Love Connections: Introduction
Jason Mical and Roger Whitson, Editors
The upcoming indie dungeon crawler dating-sim Boyfriend Dungeon advertises that players can “take [their] weapons on dates” and “capture the hearts of cuties to level them up.” The personality of each weapon is based on the weapon type. The dagger Valeria is slow to trust since she’s been betrayed and “backstabbed” before, whereas the fencing sword Issac contrasts his “old fashioned” dating style with the more flashy weapons in the Verona Beach dating pool. Moreover, developing proficiency with weapons depends on how well you’re dating them. Misread a cue or fail to return a text and you might find that your weapon deals less damage. The game caters to a variety of sexual orientations, with gay, non-binary, polyamorous, and asexual options.
It is clear that games like Boyfriend Dungeon are tapping into more subtle relationships between love, attachment, and gaming, showing how completely queer our connections to games can be. Heterosexual cisgender men aren’t exactly known for their fondness for romance simulations. Yet how many hearts have skipped a beat when those dreaded words “Weapon At Risk!” suddenly appear while fighting a particularly difficult boss in Dark Souls? I know I coveted my +15 Claymore, obsessively repairing it while visiting every bonfire. The French philosopher Alain Badiou rhapsodizes love as a total surrender of one’s nakedness towards another being: “surrendering your body, taking your clothes off, being naked for the other.” Yet I’m reminded of a similar surrender and a similar nakedness in those dark moments when my character’s life depended upon the weight, the sharpness, or the speed of the sword that stood between them and a horrifying monster.
In the spirit of Valentine’s Day holiday, we ask the question “what is Love?” Is it simply what we’ve seen depicted in the romance scenario in games like Mass Effect or The Witcher? The first flirtation? The choices of one response or another? Is it the culmination in, at least for games like Cyberpunk 2077, an extremely awkward first-person sex scene that James Davenport of PC Gamer calls “horrifying?”
Polyamorous groups have critiqued the expectation that love proceeds in a steadily escalating pace, calling it the “relationship escalator ideology:” where romance is expected to lead to coupling, sex, marriage, and children. And if romantic love doesn’t lead to these ends, then the “relationship escalator” ideology says that love isn’t worth pursuing. Yet, there are many different kinds of love that we often don’t notice, and many ways both subtle and profound that love and connection come into and pass away from our lives.
We challenged our writers to come up with various ways games have depicted, inspired, or complicated love and its many manifestations. The diversity of their contributions illustrates the many varied feelings, scenarios, affections, and experiences we often group under the word “love.”
● Ed Chang on cruising in Animal Crossing
● Nate Schmidt on horror and partnership in We Know the Devil
● Chris Breu on misogyny and polyamory in Dungeons and Dragons and Bioware Games
● Don Everhart on transactional romance in LadyKiller in a Bind and the Persona series
● Edcel Javier Cintron Gonzalez on toxic masculinity in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
● Roger Whitson and Jason Mical on 20 Years of Male Friendship through Gaming
● Brian Rejack on the love for animal NPC companions.
● Blake Reno on camaraderie between teachers and students in Fire Emblem: Three Houses
