More recently, I've been really excited about how people are using Twine games and dating sims these days to communicate about their personal experiences and their sexuality. When we hung out in London late last year we got to talking about Catherine, the only relatively major console game I'm aware of to've attempted to capture the intrigue of love relationships between men and women (we also bickered some about the love triangle in Cowboy Bebop, though I think I'd had a bit to drink by then and I don't remember it so well). I wanted to talk about relationship games. Anyway, I didn't write you just to reminisce. Ultimately it was Kieron who introduced you and me back then, via some email where he said he thought we'd "do wonderful things together."Īnd here we are, me with my spotty roots in problematic hentai games, and you with your history of putting gross metaphors about your genitalia in everything. It was the first time he'd ever commented on anything I wrote, and I practically died, I was such a fan of his. In the comments on that article, Kieron Gillen, the famous veteran games journalist, disagreed. It was definitely a sexualized raising sim, one I thought at the time was more like a sex game than not. Except you can put her to work in a brothel, or modify her bust size, or have her marry you, her father, if you play really well. In Princess Maker 2, you have to raise an adopted daughter, put her to work and ensure she marries well. In the game with the mermaid, Nocturnal Illusions - through and through a sex game - how the story progression stalls if there is a single dresser in the massive haunted mansion that you have not elected to "Look At." About how their being "game-like" often renders sexuality uncomfortable and surreal, even apart from the cultural chasm these Japanese sex games illuminated. I wanted to find ways to talk about dating sims, with all their uneasy tropes and sterile conventions. There was one game where you could have sex with a mermaid that lived in the bottom of a well. They were about appetites and fantasies it's not socially acceptable to express. It's not that I found them arousing, necessarily, just interesting. Remember? The games I'd begun to gravitate toward at that time in my life seemed to me distinctly in need of translation - opaque Japanese visual novels about sexual aggression as melodrama. I guess that's sort of a coy notation, for the benefit of our readers, about how I've known you for some six years now.Įarly in my career, around the time we first became aware of one another's work, I was writing a lot about what I saw as "odd psychology" in video games, primarily focused on sex stuff. I've really been enjoying writing these letters with you, although this isn't actually the first time you and I have appeared at the same venue.