decoyplatypus
Member
As I read it, Josh's argument against CRPG romances is that the form, wherein the player picks the right branches of the conversation tree and ends up in a romantic relationship, is not satisfying. Stated more strongly, a shallow-ish system that works well enough for some kinds of companion interaction is not adequate for representing romance.
All of Josh's other objections can be addressed well enough on a game-to-game basis. To the extent harem anime companions are creepy and make for bad companions (because their beliefs and roles in the story must always incorporate the possibility of reciprocating the pc's desire to romance them), you can limit the romance options to 1 or 2. If you find the "fade-out to implied coitus" ending silly and/or reductive, you can write a different ending. But if you think love clashes with long-established CPRG mechanics (the dialogue system, a blank-slate PC), then, like Josh, you probably see it as something that should either be a major focus for designers and writers or else be set aside.
The rub here is that many players do find CRPG romances satisfying. And I don't think anyone can say that Patrick Weekes** and the pro-romance posters in this thread are wrong to enjoy those romances. Barring some evidence that a particular game feature damages the player, all we really have to talk about is whether it is fun and whether it interacts well with other aspects of the game.* This is going to be a pretty subjective issue.
*"Fun" here is probably obscuring a deeper disagreement because it can refer either to simple pleasure of pressing the right buttons and seeing a cute companion naked or to, say, the pleasure of seeing how a complicated and often painful relationship with a companion ultimately connects to the main themes of the game. It's not that one pleasure is better than the other (and obviously I'm picking extreme examples), but that we may disagree over which is worth pursuing or how well a game provides either.
**Patrick's response to Josh is wholly unpersuasive. He does himself no favors with the insulting riff on Jessica Alba, and the point he is trying to make, "RPGs are masturbatory fantasy, so it's silly to act above a particular masturbatory fantasy," mischaracterizes and does not answer Sawyer's argument that love doesn't reduce well to masturbatory fantasy.
"It's only a shallow indulgence if it's badly written" ignores the fact that Sawyer is describing a flaw in the form of RPG romances and not just their written content.
And his last point--"ut in one cute little rhetorical swoop, wanting to have an actual adult relationship in the game has been equated with wanting a bevy of nubile pixelated nymphs to do your bidding"--is a little funny because Sawyer too wants actual adult relationships in games. His argument is that RPG romances fail to represent actual adult relationships.
All of Josh's other objections can be addressed well enough on a game-to-game basis. To the extent harem anime companions are creepy and make for bad companions (because their beliefs and roles in the story must always incorporate the possibility of reciprocating the pc's desire to romance them), you can limit the romance options to 1 or 2. If you find the "fade-out to implied coitus" ending silly and/or reductive, you can write a different ending. But if you think love clashes with long-established CPRG mechanics (the dialogue system, a blank-slate PC), then, like Josh, you probably see it as something that should either be a major focus for designers and writers or else be set aside.
The rub here is that many players do find CRPG romances satisfying. And I don't think anyone can say that Patrick Weekes** and the pro-romance posters in this thread are wrong to enjoy those romances. Barring some evidence that a particular game feature damages the player, all we really have to talk about is whether it is fun and whether it interacts well with other aspects of the game.* This is going to be a pretty subjective issue.
*"Fun" here is probably obscuring a deeper disagreement because it can refer either to simple pleasure of pressing the right buttons and seeing a cute companion naked or to, say, the pleasure of seeing how a complicated and often painful relationship with a companion ultimately connects to the main themes of the game. It's not that one pleasure is better than the other (and obviously I'm picking extreme examples), but that we may disagree over which is worth pursuing or how well a game provides either.
**Patrick's response to Josh is wholly unpersuasive. He does himself no favors with the insulting riff on Jessica Alba, and the point he is trying to make, "RPGs are masturbatory fantasy, so it's silly to act above a particular masturbatory fantasy," mischaracterizes and does not answer Sawyer's argument that love doesn't reduce well to masturbatory fantasy.
"It's only a shallow indulgence if it's badly written" ignores the fact that Sawyer is describing a flaw in the form of RPG romances and not just their written content.
And his last point--"ut in one cute little rhetorical swoop, wanting to have an actual adult relationship in the game has been equated with wanting a bevy of nubile pixelated nymphs to do your bidding"--is a little funny because Sawyer too wants actual adult relationships in games. His argument is that RPG romances fail to represent actual adult relationships.
