Typically, computer role-playing games have not been noted for their romantic aspects. However, once in awhile a game shows up that has a love interest in it.
One such was Baldur’s Gate 2, where a male character could become romantically involved with one of two female NPCs.
More recently, a male character could have a romance of sorts with Lady Aribeth in Neverwinter Nights.
You’ll have noticed that the emphasis in both games was on a male player-character interacting with a female NPC. That isn’t just because most designers are male.
The surprising fact is that requests for in-game romance come mainly from male players. On the boards, it’s usually the guys who ask if the upcoming game will have a romance option in it.
Now I find that a little odd. What is the attraction of romance in a CRPG? One can see that happening in a live, paper-and-pencil game, where both are real people.
In a CRPG, however, one participant in the romance is a virtual creation, pre-scripted, and not a real person at all.
What does a human player get out of flirting with a make-believe one? What satisfaction can there be in that?
Does it signify frustration with real-life romance? Is it a safety factor, since the human player won’t be heartbroken if things turn sour? Or, since the romance is scripted, is the attraction the ability to manipulate conversations to obtain the desired result?
For that matter, does romance really belong in a CRPG? Is it meant to add an extra dimension of “reality”? To give (or supposedly give) more scope to role-playing? Or is it just a little frill to add a bit of spice to the game?
So far, what’s been done in the romance line has been pretty shallow. That can’t be helped. Scripting a full-blown romance would be a complex undertaking in a product where love interest is very much secondary to the main action. It would be even more so if multiple choices were presented, and game programming is complicated enough these days.
With that in mind, why bother with romance at all?
While I don’t buy a game for the romance aspect and I can certainly enjoy playing one without it, sometimes having a little hint of attraction between the characters can be fun.
In Baldur’s Gate II there was opportunity for female characters to have romances, too (with a Paladin-type whose name I can’t remember and at least one other, I think). In NWN: Hordes of the Underdark females could have a romance of sorts with the male Tiefling you meet eventually. And in KoTOR and KoTOR II there were opportunities for romance (with Carth in KoTOR and almost any of the male companions in KoTOR II… well, sort of).
I think it brings more realism to a game. If you’re fighting, eating, sleeping, questing, travelling, etc. with a group of people or with just one there’s going to be a feeling of closeness between the companions (unless, of course, you can’t stand them!) that I think the romance aspects in a game addresses.
I don’t ALWAYS play the romance story lines – in most games with the romance option you can ignore the NPC’s advances. But sometimes it’s nice that it’s there.
I’ve seen messageboards, though, full of female players swooning over the male love interest characters in a game as if they were a favorite actor or character in a movie. That’s what I think the “love interest” thing also brings to the game – that “male hero crush” (or even “female hero crush”) that TV and movie characters evoke.
There. That’s my two cents!
I think a romance between CHARACTERS in a game is ok. I grant you I haven’t seen it much in PC games unless you count the SIMS. :)
But you find them all over the place in console games. In fact all most, if not all, of the RPG’s I have played over the years on the various consoles the Hero always gets the girl in the end. and most times the Kingdom that goes with her. Now that’s a Dowery!
Yeah, but one of those characters is “you” and the other is make-believe. That’s okay with you, is it?
(and look what three little ponies can accomplish! ;)
Well, see, I never feel like the character in a game is “me”. I feel like I’m directing the character in a story, not that I’m living in the story. So for me it’s the same as watching a story or reading a story. It makes the characters more believable when they can interact convincingly. That doesn’t have to be romance necessarily, but friendship or at least feeling like the things your character is saying and doing are actually having some affect people. Static worlds where no one reacts to anything you do are annoying (even though that’s how all the ollllld CRPGs were – you’d go around ransacking people’s houses right in front of them and they wouldn’t notice. And neither would the nearby guards.)
First off, hi there Scorpia. First post. Your column was a major reason why I bought and read CGW in the early 80s.
I have the same view as GelleKlara. One of the characters isn’t “me”. Both are make-believe. In the case of the CRPG romance, I’m directing the actions of my imaginary character (to the extent the game allows) and the other imaginary character is directed by the game developer. The result is the romance of two imaginary characters much as in a novel or movie.
I remember when my perspective started changing. I was a pre-teen reading science fiction, identifying myself with the protagonists, and I came across Robert Heinlein’s “Podkayne of Mars”. I *couldn’t* identify myself as the young girl named Podkayne, being a young male myself, so I had to step back and see her as a “not-me” protagonist. It was like a door opened to a larger world. Suddenly I was able to empathize with a “person” who was not me, share the story of a character I could never be.
I don’t think one kind of perspective is necessarily better than another. Identifying closely with the protagonist likely gives a deeper and more meaningful experience. Taking the … let’s call it the “third-person empathic” perspective … gives a broader and more diversely rich experience. Or something like that.
Glad I found your site, Scorpia. I’ll be dropping by regularly to see what you have to say.
Dell, glad you enjoyed the columns and thanks for posting. Very interesting remarks there. You put that very well and brought in a perspective I hadn’t considered myself.
Personally, I can empathize with characters in a novel much easier than in a game. I suspect that’s because reading is passive and gaming isn’t.
I think it should be included. I didn’t use to think so but after my wife finally convinced me to read a few of her romance novels I’ve changed my mind.
Humans are sexual creatures. Everything about our being revolves around it. So even though in the game it is scripted, it is making the game ‘more real’, like life.
Now, to real twist things, how about the so called adult MMO’s like sociolotron? Where do they fit in?
Well, I can tell you I’d get no satisfaction from any romance where the “significant other” wasn’t a real person.
However, I’m not familiar with “sociolotron”. What is that?
And also, there’s a limit as to how much “real” a game should have. Hmmm. There’s a thought for another article.
In old-fashioned RPG’s, I always enjoyed the prospect of romance (and sometimes marriage) between PC’s and NPC’s, and find it to be a real game enhancer when done well. Even if you leave aside a certain lustful samurai ;) . Or for that matter a certain shugenja who was seen blushing when faced with a certain NPC, if my memory isn’t failing me here.
A couple of the best games I was in were “avatar” games…in our group, those were games where the players were the characters, but they gained powers and abilities through their early adventures, so that they ended up doing strange things. And our “gameselves” weren’t any more deaf to romance than we ourselves were and are, and often ended up married to NPC’s. It helped that the DM knew us well, so that the NPC females we ended up meeting (over the course of many years, mind you) were suited to the characters we were playing, and the romances had interesting dynamics all their own. That didn’t dominate the games, which still centered around adventures, but it did enhance them.
The same went for non-avatar games. It was just a little more fun with the avatars, at least when the players were still single ;) . I’ve noticed that married and committed (or at least, non-frustrated) players can enjoy these things quite as much as the frustrated single ones.
This doesn’t work so well with CRPG’s because, even though the character isn’t “you,” it’s got to do for a large body of gamers. Typically, the main character isn’t given his own personality so much as assigned one by the player, whether or not it’s the player’s own. Under those circumstances, that “special someone” won’t appeal as much to some as to others. It’d be different if the character had a distinctive personality set by the game, so that you could be glad to see the right couple get together…
I mean, it can still be okay, just not as all-aborbingly interesting as in an old-style RPG. (I remember a Phantasy Star game – was it Phantasy Star III? – in which the action took place over 3 generations; at the end of the first and second, the character would get a chance to marry one of two women he’d met in the course of his adventure, and the next character was the son of that couple.) It might be different if you were using the Bard’s Tale Construction Set to make a custom game for a few friends of yours.
Do I dare admit I enjoyed Plundered Hearts? But of course, that was no RPG.