The point about who is telling the story is interesting, especially in regards to ttrpgs.

Because today, video games are everywhere and are telling insanly emotional stories. And to gamers, the guardrails feel natural. After all, they have to be there and have always been there, so the suspension of disbelief includes ignoring that you're (in ttrpgs terms) on railroads.

But, the old guard has played ttrpgs while video games were in their infancy, so they never expected the GM to give them a framework, in which they could do everything, and that still produces a story that would make J.R.R. Tolkien give standing ovations.

They, instead, assumed that with clever incentives, the players would themselves want to play and create the stories themselves. As you pointed out, the GM would simply offer tools for the players to tell their stories.

But, to tie this back into romance in video games: Sure, you can roleplay that yourself (if you write it down, you have created fanfic) but, like in ttrpgs, it's not 'your' character and you're not the GM.

Some groups might play that way, everyone being a quasi gm who can tell a part of the story freely and then handing the scene back to another player.

But in most groups, I think, players want to control only one character (themselves). To them it feels violating to either take away/control someone elses character or having your character be played by someone else.

And in video games, the only character you have is your main character. Thus roleplaying other characters is like taking away the GMs NPCs.

But, your point does work in games like The Sims, where, even though the dialog/romance options are limited, you can add back that level of meaning through roleplaying. Or in games like the elder scrolls, where the storylines aren't intertwined. But Cyberpunk 2077 does pull your romantic interest into optional endings, so the characters behavior might then no longer align with your interpretation, because the game took back control of its characters.

So I have to roleplay romance in my role playing game? I don't play role playing games to play roles! /s

Multidimensional choose your own adventure.

Oh, I do think that romance is logical. After all its purpose is to ensure the survival of the genes. It's just that the romance algorithms and the hardware they're running on have been hotfixed for millions of years so there are insane amounts of technical debt, that make the algorithm hard to figure out.

And in romance movies there is always a pursuer and a pursued party. And, as audience, we can clearly identify the correct behavior for the pursuer. But, if you identify with the pursued party, then these romance movies will feel like it's all chance, because the pursued often has very little agency.

A scoring system just formalizes this behaviour. And in video games, you as a main character have all the in-game agency. A romance, that would move the agency to an NPC will feel like the "OMG it's you, the grand champion" guy from Oblivion, or like a courier desperately trying to talk to you no matter where you are.

And I generally don't have an issue with local LLMs in video games, but I really don't think there is a way to make them work. Dialog trees are a really good way to give a player some control, while not overwhelming them with choice.

LLMs might work by allowing characters to acknowledge things you have done outside their own little storylines.

And, sure, I can type in my question. But this will be clunky and imo break the flow of the game. And I really don't want to sit infront of a computer and be talking out loud to some NPCs.