I Really Hate Valentine's Day

Thanks to my very best friend Valentine's Day, love in all of it's many forms, has been on my mind lately. While I have many, very powerful feelings on the subject personally, I don't really want to share them with the internet, so instead I'm going discuss love in video games.

Love is brought up in video games fairly often, especially within the RPG genre, but for the most part it is a very superficial love, cute and pink and with as much substance as those words imply. Actually, one of the first RPG's ever, Dragon Quest for the NES is a perfect example. In Dragon Quest it was the players goal to save the princess and then defeat the evil dragon king/emperor. After rescuing the princess she would give you an item literally called "her love" (replace "her" with the princess' actual name which I forgot), that could tell you how much experience you had left to level up and if I remember right let you save anywhere in the game (a very handy feature for that game). That was it, she had never met you before, you rescue her and then Whoom, she's in love with you. She has, I think, one line to that extent. While recent titles have had slightly more complex relationships (see the link in my last post), they are still quite simple. Even Persona 3, one of my favorite games, which had enough complex topics covered in it that I had an actual cathartic experience (which actually led to my date on VD which led to this discussion), had simple, woo the girl and then forget about her once she's fallen for you mechanics.

It's not just love either, friendship dynamics are almost entirely non-existant. Take Neverwinter Nights 2 for example. NWN2 is a game that prides itself on it's companion dynamics (it's a feature on the back of the box), but outside of one or two scenes that occur once you get enough companion points (by agreeing with your allies in the dialogue), there is nothing. I long for a game that creates a true companion experience, one where your allies have their own personalities and respond dynamically to the players words and actions. What I want most of all is real relationships, friendships that take a dozen of, "Mega RPG#34's 80 hours of gameplay", to foster. I want soulmates to find that are not obvious from the first cutscene.

Of course all of this wishing isn't really doing anything. Games are really much better described as simulations, so one has to simulate these interpersonal dynamics, figure out ways in order for specific hard-coded events occur from player chosen actions. Even more difficult is the writing for these things, it's not easy to make a relationship that gradually gains strength, it's much less difficult to hop on a train and have two best friends lie conveniently in the only open booth (cough*HarryPotter*cough). In my latest, and by far most ambitious project, a full campaign module for Neverwinter Nights 2, I intend to tackle this difficulty in gaming. I know that I can do a better job than Neverwinter Nights 2, it had a good start, but the designers just seemed to forget about that part of the game a third of the way through, but trying to top something with a more complex dynamic such as Ico will be a difficult test (and one that I probably won't pass, but I have to try). Probably the hardest part will be trying to figure out how to simulate the tactile experience of relationships. Ico had the magnificent aspect of the boy and Yorda holding hands, but in the NWN2 engine I can't recreate that, so I'm going to have to somehow use fade-outs and dialogue to create that physical aspect, and no I don't mean sex. Human relationships, especially romantic ones are full of body language and tactile events, I mean you can literally tell if two people are a couple by the fact that they hold hands (more true for new couples than "older" ones). This is something I have no chance of even simulating in the NWN2 game engine, so I'm going to have to imply that it's being simulated, a really awkward and difficult task to surmount.

On a slightly different subject a surprisingly large number of people have had very strong reactions to my last post, particularly my thoughts on my "date". Some of these reactions have been simple and informed, "perhaps she had a hard day at work and just wasn't all there" to the mind boggling "somehow I was a bad person for finding her boring after being the one to ask her out?" (Sorry Amanda, but I just don't get it, how was I supposed to know if she was boring or not without asking her out?). Let me make one thing clear here, I'm not burning any bridges. What I mean is that I wasn't the one to end the date, she did (had some kind of meeting with her housemates or something apparently) and I'm not avoiding her or anything, if she were to show any indications of wanting to go on another date then I would be just fine with that. Of course none of that means I may find her anymore attractive (outside of physicality), but I may understand a bit more of why I wasn't that interested in her.

I realized after some thought that I really like strong, aggressive women. I like women who want to win. These are traits that female gamers tend to have, which outside of sharing one of my biggest hobbies/interests, makes them very attractive to me. Unfortunately these are also "male" traits that most women don't share, so I'm looking for a particularly rare type of woman. Add in that I'm quite a bit shallow (though there are some interesting studies on why men care more about physical features more than women) and I refuse to date anyone I think is stupider than me. That last one is a biggie, since I'm a pretentious asshole with wayyy too much pride, I think I'm a genius, and thus I can only date another genius. So I'm looking for a physically attractive, intellectual, female gamer, yeah...

P.S. Next post I'll try and have less asides, maybe I'll just remove the parenthesis keys off my keyboard...