I've been thinking a lot about how the features and presentation of sim games reveal the priorities and thoughts of the devs about the thing they're simulating, or just the experiences they're presenting.
Part inspired by the wild variation among things I've played that all get called "Dating Sims", part inspired by @iiotenki's Tokimeki Memorial posts (this one in particular), and part inspired by an FMV game from the early 90's: Some thoughts about Tokimeki Memorial, Man Enough, and design priorities in games about Romance & Dating.
Tokimeki Memorial's focus on calling friends, asking girls out to hangout dates, trying to juggle your calendar and studies, and gauging a girl's likes and dislikes through gossip or conversation do a pretty solid job of echoing both the action and tension of going on dates in high school. I never went on dates in high school myself, because I was ⭐
Deeply Closeted ⭐
but Tokimeki Memorial really felt like it was letting players sample that experience. These days we generally use "Dating Sim" as a genre tag to refer to games that have a lot of different approaches to the core concept of "hey what if you're a little guy and you wanna fall in love with another little guy?" The simplest form is just simulating romance, rather than the social activity of Dating, by having a protagonist slowly get to know a character and build a relationship with them through conversation or spending time together as friends.
Right now I'm playing Aoi Shiro, which is a yuri VN that asks players to dig deeper into the mysteries and supernatural history of a couple islands in southern Japan before you can fully unlock all of the romance routes in the game. I sincerely doubt this is because the writers at Success thought this was how gay high school romance really works so much as setting up the flow of gameplay to encourage players to read multiple routes and experience more of the story1.
In any case, most dating sims are more focused on guiding the player through Romance rather than the social convention of Dating and a lot of dating sims don't actually have formal dating involved (or even dates that happen before a dramatic confession of love and a fancy CG splash screen). "Dating Sim" is also a convenient (and oft overused) shorthand we use in English most times, since we're often talking about renai games and there's an entirely different set of connotations around that word choice that I am not even remotely qualified to dissect. @iiotenki does a great job covering this sort of thing though, so check out his writing!
It makes sense for games to focus more on Romance and less on the mechanics of Dating in general, mainly because most often we really want the romance simulation and because the actual social process of "dating" isn't often a fun cool thing that we actually want to model. Establishing romance between the protagonist and a character and then having them go on dates is fun and feels like a fulfillment of a narrative arc. Having a protagonist date to find romance is often hectic, harrowing, and focused heavily on logistics and persistence and luck. That's one reason why Tokimeki Memorial is so fun and compelling though - you're constantly trying to date your way to romance and dating is as hard as cat shit in the desert. There's a chasteness to the romance in Tokimeki memorial, but also a deep sincerity that really sells the experience in a way that few other games, proper dating sim or otherwise, can capture.
And then there's Man Enough, a 1993 FMV game which SGF played through2 a while back. It's an older game, notably in the style of dating/romance game more common among Western devs where the goal is to be over the top and titillating while also laughing at the player for wanting to spend their time on trying to meet fake women in video games. It, too, simulates a certain idea of dating & romance that... might really only exist in the logic of someone whose foundational religious canon consists entirely of Leisure Suit Larry games and dubious adult flash animation web banner ads. It's fascinating to see how that game focused more on rout memorization of patterns, understanding the specific logic of extremely horny straight men (which made it baffling to follow), and sometimes just making wild guesses and using process of elimination until you could progress.
In a way, that does reflect an attitude I've heard from straight men online and in person: they believe women are an inscrutable mystery, that anything you say could set them off, that they don't understand what women want or feel or think at any given time. The developers seem to have incorporated this belief into the game's logic, whether they believed it themselves or not, and so a lot of the choices in Man Enough are about picking the right innuendo or how to flirt in a specific way that won't set a woman off and make her mood drastically shift for the worse. It's... hellish, but fascinating to pick apart.
Simulations, in a lot of ways, reflect what we think about the world and what we value in reproducing experiences so each one is a rich text in some way. The fact that in Tokimeki Memorial your protagonist prioritizes keeping all the girls he knows happy and memorizing their favorite music, activities, and date spots makes it feel like he's really focused on the girls themselves and, however clumsily, really interested in forming a deeper bond with them. The bombing mechanic can seem a bit "Hahaha, women, amirite guys?" to new players but I think it does work really well for capturing the volatility of teen romance and honestly, compared to it's western contemporaries, Tokimeki memorial is showing players a pretty egalitarian model for dating and a sweet, if hectic, experience of teen romance.
Man Enough is far more concerned with a very specific vision of dating, straight men's expectations, and also stringing the protagonist (and player) along for the sake of a punchline at the end. It's almost a perfect reflection of the way Western games media of the 90's covered the concept of romance-focused games at large - cynical and placing a heavy emphasis on titillation coupled with denial and frustration, and rarely focusing on earnest romance so much as snickering about how dumb and horny the player must be.
All this is to say that I'm constantly intrigued by games that present player choice, tied to romance and/or dating, and the things these games intentionally and unintentionally foreground as the Experience of Romance. It's easy enough to spot misogyny and other biases in these games, but there's also a lot to excavate around the way writers and designers view human relationships and the way dialogue choices or stat requirements or random events influence your progress.
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Sometimes that is how gay dating in high school works, though
