“One is not born a woman but becomes one.” – Simone de Beauvoir

“Nothing provokes speculation more than the sight of a woman enjoying herself.” – Louisa May Alcott

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It was less that it was a secret and more that I simply wanted privacy. Closing my bedroom door and sheepishly opening my laptop, I clicked open a secret folder icon that was designed either after some flower or a pixelated main character. After my ancient computer booted up, I was  greeted by either stock music or an Indie musician’s carefully constructed tune. It wasn’t porn. It was worse than porn: a videogame. It was a dating sim. The basic gist: a game where you date and that is the main objective.

This gaming genre originated in Japan and is known as Otome Games. An Otome game is generally defined as a game that is story based, with a romantic element, usually marketed toward women. Generally, the first Otome game is believed to be Angelique and came out in 1994 which was developed by an all-female developing team called Ruby Party. Other Otome games followed as the popularity of the medium increased. Typically, the games would take their cues from Shojo Manga which focused on young women as their audience (the word Shojo literally meaning “girl” in Japanese), with romantic elements but would span other genres such as science-fiction and fantasy. The Western iteration is known as a “dating sim,” which reduced the games down to their most basic element of the apparent goal being dating itself. Most games and the Mangas that preceded it were more complicated than that. They were about finding one’s identity, and sure, a partner could be part of that. You could be a college student on an archeological dig with a chance to romance a rugby player, or perhaps the student teacher (see C14 Dating). You could be a poet recently reeling from the loss of your fiancé’s memory in a motorcycle accident. Do you try to help him remember (see Remember Me)? You could swap places with a princess who has to prepare for a dance at the end of the month amongst ten romanceable princes, and a romanceable rabbit who, in a Beauty-and-the-Beast-type transformation turns into an albino prince (see Princess Debut). You could be solving a mystery of young women disappearing on your college campus. You could also play a paralegal. I didn’t have to pick one fig from the tree; I could pick all of them. I could play it as many times as I wanted until I achieved every possible ending. As someone who’s been an actor for more than half my life, it is my pleasure and adventure to be more than one person – that’s what I loved about it. It satisfied that itch. Although this was different from pretending to fall in love on stage. In this scenario, I am the audience and the performer. It was a secret.

This felt more shameful to me because it involved my feelings. It was everything: my desire for romantic connection within the safest confines. It was an unapologetically feminine pursuit, so I thought, and because of that, I felt it frivolous at times. Being such an overtly feminine gaming genre (or at least not-male), it also made me feel like I wasn’t a “real” gamer. Mostly, I think it was troubling because I was enjoying something that was made specifically for me or that someone had been able to peek into my soul and see what I truly wanted. (“Why, yes! I did want to run a small farm and fall in love with the librarian’s brother! How did you know?”) Women’s pleasures are the minority in the United States, despite us being the majority. Whenever a minority group has something they like and desire (i.e. pumpkin spice lattes) those desires go underground because their pleasures are not the majority. As the minority, the ultimate assimilation into the dominant culture is to discipline oneself into abandoning one’s desires. The color pink, pumpkin spice lattes, uggs – all of these things were for a long time considered invalidated, in terms of their enjoyment, by being called “basic.”  However, pleasures are not gendered, even if we have absorbed this idea whole.

Part of my rebellion against certain male conceptions of courtship included these games. The pleasure of enjoying a new relationship and growing flowers; those were enough. One of my favorite producers of this genre is a company called Winter Wolves Games and I have been playing them since I was 13 years old. My first one though was a creator named Pacthesis. Pacthesis was a woman who made dating sims with elements of fiction. If you didn’t want to play the dating sim where you were an aspiring rockstar and could romance your bandmates, you could play the Alice in Wonderland dupe where you could romance anthropomorphized versions of the rabbit or caterpillar. You could even romance the Mad Hatter the or the Red Queen (though turned into a prince with dark hair in this iteration). I never liked skill-based video games, but the ones that were like reading and centered on feelings – sign me up. I may have been and still am a novice for not knowing all that there is out there, but I knew some things. There were free games like Pacthesis and Alistar. There were forums where it was pay-what-you-want. Even the ones like Winter Wolves Games were only about $20 and you could download as many copies as possible. The variety astounded me. Sometimes the romance was front and center the only goal. Sometimes it was a perk in an otherwise space-commander themed narrative. The lack of a visible main character in some allowed me to fully submerge myself into the gameplay. I usually tried to romance all the characters, but they were my favorites (i.e. Rhett from Lucky Rabbit Reflex: the studious, red-haired, Oxford-bound teenager). Autonomy to a point is the general basis of many videogames, but this hit me particularly hard as a girl. Because the world operated in a similar way. I could be a woman, to a certain point. I could progress, but only to a certain point. I could demand and want equality, but only to a certain point. I could do whatever I wanted within the game, true, but I had to reign myself in if I wanted certain endings. I could be the kind of woman I wanted in real life, but only to a certain point if I wanted to be taken seriously and be provided opportunities. The idea being that there is a right way to act in order to get the relationship you want with someone. It was dangerous for a little mind like mine that never seemed to say the right things to my peers or crushes. It was also a comfort for my intensely religious young mind because I knew there was a right answer as to how to live your life. At the time, I believed this so strongly. Now that I am older, what a comfort it is to know that is not true at all – and these games said so too!  

My parents had a hard time understanding, not that they discouraged me from playing the games as they were a harmless enough pastime. I know they preferred me talking to fictional strangers that had a predetermined script as opposed to actually speaking to predatory strangers. These games also came with built in censors that made play seem fun. The most that would ever happen would be a kiss or fade to black. Things that could happen to me in real life if and when I dated, would not and could not happen to me in this game, or if it did, I would know about it ahead of time. There would be warnings, disclaimers and often even a specific download of the game where these features would be omitted all together. Epilogues of one’s future would include hints towards the romantic, but never be fully sexual. You would see that you had married your romantic interest of choice, maybe you were pregnant, or  maybe you had a career. Hardly were you left with an outcome that did not include a bright future. My own father, having been popular at school, didn’t understand why I wanted to play a game where you pretended to be in high school, when I was still in high school. It was hard to assert to the man who had been popular, had been a basketball player, and a class president that he didn’t get it. He was the right answer in high school. He was the person everyone wished they could be. (Of course, I know now how that wasn’t exactly true. Read my father’s book for more information, Rice Krispies and Ketchup by Kirk Smith. I’ll let him tell his own stories.) 

            More often than not the script writers for these games were women. Insight was a necessary part of what would be required of these script writers. These games centered on young female desires, interactions, and character traits. The male romantic interests would ask for consent, they would ensure your comfort, and they were protective while not being misogynistic. In the same way that Jane Austen created perfect men within the pages of her prose, so have these dating sim creators raised the bar for real men. The lingo I learned, “cut scene,” felt like shorthand to my own desires and pleasure. Most of these games have romance rooted in the notion that the way to a true romance is through friendship. More often than not you can only romance a character in these games. I found myself excited to jump into the scenarios I saw in gameplay – getting a job, going on a first date etc. These games were a comfort in my early teens, but were not without detractions. Elements of the game play that interested me, but did not result in “added stats” to my characters meant that I sacrificed time with my romanceable character. If I spent time as my character reading, let’s say, that meant I wasn’t going on walks or watching movies to raise the properties of my character which my romanceable counterpart found desirable. Every time I played the game as “myself” – which is to say, genuinely choosing the actions I would have utilized had the character been me – I never ended up with anyone and I never had enough stats to qualify for any good endings. I internalized this on some level, that my instinctual choices would alienate me from the things I wanted. I wanted male attention. I wanted the security of companionship. I wanted the cut scene at the end that showed the romanceable avatar a little older and established. Choices had to be made to sacrifice the elements of the game that I enjoy, in order to get a better ending. Although, it did help me refine and clarify which types of men I liked. It let me “try on” different men. I generally always went for the nerdy bookish one since I saw myself in them (gender dysphoria would come later, wherein I would ask myself if I wanted them or wanted to be them.). I never romanced any female characters, as though I knew God was watching and waiting to see if I would act on any of my bisexual tendencies. I only acted on those in real life.

These games occupied in my life the same space Harlequin-Romances did for women before me, and even women now, and even me now, if I am honest. Perhaps in some way it was porn, emotional porn, and sometimes real-drawn, anatomically-improbable porn. It was meant to get your feelings off. While this community is not without its superstars, there are problematic elements other than a teenage girl basing her expectations upon it. Because many of these creators are independent and Kickstarter-funded, there can be a lack of accountability. The best example that comes to mind it Caramel Mokaccino. Caramel Mokaccino was a  Kickstarter dream. Its creator, under the pseudonym “AppleCider,” raised $37,883 dollars when aiming for $11,000. There has not been an update to the game’s progress since 2021 and these figures remain static as I’m writing this at the end of 2023. This project is now six years late. Unlike with major gaming studios, there is no accountability system to get money back for these investors. The good faith system sometimes does not reward loyalty. Romantic representation for those that modern media and games have forgotten is also an essential contribution to the Otome. Pacthesis developed a free gay dating sim years before Dream Daddy Date Simulator was even a twinkle in a developer’s eye. In C14 Dating, you can date women (not as part of an extension pack) and you can date a handsome, tattooed, asexual amputee. There is a mixed-race, Japanese, plus-sized character to romance as well. Countless other Yaoi and Yuri games are available to those on independent gamer and coder sites. Despite all the hard work, most of these creators offer the game for free or pay what you will – there is a genuine joy to the creation and sharing of these games. You can even get a chance to help produce these games with many creators having Kickstarter funds. Certain payments you make mean you can get a customized character poster of one of the romanceable characters or even the chance to name a character. It is a space for the “other” that major developers have only just caught up to. Baldur’s Gate 3 comes to mind. Boyfriend Dungeon is another. The list is becoming endless and wonderfully-so as now there is a market for everyone. Do you want to play a dating sim with a dragon? Do you want to play a monster-dating sim? There will be something for you, even if it’s not through a major developer and may give your computer all manner of spam. Peoples’ pleasures are becoming valid, even the most taboo ones. To have one’s pleasures validated and shown to the public is to feel less alone, to feel less “other.”

Videogames are the ultimate story collaboration and as marginalized groups take back their narratives, dating sims ought to be one of the ways. It’s not only about the difficult things being acknowledged – land theft, assault, wage theft, sexism, racism, and all the other ‘isms’ – it’s about pleasures, about the intimacies of being human, and about being acknowledged. It’s about how we all desire, even if we don’t desire sex, and how those desires make us human. You wanting to romance an “evil” vampire in Baldur’s Gate is valid. It makes you a sexy-beast yourself (insert wink emoji). Katawa Shoujo is a game where you can romance disabled girls as a young man who gets transferred to a specialized school after having a heart attack. These ones I mentioned are only the ones I know about. If evil is one of the banalities of life, then surely pleasure is too, and we have a right to it. 

Ultimately, I am grateful for this being my first “adventure” into dating. It taught me how to be proactive in pursuing the people I wanted to date, even if I now realize that being myself would naturally attract people without a walkthrough. Sometimes it’s the flaws in our own romances and the successes in spite of them that will bring us forward. There is no walkthrough for life and even if there were, who would ever want to play something so predictable?