the easiest and laziest way to write a character and try and eke some level of emotional involvement from a player. Video games have had a poor history of dealing with sexuality and relationships; and reducing those to fanservice 'rewards' is definitely not the right way to go about it. If games and visual novels are to be made about something like that - I'm holding out for a title that's more realistic:

Playing as a 20-something white male, unemployed and from a middle-class background, you meet many girls in your life, ready to be romanced. However, your only dialogue options are to stammer awkwardly, talk about your World of Warcraft character, or jump into an hour long diatribe about anime. The game is impossible to win.