Sex shops are already a booming business. The manager of one store I visited, Risa Yasojima, tells me non-robotic blow-up dolls are the subjects of real affection for many of her customers. One can only hope that Harmony 2. But the people I met in Japan are living evidence that robots will change the way we imagine human relationships. For a population that is literally dying out, a little company — even if it is artificial — is better than none.
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This genre of game — often referred to as dating simulations or dating sims for short — emerged in the s in Japan, where they were popular with a predominantly male audience. But since the rise of mobile and online gaming, dating sims have become popular outside Japan and with more diverse demographics.
Unlike earlier generations of dating sims, where the action centered on erotic interactions with virtual girls, these games foreground conversations between players and characters, and often have nuanced and well-developed scripts. Mystic Messenger is one of the most popular of this new generation dating sim.
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Since dating sims first came out, they have been controversial. In Japan, many critics saw the rise of dating sims as a signifier of alienation, a retreat from human relationships in a machine-mediated society. And as the popularity of dating sims develops once again, similar concerns are resurfacing. But the growing community of people who play dating sims are mostly impervious to this disapproval.
The most dedicated romantic gamers do not see their interactions with virtual characters as a substitute for human companionship, but as a new type of digital intimacy.
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As well as spending hours playing dating sims, fans chat with each other on online forums about their favorite characters and the contours of their virtual relationships. It was on one of these forums that I met Wild Rose. I had joined hoping to get a better understanding of why people play these games and whether the relationships they form with virtual characters possibly foreshadow a future in which the boundaries between real and virtual companionship will become increasingly blurry, if not irrelevant.
When I first asked Wild Rose to explain how and why she fell in love with Saeran, she told me that if I had any hope of understanding, I had to first enter the world of Mystic Messenger and experience it for myself. The narrative of the game was that together we had to organize an upcoming charity event due to take place in 11 days.
The gameplay of Mystic Messenger was unlike anything I had experienced. It did not involve collecting coins or moving through levels but chatting with these other characters through multiple-choice responses. While these characters were basically just interactive cartoon characters that would automatically respond to prompts from the player with pre-scripted answers, they still felt lifelike, and talking to them required tact and social nous. One character called Jumin liked it when I asked him about his pet cat.
Another called Zen was a narcissist who only ever wanted compliments. Of all the characters in the game, I was most drawn to Jaehee, the only other woman in the group. She was the most intelligent and self-deprecating.
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I found her slightly sardonic attitude towards the other characters in the game funny. Part of what made Mystic Messenger compelling was the fact that it ran in real time. This meant that once you started, if you stepped away from the game you would miss out on vital conversations and lose track of where you stood with your virtual friends. I was on the app two to three hours per day, which felt like a lot.
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But compared with those I spoke to on forums, my commitment to the game and Jaehee was paltry. Amy, a single mum from South Africa who was part of the Mystic Messenger Addicts forum, told me that she played every day for at least six hours. Once she had successfully wooed one character, she would refresh the app and start again, focusing her attention on someone new. Kind of like an ideal boyfriend, maybe. Wild Rose said that when the game first came out she would play for up to five hours a day but had since cut down.
This has meant many sleepless nights catching up. When dating sims first became popular in Japan, they were often reported on by the media with a tone of moralizing disgust, partly because of the obsessive way fans played. These games were seen as an escape, a last resort for nerdy men who needed virtual girls to substitute for real, healthy heterosexual relationships. This attitude was shared by western media, too, where Japanese dating sims were seen as a curious, almost alien pathology.
With the popularity of dating sims now growing outside Japan, similar concerns have once again emerged.
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In China, where a dating sim called Love and Producer was downloaded more than 7m times in its first month, media reports about the game have been mostly negative, if not alarmist. When I raised these criticisms with Wild Rose, she dismissed them as narrow and close-minded. She told me that playing Mystic Messenger had actually made her emotional life more stable and fulfilling.
Mystic Messenger was a place where she could explore some of her unmet emotional needs, where it was safe to fantasize and imagine other ways of loving. I felt interesting and needed. In Japan, where this debate about intimacy with the virtual has been unfolding since the s, there is a word that gives shape to the idea of loving a virtual non-human.
That word is moe , which derives from the Japanese verb moeru , meaning to burst into bud. This word was originally used in ancient Japanese love poetry to describe nature blossoming into life.