Virtual Relationships

Some of you may have heard of this before.  A man in Japan married a character in the Nintendo DS dating simulation game Love Plus.  The appeal of a virtual love interest isn’t a new thing for Japan.  Dating sims are a very popular genre in Japan.  Take, for instance, the hotels in Japan that cater toward a man and his “girlfriend”:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703632304575451414209658940.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

What’s the appeal?  If you think about it, the girls don’t have to eat, use the bathroom, and you know where they are all the time.  But it’s not real.  Men wrote and programmed the games, creating ideal women that may not be realistic.  The men who use games like Love Plus are most often quiet and are awkward around other people.  In that sense, the dating sim could be seen as a way to make the individuals more social, but who knows if these virtual girls are helping them become more social.

I have been taking Japanese classes for a little over a year now, so I decided to import Love Plus to see what the hype was all about.  Don’t judge me too harshly.  Anyway, the game centers around the player as he goes through a new high school.  You have the choice of three different girls.  In order to win the game, you must develop a relationship with one of them and go from friends to boyfriend and girlfriend.  After that is where the game starts to grab on to the player.  After you develop your relationship, the game enters real-time mode, where you can set up dates using the DS’s internal clock and various other events.  Depending on certain times of the day the game will reflect if your girlfriend is still sleeping or if she is currently in class.  It’s almost like a real relationship.

However, I did not get sucked into the game nor did I feel like marrying my “girlfriend”.  In fact, I missed a week or two and missed a date we had scheduled (she was very upset in her email she sent me).  I don’t know what to say about this continued conversion to seeking relationships with artificial intelligence’s.  One could simply make friends in forums online, but even that can be tricky, so I can understand the easy route of befriending someone who is programmed to love you.  But it just seems to me that using a video game as a social crutch might hurt someone in the end.

-Tyler Trosper