Love and darkness: A series of letters on relationship games

Dear Leigh,

You'd better take that bit about maps back. Most of my teenage years were spent happily behind locked doors, engaging in quality materials JUST LIKE Morrowind and the accompanying paper map.

Gamers still have dalliances with solitary experiences, but all the games that seem important right now are the ones that let us play together. The Journeys, the Minecrafts, the Dark Souls and DOTAs. But now that we're mining this rich seam of togetherness, why the continued disinterest in sex and love? The evidence is that we all want to connect with one another. The reality is inexplicably prudish. We'll stand back to back and kill until our arms can hardly lift the guns, but two years ago I was left speechless when a character in Ninja Theory's Enslaved used the word "penis." I'd never heard it before in a game. I still haven't, since then.

Here's my theory, which navigates the nauseatingly bleak response that it's because games are a male-dominated field. I think games have a disinterest in relationships because they have their foundation in play, and play is, in the first place, a non-literal means of humans fostering relationships.

I'm playing a lot of Monster Hunter right now, which isn't a euphemism for going clubbing with Brendan. It's a game where up to four players can work together to defeat some vast creature across fights that last for an hour, at which point you make jackets and pants out of the fuckers. When that monster collapses there's a heartbeat where you stare disbelievingly, and then you all scream. This is where you'll find relationships in games, is my point, and it's more tangible than any movie. For the rest of our lives, me and Keza McDonald, my hunting partner, will remember our time spent together. Isn't that even better?

Yeah, I remember talking about Catherine with you in some doomsday pub or another. But for weeks when you were in London, the most enjoyable conversation we had about a game concerned fruit machines in U.K. pubs. You were awed by this horrible, flashing obelisk in the corner. I'm telling you, every U.K. gamer grows up learning to treat those things like mimics in fantasy games. Don't go near it! You'll have a shit time! "But I want to!" No, Leigh! No!

It wasn't that way with Catherine. We took that game apart. We discussed the text-message mechanic, the morality test, it featuring pregnancy and fear of commitment. On some level, yeah, it felt like a sweat-slick artifact from a future where games reach further than the nearest goblin hutch for their inspiration. But you've got to agree with me that the presentation of the pivotal relationship in it, with the nerve-spangled Vincent and his bumfuzzled love triangle, was also the worst thing about it. The game's so bizarre that you think it HAS to be going somewhere clever, when in reality the ponderous,bowling ball of a narrative spends the entire game in the gutter, and simply vanishes from sight at the end.

Maybe games don't need to worry about simulating relationships, is what I'm saying. They improve real-life ones on a daily basis, don't they?

– Quinns

Leigh,

You're really going to make me express why the male domination of video games would slow their development of romantic literacy. I can practically see your grin as you hand me the unicycle and point the way to the minefield.

OK.

When I worked at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, we had a half-joke, half-idea (that we never did) of telling our readers it was "Men With Guns Week." Every news post and review would have a reminder that this week we'd be taking a closer look at the dramatic world of Men With Guns, the joke being that we wouldn't do anything else differently. In video games, "Men With Guns Week" would be indistinguishable from any other week.

Now, 99 percent of movies have a romantic plot or subplot, because romance and sex have universal appeal and movies are trying to reach the largest demographic possible. Even the movies that could be video games! Die Hard is about a man trying to save his wife. Lethal Weapon has a heartbreaking scene where Mel Gibson breaks down in tears over a photograph of his wife. Every Star Wars movie is bloated with romance, but almost all of the 97 Star Wars games (a number that doesn't include mobile phone and flash games) don't mention love at all, taking place in a strange layer of the universe where men are expected to just fiddle with their lightsabers.

You know that media which actually targets women is uniquely dedicated to exploring romance and relationships, same as media which targets men is uniquely dedicated to finding out what the insides of a bad guy's chest cavity looks like.

Games have gotten pretty good servicing men with this lowest-common-denominator stuff. It now feels pretty fucking great to club an alien over the head in Halo! Perhaps if single-player games had been aggressively pursuing women for the same amount of time, they might have reached romantic and sexual pinnacles beyond the foursome in Dragon Age: Origins.

But let's get back to multiplayer. One of my first ever pieces of games writing (now lost) documented my travels in Furcadia, a virtual retreat for Furries that, I see now, is still going. Huh. Just last December it raised $155,000 on Kickstarter for an expansion called The Second Dreaming.

Back then, Furcadia had six or so "worlds" you could explore. My friends and I wandered through comparatively empty forests and dingly dells, finding nothing but the exact barren landscapes you describe. Finally, we tried the very last server, an adults-only realm called the Exotic East, or something. What we found took our breath away.

Dear Leigh,

A memory pops into my head of an editor of mine describing World of Warcraft as gaming's cathedral, which works on a sexual level, too. A certain god-fearing cleanliness, with, perhaps, some of the more permanent residents getting up to no good behind closed doors.

As I write this, you're asleep on my couch. Gonna try and get away with a confession before you wake up.

I can't count the number of times I've been turned on by games.

Role-playing in an online chatroom might have been my first sexual experience. As a kid, I couldn't believe I could hook up with Aerie from Baldur's Gate 2. I could build a sex ziggurat from the innumerable 2D and 3D models that have caused twinges in the reptilian part of my brain, with Fran from Final Fantasy XII at the top. What I remember most, though, is Fallout 2. Here's a thing. You mention games' appeal in that you can do-over key decisions. Sex is the only area where I've never been able to go back and change what's happened. I think this ties in with what you were saying earlier, about how systems and romance can't co-exist.

So. Fallout 2. I was 12 when I played it, playing a female character, and she'd just made her way to the first town in the game. I found some gang members and, in the tradition of RPGs the world over, proceeded to try and be as nice to them as possible. One of them asked if I'd like to retire to his horrible burned-out car. I said yes. The screen faded to black, and opened on him, having used me, telling me to fuck off.

At 12 years old, I didn't have the capacity to deal with what had happened to me, or her. I scrubbed the saves from my hard drive and started the entire game again.

Surely us questioning whether systems are compatible with sex is the wrong question. Isn't this stuff too intrinsic to human nature for games to dream about avoiding it?

Gonna send this email before my Englishness gets the better of me.

Sincerely,

— Quinns (from upstairs)