I’m an adult.
I have a life. I have a good job. I have a nice group of friends that I don’t see nearly often enough. I have a steady boyfriend. We have an active sex life. (TMI, I know. I’m getting to the point.) Things are good.
And yet I was vexed. I had spent the greater part of an hour trying to get a computer simulated ganguro girl to sleep with me and she wouldn’t even tell me her name yet.
It is at these moments when you start to wonder how your life took such a strange turn. How did I get so invested in getting a fake girl’s phone number? Why am I so willing to slave away at my fake job so I could buy her an $800 pair of fake boots so she would go on a date with me and pout?
The Quiet Lure of Dating Sims
Somehow, I had gotten involved with the world of dating sims.
The Wikipedia definition sums the concept quite nicely:
Dating simulations (dating sims) are a video game subgenre of simulation games, usually Japanese, with romantic elements. The most common objective of dating sims is to date, usually choosing from among several characters, and to achieve a romantic relationship. In the West, the term dating sim is also used to classify what are known as visual novels in Japan. However, this is mixing genre and medium, as visual novels are considered a subgenre of adventure games and the term does not cover simulations. While the two genres often share a common visual presentation, dating sims are sometimes considered to be more statistically based than the “choose your own adventure” style of visual novels.
[...]
Dōkyūsei (Classmates) established the basic conventions for dating sims in 1992. In a typical dating sim, the player controls a male avatar surrounded by female characters. The gameplay involves conversing with a selection of girls, attempting to increase their internal “love meter” through correct choices of dialogue. This then affects which internal “path” you take through the game like it would in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. The game lasts for a fixed period of game time, such as one month or three years. When the game ends, the player either loses the game if he failed to properly win over any of the girls, or “finishes” one of the girls, often by having sex with her or achieving eternal love. This gives the games more replay value than some other game genres, since the player can focus on a different girl each time, trying to get a different ending.
While bishoujo games make up the bulk of dating sims, other types of games exist. Games where the player character is female and potential objects of affection are male are known as GxB or otome games. Homosexual relationships are also possible, as are games with no specific gender lines (“all pairings”).
There are many variations on this theme: high-school romances are the most common, but a dating sim may also take place in a fantasy setting and involve such challenges as defending one’s girl from monsters. Dating sims, as their name suggests, generally strive for a romantic atmosphere.
Dating games seem like the were made for me directly. I have talked about my Sim addiction before. However, the fabulous home decor options were only part of the reason the game appealed to me. The other part was the relationships.
Abusing My Omnipresence
I played hours upon hours of The Sims in my Simming heyday, building towns and creating complicated webs of friendship and love. Love in the Sim world was kind of cheap though – to maintain friendships, you had to put forth a lot of maintenance and effort. My poor stressed out Sim couldn’t find the time to work a job, study, and have a social life. The solution for me was to just make every other Sim fall in love with me. Love lasted a lot longer than friendship did, and I could spend less time on maintaining the relationships. Things were good in SimTown.
That is…until my younger sister brought home The Sims: Hot Date expansion pack. Suddenly, the rules of love changed. My Sims could go out. They could wine and dine each other.
And they could have prodigious amounts of off-screen Sim sex in the hot tub! Whoo! I created love triangles that covered entire neighborhoods. My Sim was polyamorous and loving it. Until two of her loves met enroute to her home.
There were arguments.
Tears.
A Sim fight.
And one of my Sims left SimTown, never to be heard from again.
Unfortunately, the spurned Sim was my younger sister’s. I was banned from the expansion pack, so I left it alone.
But Why a Sex Game? Why Not Just a Dating Game?
By the time I discovered Ganguro Girl, I had known about other sex related games for a while. I had just never been interested in playing.
I don’t know what started me searching for random free flash games that involved dating and sex. I just know that they amused me. It wasn’t until I played a few that I realized a few things.
Gamers are getting older but our games are still rated PG.
I think this is a little bit of a problem.
As oversexualized as game characters are – with five kiloton breasts adorning the chests of many leading women and men who could easily double as a washboard in a pinch – one would think that sex would be a bigger theme than it is.
However, with rare exception, video games are fairly chaste. Aside from longing glances (most RPGs) or leering stares (thinking of games like Doom and Conker’s Bad Fur Day) the players aren’t getting much by way of action.
Think of Lulu and Wakka from Final Fantasy X. The entire game they remain a respectful distance apart, with Lulu remaining cold and aloof. (Yes, I know, grieving for Chappu, but still!) The game ends, Lulu and Wakka are in love…and she’s still aloof. Then they give birth to a child, Vidina.
To be honest, I would not have been surprised if SquareEnix had mentioned that sex was not involved in the conception of little Vidina. Obviously, Lulu and Wakka cast Babyaga, and after the third perfect cast, they were rewarded with a child.
*sigh*
The relationship of the hypersexualized characters to the sexual tension free plots is a baffling one. It feels as if gaming has been fitted with an extra large chastity belt. Sex and sexual attraction are either jokes, omitted from the plot, or avenues to showcase male sexual prowess.
(Hot chocolate, anyone?)
Personally, it would be nice to see a game handle sexual feelings and -gasp!- activity in a realistic way. It is not necessary to make the games sexually explicit to do this. However, there is a lot of intimacy that can be conveyed and implied, in everything from an intimate stance to acknowledging that there is a little more to the story after the curtain falls. And since my regular games seem unwilling to allow their characters anything more than a handholding, I need to go to the opposite end of the spectrum to see relationships with some semblance of sex – the dating sims. (Though to be honest, this treads deeper into hentai games than regular dating games, as the latter can be just as chaste as our mainstream releases.)
I’m Not the Only One
Somewhere around the time I mastered the Ganguro game and got to the love hotel, I became aware of Bonnie Ruberg’s article series on hentai games. I was relived to find out I was not the only woman enjoying side-scrolling adventures in sex. Ruberg blogs about her adventures in h-gaming here, here, here, and here.
However, my favorite post from Ruberg is where she fields her fiance’s honest question: do hentai games turn you on?
He had that sexy twinkle in his eye, and I hate to disappoint, so instead of giving my standard “It’s for research” line I decided to stop and think.
It’s true that I’ve enjoyed my recent experiences playing h-games (short and few as they’ve been, admittedly), and maybe even more than I expected. It’s also true that they are, well, about sex. And when you watch/do anything concerning graphic sex for a few solid hours, it’s hard not to find yourself a little hot and bothered.
Still, I can’t say that–for me, at least–h-games serve their primary purpose as pornography. That is, I can’t see getting off on them. I think they’re fun, fascinating even… but I don’t know how well they’d function as masturbation material.
Ditto.
While playing the various free dating/h-game sims I found online, I was surprised at how removed I was from the actual sex. It was just a fun goal, another persona I got to step into for a while. In fact, with the Ganguro game, I was too bored to wait for the game to end during final pay-off. Messily rendered fingering just doesn’t do it for me. Still, I contemplated buying the actual game so that I could date different girls.
So why did I continue playing a sex based game if the ultimate pay-off wasn’t all that inspiring?
One of Ruberg’s commenters nailed my sentiments by saying:
TrannyGetYourGun Says:
October 26th, 2007 at 12:39 am I kind of like hentai games. Most of the porn therein doesn’t really appeal to me specifically, but there’s a sense of delayed gratification in having to click 400 times before you get to see lasciviousness. It’s mingled with frustration, certainly, but in the age of the internet, there’s a certain adolescent charm in providing obstacles between yourself and the soft glow of electric sex.
Hmm…could the appeal of these games be in the anticipation of sex, rather than the actual act itself?
At any rate, I will be looking forward to the day when gaming can add in sex as an addition to plot in the same way that novels, movies, comics, and television do. Maybe the addition of sexuality will stop the infantilization of gaming, add nuance to stale plot points and take the industry to another level.
Or maybe I’m hoping for a little too much out of what amounts to lines of code. Whatever. I just know the future of gaming is ripe with possibilities.
Especially sexual ones.
Post Script
As an aside: The article ended above the post script. However, I would be laying down on the job if I did not at least bring up the controversy involved with introducing sex to video games. There would be issues with censorship and appropriate gaming levels. The ages of characters would need to be stated and would probably be analyzed to death. There is the issue of pornographic style exploitation which is often seen in some hentai games – women are demure little virgin puppets, ready to be used and abused for someone else’s pleasure. Issues of double standards would undoubtedly manifest themselves in gaming – i.e. is it permissible for a female character to initiate sex with a male character. There are issues surrounding the images of sex in gaming already, considering that women in some male geared games exist as prostitutes, strippers, and sexual ornaments. There are concerns that inviting more sex to the gaming world would basically become a large, frat-like bacchanal.
And that’s just some of the issues that would arise with hetero sex in games.
Still, I would like some acknowledgment of sexual feelings and attitudes in gaming before we we start to analyze the chances of having sexually aware characters into oblivion.
Sexual attitudes, sex positivity, homosexuality, and misogyny in hentai games? That’s another article in itself…
Article © November 2007 by Latoya Peterson.
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