Love+?
I assume you’re asking about Love Plus+, the Japanese dating simulation? I haven’t played even a bit of it, although I did expound, if momentarily, on how uncreepy I find it. The game experience, I suspect, is no more or less artificial than—and I apologize for this but I think I do mean it—the anonymous querents leaving notes in an online school locker to a girl who is only a piecemeal assemblage of online data. Or if that really is creepy and strange behavior, it’s hardly aberrant: in our solitude, we do weird things.
There is a longform column by the talented Tim Rogers—http://bit.ly/d6l1DO—and it has upset me for many months now. He describes the acute irony of being made to repeat “I love you” to the game when those three little words are, as it is, nigh impossible to utter to another human.
Pretty recently I realized I haven’t resolutely jumped into any relationship with both feet in, well, years. At the beginning that’s fine, but eventually that persistent emotional reluctance becomes pinheaded and unfair. This is real “I Think I Need a New Heart” stuff.
A close friend likes to describe marriage to me—how she keeps herself mindful and sure-footed and true, how they stay respectful, how they work and cultivate and closely guard all the love each has earned from the other. She was describing her partnership—and here I mean mature, adult love, perfected with time and practice—and I became very grim during her retelling. I admitted, then, that I have no analog, that the nearest I have come to gardening out of loving duty was SimCity. Or Harvest Moon. Or a nice pet. I have seldom committed those financial or emotional resources, or time and thought and care, to another living soul. I cannot begin to describe, for you, my remorse.
I can’t condemn a love simulation like Love Plus+ because that game only asks the heart to do real things in artificial situations. Much worse, I think, is behaving artificially during true situations. And that is a truly human behavior. I guess in that way, some games train us to be better than ourselves. So if Love Plus+ really is about manipulating girls and playing romantic odds, to hell with it. But if it instead teaches painful moments of human connection, which are rare in these times, that’s awesome! Embrace it! “Personal Trainer: Heartbreak.”
