Okay, here's why I would like to do with romance in the main game:
1) The PC has not previously had a major relationship. His/her conflict is to balance romantic interest in the npcs against the necessities (physical and political) of survival in a strange world.

2) The NPCs have a variety of backgrounds. One begins the game in unrequited love with someone other than the PC and suffering because of this, one is a total innocent, one is contemptuous of love and sees it as weakness, one is a suave playboy/girl with a trai of broken hearts behind them, etc. Your usual garden variety of romantic characters, each with his/her own barriers that the player must make them over come through solving dialogue puzzles and making plot choices. The key is to have a variety of challenges so that one or two will catch any player's interest.

Some resource links:
Designing Romance
Characters To Fall In Love With
Features wishlist somebody mentioned


BTW I'm curious, what book or system is the term 'binds' from?

"Binds" is just from the top of my head. I was trying to get a word that fits in the relation, "a barrier is an object that obstructs one's path, as a ______ is an object that brings paths together". A noun describing such physical object escaped me so I chose "bind". I would have used "attraction", "motivation", or "drive" if I didn't try to objectify the abstract forces. There might not be such a physical thing, but since it is scifi it might be interesting to have such an object as a metaphor.

So we want to depict the many faces of finding love. How deep do we want the barriers to be? Do we want the barriers to be metaphors for greater problems? Do we want to symbolize anything through the different possible relationships? (Do we want to add another layer of metaphors?)

[Edited by - Estok on September 10, 2004 10:50:21 PM]

I don't know about the barriers being _metaphors_ for larger problems, but they can certainly be _instances_ of larger problems in the game world such as: preconceptions, fear of the unknown, fear of others' censure, lack of introspection and self-knowledge, use of compulsion, self-delusion, lying, recklessness with others' feelings, naivety, loyalty, and whatever other moral issues we want to address in the game. See, we can use the NPC's problems to make these abstract issues much more personal to the player. :)

What problems would you all (or both, since it only seems to be the three of us working on this problem any more) add to this list? Any ideas about which issues should go with which character?

In the beginning, I had a very different view on the game story for romance genre. For instance I didn't expect it to be a dating game, because that stage was somewhat common. I wanted a story about a forbidden love between two persons, a relationship that would make the player question what type of love they shared, or whether the two were even in love. The multiple endings involve different classifications of the bond between the two. The purpose of the story was to explore whether an emotional bond above love was possible. The game world, mysteries, and conflicts were all built around this purpose to suggest an emotion beyond.

It is kind of weird, after I read the threads in the link you gave on the post before the pervious posts, it occured to me that we are still working on the same model back in March. You always have the final say and direct us back to the original model. It seems that our participations don't really change the model much. I am not sure what our roles are besides substantiating the existing model.

In my opinion, the world setting with aliens and sci fi is rather bizarre, and the different abilities and technologies are primarily distractions from depicting normal deep emotions, unless the emotion described requires species differences, or the world offers an unique relationship that reality does not offer. The relationship that we develop are ordinary, I think that we might be not using the extraordinary world to its potential.

Anyway, the current list:
1) stealable unrequited lover to an NPC ;
2) total innocent;
3) contemptuous of love and sees it as weakness;
4) playboy/girl with a trail of broken hearts behind them;

I would add:
5) a shapeshifter that changes not only shape but also personality. If there are only two personalities, you might wonder what to do with the other half, or maybe you end up loving both halves, or you might not know that the two are the same person.
6) the PC is the master of romance shapeshifter that needs to get all the guys/girls villains/friends. Your primary goal is to level up your abilities and equipments to become the succubus/incubus prime. But maybe in the process you decided to settle with one special love.

Personality wise I would add:
7) someone that is assigned to go with you but doesn't like you or have prejudice about you
8) someone stuck in a boring life who could use some adventure.


Should we declare whether the PC is a guy or girl? Or can the player choose in the beginning? Or do we go with an idea where the PC can choose a gender in the middle of the game?

[Edited by - Estok on September 11, 2004 3:21:48 AM]

Quote:

Original post by Estok In the beginning, I had a very different view on the game story for romance genre. For instance I didn't expect it to be a dating game, because that stage was somewhat common. I wanted a story about a forbidden love between two persons, a relationship that would make the player question what type of love they shared, or whether the two were even in love. The multiple endings involve different classifications of the bond between the two. The purpose of the story was to explore whether an emotional bond above love was possible. The game world, mysteries, and conflicts were all built around this purpose to suggest an emotion beyond.

I like forbidden love stories, we could certainly make one of the NPCs feel that it would be forbidden for the to love the player and think about this. Or as someone suggested earlier the player could be the matchmaker in a relationship between a techno and a spiritual, which could be portrayed as forbidden. Dating games are common in japanese games but not in english games, and the reason they're common is because they're fun - no sense fixing what isn't broken. And personally I don't believe in an emotional bond beynd love (or transcendentalism), so I would have an impossible time trying to write about one. The concept is nonsensical to me - love conquers all, love makes the world go round, it's even said to be more powerful than gravity, what could possibly be beyond it?

Quote:

It is kind of weird, after I read the threads in the link you gave on the post before the pervious posts, it occured to me that we are still working on the same model back in March. You always have the final say and direct us back to the original model. It seems that our participations don't really change the model much. I am not sure what our roles are besides substantiating the existing model.

*blink* Well yeah. This is the model that I have come to through 4 years of gamedev experience, it is the game I want to create, why would I have changed my mind since march? o.O I'm not trying to be a dictator, I'm just stating what I want - if you ask questions I'm supposed to answer them, right? It's not my fault other people tend to take my word as law just because I'm the moderator and I naturally have a forceful personality. I even said in the previous thread about this project that I didn't want to be the leader, and others were welcome to step forward and take the leadership role, which I thought you had been doing to some extent by posing questions for us. If you feel your opinion is not being incorporated into the design, speak up and say what you want to be different.

But if you're talking about the features wishlist, that wasn't created for this project and I'm not suggesting using it as-is. I wasn't thinking of putting shapeshiftng in this collaborative project but we can certainly add it if you particularly want it. I'm sorry if I caused confusion by linking to that.

Quote:

In my opinion, the world setting with aliens and sci fi is rather bizarre, and the different abilities and technologies are primarily distractions from depicting normal deep emotions, unless the emotion described requires species differences, or the world offers an unique relationship that reality does not offer. The relationship that we develop are ordinary, I think that we might be not using the extraordinary world to its potential.

Interesting. Well here's how I look at it: the fact that the world is science fiction or fantasy signals the player to examine things that they would normally take for granted. It's a what-if, the beginning of a socratic discussion with the player, and this philosophical questioning can be extended from ontology (worldbuilding) to ethics (human behavior including romances, ambition, fighting, and all the other things the characters in an RPG normally do). I'm not sure exactly what you would consider an ordinary vs. extraordinary relationship. I would consider miscegenation, adultery, sado-masochism, multiple personalities, polygmy, and npcs with alien ideas about courting and mating all to be more-or-less-ordinary. People are fundamentlly the same anywhere, they have the same emotions whether they're cave men or space travellers; I can't imagine any kind of alternate world creating relationshps that are truly different from what reality offers because after all we still have to write our stories about people with human emotions of they would be meaningless and irrelevant to ourselves and our audience.

And then there's also Asimov's (Or was it LeGuin? o.O ) advice to consider, he said that in order to build a sfnal 'what-if?' world in a logical and deeply-explored way one shouldn't confuse the issue by adding more 'what-if?'s. So he thinks that you can have one extraordinary thing but you shouldn't try to pile them up. How did the quote go...? "You can have ordinary people in extraordinary situations, or you can have extraordinary people in ordinary situations..." because if you try to put extraordinary people in extraordinary situations, what's left for your poor ordinary audience to empathize with?


I'm out of time at the moment, I'll come back and reply to the rest of this later.

[Edited by - sunandshadow on September 11, 2004 11:30:45 AM]

Quote:

"You can have ordinary people in extraordinary situations, or you can have extraordinary people in ordinary situations..."

I agree with this. It is easier to think of a deprived alien society where love is unbreakable and eternal, would they understand the love if the persons involved know that it was transient? In the scope of these aliens, transient love does not exist, therefore it is beyond love, or beyond the set of love that the aliens understand. The question was can we introduce a new kind of love that cannot be experienced in reality. If you have never experienced it, you might never know that you are deprived. Your answer was that even if we depict this relationship, no one could possibly relate to it.

I guess we are writing a sci-fi mod of ordinary relations and love stories as an optional part, as stated in the design document. In this case I see why a simulation approach is okay, because the first few steps in my model are not that important.

What is the underlying conflict (the non-romance part)? What threats do the human have to face to survive?

There are so much to learn from the spiritual and techno. What if put the characters in an academic setting? The back story can be:

It had been several years since the spiritual and techno met on earth answer the call of help. The specializations of the spirituals and technos had eliminated several needs and desires of the two races, making them deprived of some of the rich emotions that the humans have. The player is a student at an university built by the spirituals and technos, studying the more advanced and specialized subjects offered by the two races. At the same time, earth is transforming into a cultural hub, where human catalyzes the merging of the two races, allowing them to rediscover their lost halves and lost emotions between.

Maybe a general difference between the two races is that the time scale for spiritual is dilated, while the techno is compressed. Spirituals have a weaker value on transience, while technos have a weaker value on constancy.

Well, I think that the path we're weaving is making a lot of twists and turns but we're starting to straighten. Trying to involve a player into an emotional state while playing a computer or console game is something that will take a lot of creativity. Such as deliberately dragging emotion from the player.

I was thinking about the romance end that we're trying to create in a futuristic and alien setting. I thought that since I see the spiritual race more as an asexual race which eliminates the gender role from their society but in fact they still have ways to make love and to show love within rituals and other types of completely alien ideals.

I think that we should work to educate the player on all the terms and definitions of love. Like has been mentioned before there are many different defined relationships and types of love or emotional feelings associated with love. However I think that we should have it so that the Spiritual race understand that love is not just an emotional state or a state of mind but that magical energy not just of attraction or bond has occurred between the two or more involved but there is some more.

In the beginning of the game and using the game+ feature I think that the player should be able to choose one of two or three humans that they want to play as. And then as they have moved through a few long completely different sets of adventures they can start over and play as another player. We should however link at one point all the characters simply because it will give the bored college student or teenager even adult an incentive to go back and play as another character.

Eh? I thought it was the technos which are androgynous?

Edit: Here's an old lounge thread where people were debating the definition of love and what different kinds there are.

[Edited by - sunandshadow on September 13, 2004 11:34:27 AM]

Well I only said that one of them should be asexual and did not say anything about them being androgynous. So I meant them to be able to reproduce without needing any other partner basically they have no sex. I intended this to be for the spiritual race simply because then it would open up a new view on love.

The forum discussion is hardly a source of expert knowledge if anything it goes to show how many people have no real idea what love is and make so many blank attempts at defining it. Also it shows that many people have completely different definitions.

But if we want to use it as a theme which we already are by making a romance rpg then we need to agree on some definitions that are advanced thought through and believable. We need to define the types or sides of the word love that we want to portray.

I am suggesting that we portray selfless love. Along with Romantic Love,
brotherly(includes sisterly,fatherly) love,
Tough love.

Quote:

Original post by 5MinuteGaming Well I only said that one of them should be asexual and did not say anything about them being androgynous. So I meant them to be able to reproduce without needing any other partner basically they have no sex. I intended this to be for the spiritual race simply because then it would open up a new view on love.

Isn't that kind of the opposite of romance? Why would the PC (a sexual human) want to love someone who wouldn't/couldn't particpate in the sexual aspect of love? I mean, they would probably make a great best friend, but not a romantic object. Either way, I don't think this would open up a new view on love because real live already includes people like nuns (who supposedly never have sex and are in unsexual love with god) as well as people with hormonal disorder such they they can't feel lust, not to mention normal people who non-sexually love their best friends or siblings or leaders, etc. Oh, and there are women who have a child by themselves with artificial insemination. So basically I think you can portray the kind of love you want two without making a whole race asexual, which would screw up the possibilities for the player being able to romance someone of that race.

Quote:

The forum discussion is hardly a source of expert knowledge if anything it goes to show how many people have no real idea what love is and make so many blank attempts at defining it. Also it shows that many people have completely different definitions. But if we want to use it as a theme which we already are by making a romance rpg then we need to agree on some definitions that are advanced thought through and believable. We need to define the types or sides of the word love that we want to portray. I am suggesting that we portray selfless love. Along with Romantic Love, brotherly(includes sisterly,fatherly) love, Tough love.

Isn't tough love the same as fatherly love? I would add submissive love (the love of a follower for a leader) and dominant love (the love of a leader for a follower).

I think trying to portray all the different kinds of love in the game is a great goal. :) Personally I don't understand selfless love, so one of you guys will have to create the character who feels that. I think the second human or other sidekick-type character would be one who would naturally feel brotherly love.

The technos and androgyny - I was thinking an androgynous race would be a good opportunity to explore the different kinds of love free of gender and the distinction between hetero and homosexuality. The techno race seemed the natural choice to me because technology is often used to flatten out the natural differences between people - everyone's equally strong when driving a backhoe, for example. And urban culture, the kind associated with highest technology use, tends to celebrate the androgynous kind of beauty, I could easily see a colony group of that type having evolved into our technos.


Anyway, why don't you each create a character to portray one type of love that you'd like to teach the player about?