I wasn’t really one who was drawn to romance in my reading or media consumption for a very long time. Being a, well, cishet male, this may not necessarily come as a surprise to many people. That said, I did, much later in life, figure out that, at some level, it was something I was missing. In literature, romance is (or at least is marketed as) gendered, especially when you’re talking about genre fiction (as opposed to “literature” literature which is a whole land mine I won’t dig up at this point). That said, most genre fiction was gendered for a long time; mystery and horror had breakouts which flattened this somewhat but science fiction and fantasy are still working against how they were framed earlier in the century. Romance, though, maintains a much stronger slant as being ‘for women’ even as science fiction and fantasy are slowly and painfully casting off decades of being ‘for men’.

Enter video games. I do believe that romance stories appeal equally across genders (maybe not the exact same ones, but even so), and as a result there’s been the peculiarity that some of the most successful romance stories in recent years were incorporated into the plots of video games. BioWare is essentially synonymous with in-game romance at this point, both Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 drew particular attention to their romances, and even Fallout got on that particular train. And I don’t intend to write a comprehensive survey of video game romance, but giving the context of how popular video game romance plots have gotten is useful context to the story of how they drew me in.

I think probably the first video game romance that really grabbed me, as hokey as this may sound to some, was Stardew Valley. I bought the game shortly after its release on Steam and, like many people, got hooked. In the intervening nine (yes, nine) years I’ve replayed the game a number of times, and one thing I’ve done through all my multiple playthroughs is try a bunch of the different romance paths. For those who don’t know, Stardew Valley is a farming sim, designed as a love letter to the original Harvest Moon games and arguably responsible for a resurgence of farming sims and other ‘cozy games’ that often follow a similar template. In Stardew Valley you can become friends with virtually anyone who lives in Pelican Town, where the game is set, but there are six ‘bachelors’ and six ‘bachelorettes’ with whom you can have even deeper relationships, even eventually marrying and having kids should that be your interest.

The way Stardew Valley presents its relationship stories is fairly compelling. You start in this town where everyone is friendly but nobody knows you. As you build up relationship points with a given resident, you will eventually trigger a ‘heart event’ where you get more of a peek into their inner life. These heart events don’t happen randomly; once you fulfill the criteria you’ll generally need to run into the character in the right place at the right time. As you get deeper into a relationship, the heart events become more specific and you’ll need to know more about the character’s schedule to trigger them, if they aren’t triggered by following instructions (literal or not) to meet the character somewhere. This journey gives palpable emotional feedback, especially as you’re going to slowly accumulate relationship ratings with every resident, in turn slowly changing how they talk to you and how you feel wandering around the village. With the romances especially, though, you feel like you’re sharing something with that character as your relationship deepens. This does lose its shine as you get into the late game and dialogue starts repeating a bit more and the post-marriage relationship is a bit thinner, but going on that relationship journey for the first time in Stardew Valley is eye-opening.

My favorite video game romance, the one that still gives me warm fuzzies years after playing the game, came a bit later in Life is Strange: True Colors.The third game in the series, True Colors had a similar set of romance options where there were two possible relationships the main character could pursue. In the case of True Colors, main character Alex could either go after generic outdoorsy hunk Ryan or local misfit Steph, who was a character from an earlier Life is Strange game defined by a combination of her sexuality and intense TTRPG hobby. Luckily Steph is a bit better defined in True Colors than she was in Life is Strange: Before the Storm, but beyond that it really did seem like the sapphic romance between Steph and Alex was the intended path for the game’s storyline…or at least that’s how I interpreted it. This game was probably the first that got me sucked into the shipping communities around the game, and definitely the first where I felt like I had some attachment to the ship.

This is a peculiar thing around video game romance, though it’s hardly the first time a game designer has made choices to deliberately exploit or inflame parasocial dynamics for the benefit of their game. Shipping historically, at least the way I’ve understood it, was mostly around creating or “identifying” romantic narratives in fiction where one hadn’t existed before. This is either done through reading into subtext or just hoping really hard, and then from there it becomes the subject of debate, fanfiction, and occasionally acrimony. And the way I said that the romance between Steph and Alex is the ‘intended path’, that is exactly me falling into a fandom shipping debate. This particular one can either exist textually (what in the fiction of the game indicates that one choice is more real or preferable to the other) as well as meta-textually (the developers clearly had more affection for this storyline, not that one), and you see both of those sorts of debates over video game romances all the time. In some cases, there’s meta-textual merit to assessing and comparing romance paths; it’s hardly even argued in Cyberpunk 2077 fan circles that one of the romance characters just doesn’t measure up to the other three (that one being River, the other three being Judy, Panam, and Kerry). The in-game version is a bit more fierce, though in the case of Cyberpunk there’s more of a debate which of your gender options is the canonically true V.

While I played Cyberpunk and enjoyed exploring several of the romance options, I never got into any of the fan debates; they all seemed a bit silly, especially as the characters aren’t really positioned to show up in a sequel or have any further investigation into the debates that fans are having. The same is likely true of True Colors; the current Life is Strange studio returned to the original game’s characters (which sparked its own avalanche of fan outcry, but that’s its own post), and it’s unclear if they’re going to return to Haven Springs any time soon. At the same time, I felt more invested in the characters in that game than in most I’ve played, and that investment in the characters turned into investment in the romance. It made the story so much more compelling to me, even as the actual narrative of the game was more focused on heavier topics around Alex and her family. It also stuck the landing and left me wanting more, something very few video game romances manage to do.

It’s clear to me that I’m looking for the next True Colors in among my video game wishlist. I haven’t yet played the newest game from Dontnod (the original Life is Strange Developer), Lost Records: Bloom and Rage, but I’m going to. I also poke at a whole range of narrative indie games, but the quality of both gameplay and writing is incredibly variable, which can be discouraging. As is implied by the intro, it’s also something I’m likely going to keep searching for in among the rest of my media consumption. That said, a lot, maybe most, of my media consumption in the last few years has been video games; the amount of movies or fictional video of any sort I watch is very small. My interest in video game romance is likely an extension of the way my media habits have evolved over the years…but that itself is likely a whole other post.