The Seeds Of Romance

Every time a game receives commercial success and critical praise, a civil war erupts from beneath the tense status quo of videogame forums. As the perfect scores start rolling in and the celebrity endorsements are YouTubed and Tweeted, roughly half of the online population will declare itself immune to such hyperbole, and immediately begin a bitter offensive against the game in question. Grand Theft Auto IV did not avoid this phenomenon.

Although a brilliant piece of interactive entertainment – a stellar example of game design and game writing – it was slow and a little ponderous, something to which us gamers aren’t exactly accustomed. The relative cutback on explosions was mooted, hands were wrung over Roman’s incessant phone calls, and Niko’s inability to get ripped at the local gym was duly noted. But the most undeserving target of all this vitriol was a girl many gamers had already forgotten: Kate McReary.

Also known as ‘The One Who Wouldn’t Put Out’, Kate is described on various forums as “just a bit too plain”, an “ugly bitch”, a “waste of time”, and “disappointing”. She, along with the other McRearys, becomes an integral part of Niko’s revenge odyssey as GTA IV enters its second half. During a mission, Niko is given the opportunity to date her, and so commences a long, tentative romance. Potentially.

When Kate is gunned down by a vengeful Jimmy Pegorino in one of the game’s two possible endings, Niko is emotionally annihilated. But for players who hadn’t taken to Packie’s plain but sharp-witted sister, his grief seemed unfounded. Some even went so far as to decry GTA IV’s ending as anticlimactic. This is a shame as not only is Kate one of the most realistic and well-written female characters in the medium’s history, but also the romance she develops with everyone’s favourite Serbian sociopath is utterly revolutionary.

Romance, relationships and love present an interesting challenge for game designers. Where the industry has reached exospheric heights with regard to simulating the act of pulverising a gentleman’s forehead with a lead pipe – if not, perhaps, the gesture’s emotional gravity – going on a date with the cute Tesco checkout girl is a feat billions of dollars of graphics, physics, and AI technology have yet to accomplish. Most non-violent interactions in games usually involve trading short snippets of pre-written, pre-dubbed text. Romance follows along these lines, and typically tasks the player with choosing the ‘right’ dialogue option to ensure progress of the virtual tryst; a linear process more akin to a puzzle than a relationship.

Take, for example, the romance options BioWare presented to the player in Mass Effect. Whether you picked the Sexy Xenophobe, the Whiny Bisexual Alien, or The One Guy, it was more or less a process of choosing the most affectionate dialogue branch whenever it was made available – usually after completing a major plot node – and revelling in how much of a Lothario you were. The payoff for all this hard work was the much-discussed sex scene.

This is the case for most BioWare games, the studio’s designers being somewhat renowned for their fondness of compelling virtual relationships. And despite their relative simplicity in a gameplay sense, it’s fair to say the Edmonton-based developer is one of the better studios out there in this regard, primarily because its games tend to be well written. The best example of this romance-craftsmanship can be found in what is arguably its best game: Baldur’s Gate II. While it offered the player an unprecedented number of possible love interests, the most nuanced, compelling, and difficult to see to its end, was unarguably Jaheira.

As you might recall, Jaheira was Khalid’s ballsy Elven wife in the first game. While many players fantasised about disarming (and disrobing) that churlish wench even then, it wasn’t until she emerged alive in the sequel, sans husband, that they got their chance. Stricken with grief over Khalid’s untimely death, Jaheira was wounded, vulnerable, and mercifully open to the player’s advances. But to win her heart required them to traverse an insane – or perhaps realistic – number of obstacles, many of them time-based.

First, you had to be amenable to her many interjections about bad dreams. Then it was a matter of buying her a necklace and fulfilling her duties to her former employers, the Harpers. And then you needed to express your willingness to surrender your belongings to a group of bandits who accost her, and… well, the relationship was so complex and took so long to develop that many found themselves accidentally finishing the game before they’d earned her trust. This demonstrates BioWare’s willingness to take inter-character relationships very seriously, and also provides evidence that elves are a high-maintenance bunch.

It’s a discipline that isn’t often pursued in Western videogames, which are stereotypically (but also rather accurately) characterised as violence/dominance-orientated. Except, of course, within the confines of the adventure genre, where love quite often reigns supreme, and there is no better designer of adventure romances – indeed, there is no better adventure game designer, period – than Tim Schafer. You’ll now probably know him best for the upcoming Brütal Legend, but the beautiful, hilarious, and tragic romances he created in two of his previous classics, Grim Fandango and Full Throttle, set the standard for all subsequent virtual love dramas.

In the absence of the technology required to simulate the dynamics of real romance, Schafer believes the best and only substitute is fantastic writing and character design. “My strategy,” he says, “is to just know your characters really, really well, and that involves getting down to business with their back stories. You know: who are they? Where did they come from? What did they do before today? Where did they grow up? Were their parents good, bad, or not there at all? Heck, what were their parents’ names? I make all of this stuff up and it helps me with their characters. You may never hear any of it in the game, but there’s this secret knowledge I have, and sometimes when they’re speaking, you might get a little peek at it.”

Not all videogame romances require dialogue, however. Ico’s wordless tale of companionship is still widely discussed, but it’s hardly unique. In Japan, unlike the West, love is most definitely in the air, and three of the country’s most famous international exports – Mario, Zelda and Final Fantasy – all but hinge upon what got Elvis all shook up back in the Fifties.

Princesses Peach and Zelda represent a quirk in Japanese game development culture that’s almost taboo in the West: romance not as an ancillary gameplay element, but as a goal. Mario and Link are consistently tasked with rescuing their respective damsels, and are frequently reminded of their loveliness and purity, and how that’s all about to be quashed by Bowser/Ganon, as their journeys progress.

The end result is usually pretty insubstantial. Mario, at least, gets some cake, which has been construed by some – specifically those who are inexplicably able to invest sexual attraction into Peach’s insipid visage – as a tantalising euphemism. But the point is that the player made it there in the first place. Although they had very little actual interaction with them, they cared enough about Zelda or Peach to go ahead and rescue them, so their newfound freedom should be rewarding enough.

The notoriously hammy romances in the Final Fantasy series offer only slightly more interactive potential than in Zelda or Mario, but nevertheless show just how moved gamers can be by in-game relationships if you let them. Aeris’s death in Final Fantasy VII, after all, is considered by many to be one of the most poignant moments in gaming history. It was also, of course, a tremendous cheap shot: the player had no say in the outcome, and the cut-scene itself existed primarily to create further emotional engagement with the villain.

Regardless, FFVII remains a fascinating example of an emotionally compelling virtual romance. So successful was sweet-natured Aeris in captivating players worldwide that she inspired copycats in the most unlikely places: the rain-soaked streets of Max Payne’s New York, for example. Mona Sax, the love interest and second playable character of Max Payne 2: The Fall Of Max Payne, was no Aeris, to be sure. In fact, she was tough and teetering on the brink of amorality. But the bond she formed with Payne – a noirish love story that genuinely fed smoothly into the Woo-esque action that surrounded it – was altogether similar, and players’ shock and betrayal at her murder was exactly the same. Unlike Aeris’s death, Mona’s fate could be avoided, but only on a certain difficulty level. In the end, though, Mona was a film noir archetype, and her romance with Max, like every other hookup mentioned above except Jaheira’s, progresses in an entirely scripted and linear fashion.

Which takes us back to Kate McReary. Like all Grand Theft Auto missions, dialogue is non-interactive, but in this case it works. The little private snippets of Kate’s character – the “peeks” Schafer describes above – are revealed in an emergent fashion, and the amount of emotional involvement you have in the game’s ending depends entirely on how much you… well, choose to involve yourself in Kate McReary. Keep calling her after that first compulsory mission and you’ll be able to take her around town regularly. You’ll discover she has a weakness for fast food, thinks you look like a right wanker in that Perseus tux, and despite the sunny disposition, is tormented by a mixture of guilt, love, and anger towards her criminal family. She feels a connection with the gloomy, remorseful Niko, and if he (and thus you) has been attentive and caring enough, she’ll exasperatedly confess her love for him. Tragically, she’ll be dead one cut-scene later.

It’s the classic Aeris cop out, and while it perfectly suits GTA IV’s storyline – anyone who thought the cousins Bellic weren’t doomed from the start, move to the front of the class, please – we wonder if Rockstar couldn’t have allowed that emergence to drag on just a little longer. A greater lesson in futility would have been to eschew the cut-scene altogether, and have players scrounging for a way to rescue her in real-time only to discover that, sadly, some things simply aren’t meant to be.

Imagine the buzz it would have created: despairing forum posts, faked YouTube videos by players who “swear” they’ve figured out a way to rescue her, and ridiculously complex cheat codes that promise Niko a happy ever after. It would have been chaos, and Kate might have secured a more prominent place in the history of videogame romances – more prominent than the so-called “ugly bitch” who wouldn’t relinquish her panties, anyway.

If nothing else, it should be quite apparent that for virtual romances to continue being compelling, they require more simulation and less dictation by the developer. In order to achieve this, however, the videogame industry will need to start addressing that long-ignored part of game development: artificial intelligence. For a truly emergent (and yet well-written) romance simulation to be possible, there needs to be a way to not only generate “romantic content” based on player input – and how this would actually mix with pre-recorded dialogue is unknown – but the characters involved also need to be able to build on organically derived behaviours and motivations. The midpoint between The Sims and Baldur’s Gate, in other words.

For some designers, though, not even that is enough to convince them romance has much purpose in modern interactive narratives. Obsidian’s Chris Avellone, who worked on RPG classics like Planescape: Torment, for instance, thinks their relative brevity will always make for a shallow, even masturbatory experience. “I think there’s a group of people who really enjoy romantic elements,” Avellone shrugs. “But I don’t usually enjoy writing them. They don’t always feel true to me. As a game writer, it’s my job to keep the drama flowing, and sometimes I just think the satisfactory conclusion of a relationship in a game removes a lot of the tension you need for a good story. My remedy is just to… well, whenever romances are included in RPGs I do, I try not to let them always have a sweet resolution, because they just happen too fast. That’s not how real relationships work.”

While there is certainly some truth to Avellone’s words, it would be a tremendous shame to abandon videogame romances as a focus for development altogether. After all, if the ultimate challenge for graphics and physics technology is to simulate the pandemonium of war, what better frontier for game AI to conquer than love? It remains the ultimate emergent challenge, and it would also require a more mature approach to character design. So yes, the end result may well be Kate McReary, plain and tall, but Christ, man, did you ever think Lara was going to settle down with a guy like you, anyway?