Extra Credits - Romance in Games

[The Sam]

"Can We Play with Lasting Relationships?
Games often focus on the flirtation and courtship of an early relationship, turning it into a game where saying the right thing means you will win over your romantic interest. These simple game systems fall far short of delivering on the complexity of human relationships. The player never has to face rejection, and they hardly ever find themselves on the receiving end of a proposition from an NPC companion whose feelings may be hurt by rejection (hi, Anders). Moreover, once the player's overtures are accepted, the game is "won:" very few games deal with break ups or the evolution of a relationship over time."

[Red Impact]

It's sort of interesting that the artist used a Mass Effect image for this video, because Mass Effect pretty much does all these things. You get to initiate a relationship, yes, but characters can come onto you and you might turn them down, and depending on your choices, you may have to deal with the breakups resulting from your decisions.

I would agree that it's hard to get the whole depth of a relationship when you start it in the middle. inFamous comes to mind, you start it with a girlfriend who is angry at you for everything that happened. You have few scenes with her and so a lot of people just found her annoying, which is understandable. You miss out on a lot of emotional baggage when you do that in agame.

[Reflecto]

The biggest problem this doesn't seem to mention is the fact that for a lot of romantic relationships, there's an inherent catch-22 involved in adding them to stories. The fact of games is- any game that's based more in "adventure" (and "adventures" are far more common and throughout far more genres of play than "sports" or "world-building"-based games), you have the core storyline of "you're playing a hero who is sent out to save the world from such an enormous threat that sending any being, no matter how innately powerful, to do it would border on a suicide mission when the mission starts."

While there's also the innate "if the player is good enough at the game and follows the storyline, eventually they'll defeat this threat and save the world"- even then there's enough danger (as seen from the amount of deaths inherent in a game.) In order to make a threat big enough to justify adventure genres, the threat has to be big enough so that at the beginning, before your character comes into their own and finds out they CAN destroy this threat, the mindset of the people going on the mission is to have in the back of their mind "You are probably going to die, and your death won't even matter, you're just going to beat the rush when the world ends and everyone else dies."

This makes it harder to make relationships outside of that "new love" nature, simply because- if someone's in an established relationship- whether it's a happy, committed relationship or even on the verge of going downhill and ending? That is a person who isn't going to happily say "I'll sign up for this mission that I'm probably going to die in, and when I die it's going to kill everyone else in the world, including the person I care most about", but rather a person who'd say "If I do this, I'm going to die alone, and then everyone else in the world will die shortly after. If I don't do this, I'm going to die alongside the rest of the world- but at least I'll die with the one I love...you know what? Screw fighting the evil. I'd rather have that precious last few weeks/months/days with the person I care most about in the world and at least die with them."

[Dub H]

Apr 8, 2015 20:43:57 GMT -5 Red Impact said:

It's sort of interesting that the artist used a Mass Effect image for this video, because Mass Effect pretty much does all these things. You get to initiate a relationship, yes, but characters can come onto you and you might turn them down, and depending on your choices, you may have to deal with the breakups resulting from your decisions.

I would agree that it's hard to get the whole depth of a relationship when you start it in the middle. inFamous comes to mind, you start it with a girlfriend who is angry at you for everything that happened. You have few scenes with her and so a lot of people just found her annoying, which is understandable. You miss out on a lot of emotional baggage when you do that in agame.

Extra Credits does these misrepresentation often.

I think Persona,as much as it is good in everything else,is the pefect example for the standard.You can get any girl you want,you go to then,no need to deal with break ups,etc.


Catherine i find it interesting that it is an game all about relationships,sure you can choose which girl you want in the end,but it is a very different journey