Romance as a video game genre: Furthering evolution of game design? | Hacker News Reader

Romance as a video game genre: Furthering evolution of game design?

4 pointsJenniferFinelli4 comments

The world could use a few more romance video games.

Oh heavens, the controversy. Let’s trust this publication’s readership is too intelligent to moan, 'Oh gawsh, what a girl thing to say,' but maybe the sexists have a legitimate counter-argument here. Romance readership? Women. Romance viewership? Women. With pizza-covered adolescent white-male stereotypes running rampant through video game culture, do companies have any financial room to aim towards a probably female gamership?

A million times yes. Women make up 47 percent of all gamers, according to a 2012 study by the Entertainment Software Association. Even better, women over 18 make up 30 percent of the community while only 18 percent of gamers are boys under 17. The stereotype is so broken it’s not even money.

With that out of the way, here’s a bigger hurdle: what the heckz0rz is a romance video game, and why would any gamer, irrespective of gender, care about playing it?

(Because it would further the evolution of game design! More here: http://insertquarterly.com/2013/04/17/make-love-not-war-romance-as-a-video-game-genre/)

I do believe that a good romance game could be very successful and I would be interested in seeing one made, but the issue would be making one that is a quality game in and of it's self.

When you look at a lot of the latest successful games the majority of the entertainment value comes though exciting and engaging game mechanics or some sort of role playing aspect where the playing is able to feel like they have the ability to feel like something they are not able to do in their normal lives.

This has driven a lot of games to go the route of high paced cinematic game play with the player taking up the role of an extremely powerful person in order to feed their superiority complex. It's one of the main reasons good horror games, adventure games, or heavily story based games have really fallen in numbers in recent years.[0] And a romance game would not only have to execute known mechanics and characters well, they would have to invent them.

A solid romance game would require an incredible amount of detail in the story, innovative mechanics, and incredible amount of character work with solid voice acting to fulfill what someone looking for a romance game would be looking to get out of it.[1] On top of that convincing a publisher to put up the money for such a risky project would be incredibly difficult.

While I do believe that there is a market for it, there are just so many challenges surrounding creating one that is actually good that I can't see one being made that would be successful.

If you are even casually interested in video game design, I would suggest watching the videos made by Extra Credits[2]

[0]exceptions including Amnesia, Tell Tales' Walking Dead, Bioshock, Spec Ops the line etc.

[1]I would assume emotional connection to characters, a sense of adventure, and an engaging story arc with characters. Mostly it being very relationship and character driven which is very difficult to pull off. But these assumptions would need to be tested.

[2]http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/show/extra-credits

> On top of that convincing a publisher to put up the money for such a risky project would be incredibly difficult.

Sounds like a good use case for Kickstarter.

It's not purely romance, but at least one project apparently models relationships: "Amaranthine uses simple game mechanics to reflect the ebb and flow of relationships, and lets the power of those relationships influence your success or failure now."

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/machineage/amaranthine-a...

Is the financial contribution of every category (women, boys under 18, the rest) the same to the game industry? or is there an asymmetrical financial contribution?

mass effect and the whole japanese industry of dating simulators have already extensively proven your point.

you don't need to specifically target women , i assure you.

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