'Leisure Suit Larry'
'Leisure Suit Larry'

“Hot coffee”. The words were whispered between teens at my school like a secret of national importance. They referred to a hidden part of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in which you could make your character, CJ, have sex. It is a sordid scene. While the woman is naked, CJ is inexplicably fully clothed. You press buttons to thrust joylessly, filling her “excitement” meter. CJ whispers sweet nothings like: “You should get paid for this, baby.” I was 13. If this was what sex was like, I didn’t want anything to do with it.

This was far from the first game to show intercourse. The medium has been getting sex wrong since the early 1980s, when notorious publisher Mystique released games such as X-Man, a Freudian nightmare where an aroused man flees a pair of emasculating scissors. Little better is the Leisure Suit Larry series, featuring the original 40-year-old virgin who tries to seduce women, one flimsy double entendre at a time.

Even games seeking to portray sex in good taste have struggled. Computer-generated characters are designed to run and fight, not caress each other lovingly. Worst is “clipping”, when the character models collide unrealistically. If you are reaching to stroke your lover’s hair and your hand passes straight through their head, it tends to kill the mood.

Romance in 'Mass Effect 2'
Romance in 'Mass Effect 2'

If sex in games is reliably unsexy, romance rarely fares better. If you are tasked with winning someone’s heart, it is likely to be a mechanical experience. You increase their internal “love meter” by deducing what they want to hear, rather than, say, being yourself. Learn about seduction from The Sims: press “flirt” until you’re ready to, in the coy language of the game, “woohoo” in bed. Or try giving gifts. In farming simulator Harvest Moon I dutifully gave my girlfriend an egg every day until she married me. Gaming can teach us many things, but how to date is not one of them.

When a game gets romance right, it’s because of the writing. One famous sex scene, a ludicrous sequence astride a stuffed unicorn in The Witcher 3, feels genuinely affecting, given the characters’ long history and volatile relationship. Developer Bioware leads the pack here. In Mass Effect and Dragon Age you can court several companions which, to the company’s credit, include gay and lesbian options as standard. The script believably acknowledges humour and awkwardness in intimacy, even when your human protagonist wants to kiss the mandibles of insectoid alien Garrus Vakarian.

In these games, romance is an optional subplot. However, some genres such as dating simulators and visual novels, interactive anime-style stories with little actual gameplay, put the quest for true love centre stage. They can get strange, too: woo a hunky gay dad in Dream Daddy, play a pigeon looking for love in writerly Japanese game Hatoful Boyfriend or romance a T-Rex in the winningly titled Jurassic Heart.

Building a character in 'Dream Daddy'
Building a character in 'Dream Daddy'

The indie world offers a more offbeat look at relationships. In the bite-size mobile game Florence, you play puzzles which unfold during the quiet moments of a relationship. On a first date you must piece together speech bubbles like a jigsaw, which gets easier as the couple become more comfortable. In How Do You Do It?, a child explores sex by smashing the smooth parts of her boy and girl dolls together. Robert Yang’s games explore mythic symbols of gay cultural history, such as bath houses and public toilets, with a raunchy humour which has got his games banned from streaming platform Twitch.

While many games scramble to depict love realistically, you might also indulge in a full-blown flight of fantasy. The defining love story of my childhood was Final Fantasy IX, in which Princess Garnet’s lover sacrifices himself, leaving her to rule the country alone. Later, at the bittersweet scene of her coronation, he suddenly returns and sweeps her into his arms. There is no explanation of how he survived. He just had to be there, he says, to see her again. The script understands that it’s a story. We should take happy endings where we can get them. If a game wants to trade realism to make me believe in this kind of earth-shattering, death-defying, all-consuming love, even just for a moment, then I’m all right with that.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024. All rights reserved.
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