Making a Believable Romance in Video Games

[Formalhaut]

Wait, some of you seem pretty confused about this.

Women are supposed to dispense sexual acts when you put in enough niceness coins.

Just the way all those Visual Novels taught me!

What, so I can't initiate sex? But her 'love' meter is at maximum! What a con!

This funny little exchange in 'The Rant Thread' (where else!) got me thinking about the mechanics behind video game romances.

With the games I play, I'm exposed to romances quite a lot. BioWare does them quite a bit, like in Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Like Fynn said, Visual Novels are a veritable treasure trove of sometimes questionable romance stories between five or six Japanese schoolgirls, which may or may not involve tentacles. Where was I again?

Romances in Video Games can be very good. BioWare has definitely improved in this regard, going from a fairly labored attempt in Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins with limited choice, to more varied options in later sequels. Visual Novels are well known for allowing anything under the sun to be the object of desire. When done well, romances really work in story-driven games.

Thing is though, these romances often involve mechanics that attempt to mimic love in the real world. So in Mass Effect and Dragon Age, if you keep saying the 'right things' to a certain person, you can initiate the romance. It's more explicit in Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 where you can literally track by numbers how well you're doing. The Fable series may be the worst at this, with townspeople literally throwing themselves at you just by maxing their bar.

Or in The Sims. I love the series, but romance in that game essentially boils down to: repeat friendly interactions, once bar is sufficiently full, kiss".

I may be judging too harshly. These are games, so naturally in the coding romances do have to be programmed. But I do leave these games slightly cold. Some romance stories in a video game just feel mechanical (just like in real life! )

Case in point: the first Witcher game. In this game, you can have sexual encounters with over twenty women, which at the end give you a rather sexualised card in a really strange variation of the "gotta catch em' all!" Pokemon tagline.

So I suppose I have two questions. Firstly: are video games a good vessel in which to hold romance options in the first place, and of course, do you like romance options in games. Second: how can romance options in video games be done more... naturally, I guess? Is it even possible to?

[Fynn]

I heard that Catherine is actually a pretty good exploration of relationships, fidelity, commitment, and stuff like that. It has a pre-determined romance, in that your character already has a girlfriend at the start and cheats on her really soon as well, so I don't think that's what's usually understood as video game romance.

Here's the deal, really. I'm always gonna think that romance that is dependant on player choice will be a bit weird. As in, I'm supposed to be projecting myself on this character and having a fantasy about dating this other character? OK, why would I need that? My love life is quite alright as it is, why would I need this? Or does someone lacking a love life finding relief in this? I'm not one to judge, but if that's the case, that kind of escapism is pretty sad, if you ask me.

I'd like to see more romance written into the plot already. Fran and Balthier are one of my favorite video game couples because they just behave so naturally. They're so comfortable around each other and can communicate non-verbally - you can just feel all the chemistry. Or even other FFs, and other RPGs for that matter. That's one of the reasons why I'll mostly choose JRPGs over WRPGs - the latter usually lets you create a self-insert character that gets to romance with one of our resident Hot Chicks^TM or some shade of Femmy Twink^TM if you're a guy, while the former usually has romance already written into it from the getgo. So yay for Cecil and Rosa, Cloud and Tifa, Squall and Rinoa, and Balthier and Fran. I want more well-written romance that isn't interactive.

[Pumpkin]

Hey now, I have a good love life and I love dating sims. When playing, I view my character not as an avatar but as a character. And I want to spread happiness and joy by playing matchmaker because I like playing matchmaker but not in real life because I don't want that type of control over people's lives. But fictional characters are a different story. With that being said, I hate sex scenes and the like. I prefer just cute little romances like in Fire Emblem: Awakening.

As I've said before, I prefer dating sims in video games where you don't have "right" and "wrong" answers, but rather different answers that affect your relationships. Choose option 1 and girl A likes you more, option 2 and girl 2 likes you more, etc. Because different people are attracted to different qualities and different things, and it feels more genuine rather than:
Choose option:
You look pretty
You look like you bathed in a sewer

I mean, come on, you know what option to pick there. As opposed to something like
Choose option:
I'm very social, I love being around people!
I like a smaller group of friends.
I'm pretty introverted.

There, different qualities will attract different people and there's not really a wrong answer unless you're aiming for someone in specific.

But I also like story related romances and I would also like to see more relationships that are stable and already started pre-game as opposed to them falling in love and whatever during the game. I like both but it would be nice to get some variety~

[Karifean]

Reading a lot of visual novels you get exposed to extreme highs and lows of romance writing. I do rarely come across romances where I get heavily invested in seeing the couple be happy, and those end up being my favorites. Conversely there's a lot of times when the romance feels forced or just unnatural, which end up being forgettable. Worst would probably be the nukige genre, where a sex scene is literally your goal point. I'm the same as Pumpkin in that I never self-insert, because to me the main character is a 'person', not a blank slate. Even if they don't appear graphically on the screen for 99% of the game.

But well in that regard all that really matters is how well the romantic scenes are written. How well playing matchmaker works is a totally different story. Most I've seen are simple choices that determine who the main character spends the most time with, and that's how the romance starts building up. But honestly there's no real activity in pushing the relationship forward for the player there, the characters do it on their own, you just let them have those moments. Which again I'm fine with because I don't consider myself a part of that romance, and it also makes it feel more genuine if the immediate interaction between the MC and the romantic interest is governed by THEM, not me, the player.

So I guess what I'm really interested in is not so much playing matchmaker in particular as just seeing good romance stories unfold. Romantic charage (character games) are usually quite good at that.

On the topic of 18+ stuff, I used to indiscriminately hate H scenes, but I've actually grown appreciative of some of them. For every 10 stupidly out-of-place scenes that amount to nothing more than mindless fap material you come across the one that actually fits the story well and furthers character and relationship development, and the story just wouldn't be the same without them(Tomoyo After in a nutshell). But well, that's something that goes on a case by case basis, and most H scenes I can't be any more than apathetic towards.

[Dr Unne]

The "love points" systems mirror hit points and magic points and other kinds of points that don't exist in the real world. I see nothing wrong with them. That's what video games do: take complex ideas and dumb them down to simple mechanics. Getting a guaranteed opportunity to sex up everyone you take a random interest in is one of many things you sometimes get to do in video games that you don't get to do in real life, along with killing hundreds of people with a sword without consequence, shooting fireballs at dragons, an so on.

Romance doesn't make sense in real life most of the time; it'd take a miracle to have it make sense in a video game, let alone make sense in a way that's fun for everyone playing the game.

[Leigh]

I think that video games are at a point, where they could probably implement a linear scenario with a romantic storyline. Video games have more in common with motion pictures today, especially the AAA titles, than their precursor late-90s brethren. A script of high quality and characters with more than one dimension is already truly possible. There just hasn't been a gaming equivalent of a romantic drama yet...

Now, if we are talking about a mechanical system, that has any chance of emulating the progression of a human relationship, then I would imagine (I'm not a programmer) that a very sophisticated system would have to be crunching numbers, in the background, attached to every single action you perform in the game. What needs to be encoded into the game is a sort of latent emotion system.

Every character would have to be attached to a sort of database of internal values crossed with a personality system, that could work simply by using statistical and probability calculations. You could employ the basis tenets of the Five Factor Model of Personality

• Openness to Experience
• Conscieniousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

Also attached to each character would be a defined list of human values, and how much sway these have in the spectrum of their personality. For example;

• Honor
• Empathy
• Compassion
• Faithfulness
• Loyality

...and so on. These particular values would be used to calculate a characters feelings towards your character. If you have a character in your party with a tendency to be boastful, who happens to have mentioned, at some point, how you dispatched 30 foxes in a quest, and a character who has a high empathy value for animals speaks to this boastful character...might be standoffish with you.

Every action that occurs in the game can be observed and fed back to characters in your general vicinity. A simulated social environment, occurring in real time, would have to be running in the background as well. All characters having the ability to communicate with each other, forming bonds, without you having any direct impact. The amount of branching pathways just for one character would be generated, rather than being hand-programmed. A concept more like the procedural generation of emotional data, rather than graphical data. Alas, it would still have to be based on numerical statistic values.

Something so involved. I have no doubt that such a system could be computed. I am sure it can now, theoretically, but it would be a colossal undertaking from a programming point of view. Leaps in AI, will I am sure, make a system possible. But there obviously needs to be a great deal of investment in this area.

At the moment, we are focusing on expansive worlds. I am sure that in the future, we will start to focus on expansive emotional content and great strides in A.I. That will eventually take us away from this sort of 'likert scale' programming that most matchmaking is based on.

[Freya]

I love romance options in games. They make the game feel more organic and believable to me.

I like how sims is doing in their recent games. You can give your sims traits. Some traits just will not work with other sims. So in an attempt to have those normal conversations to build up a romance, some sims just wont. They can't talk cause they don't agree on things. That's nice.

Bioware has been doing a good job lately with personalities like that as well. You as the player though are making the choices that the romance option may like or dislike. Like if you support jailing up magic users, well the magic user that is for freedom probably wont get along with you. I like that.

I like that more than just the talk to them over and over thing.