this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Gaming

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Video game romances need to evolve beyond lore dumps (www.polygon.com)
submitted 3 days ago by cm0002@toast.ooo to c/gaming@beehaw.org
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If you had to pick a good love story, you might think of something classic, like Jane Austen's Emma or Casablanca. Or maybe tragic, like Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin or Romeo and Juliet. Or possibly cozy, like Heated Rivalry or Netflix's Nobody Wants This. What probably doesn't come to mind is a video game love story, and there's a good reason for that. Despite the appearance of variety, video game romances only come in one type. And it hardly even counts as a romance.

Games are still young as a storytelling medium, so the lack of memorable love stories compared film or literature is hardly surprising. What is surprising is just how little romance has changed in over three decades. In 1994, Konami's Tokimeki Memorial made popular the idea of dating in video games. It was hardly what you might call romantic, with its stat-based progress and checklist approach to relationships. But it set a precedent for how to Do Romance in games, and later titles, like Harvest Moon, built on that formula. By 2000, the likes of Baldur's Gate 2 added a stronger element of personality, with more complex characters who played important roles in bigger stories, but not necessarily in each other's lives. Relationships consisted of saying the right thing at the right time and then, like magic, love occurs. 26 years later, game romances are still written like they were in 2000, with obvious exceptions like (usually) not being as sexist anymore and occasionally being decent enough to show more than one type of love.

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[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 3 days ago

I wouldn't describe Life is Strange as a lore-dumpy romance game, it's quite memorable

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

The best love story I have ever read came from a visual novel; a type of video game.

(The game in question is Adastra)

[–] GottaHaveFaith@fedia.io 7 points 3 days ago

Yeah I think the author point is kinda silly, they don't see good love stories because they aren't playing "love games". All the bad examples in the article are games where romance is not the main focus!

Better romance requires good writing, good quests, good acting, all things that take money and time to realize.

I think visual novels/dating rpg are the right place to look for love

[–] SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org 2 points 3 days ago

Haven did it well in my opinion, but that might be because it was a pre-existing relationship.

Also, it did get lore dumpy in some places, however, you could feel the chemistry between the characters in most of their interactions.

[–] Godort@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 days ago

Video games as a storytelling medium are still pretty new. Not only that, they are far more complex than the other mediums due to the interactive nature of games

Games delivering complete stories beyond "Hero goes out and saves princess" has only been around for around 25 years or so. it takes a lot longer to learn the language around the technology. Right now, video game narrative tends to exist as a sort of "choose your own adventure" movie.

The format just needs a lot more exploration from people willing to experiment with it as an art form to try and tell stories that are not possible to tell through static mediums like novels or film

[–] pimento64@sopuli.xyz 0 points 3 days ago

Action games almost never have long, detailed dialog interactions that affect relationships and simulate the interpersonal detail of characters in a book. Then when I play visual novels, they do have all that stuff, but I can't rocket jump or quickscope. What kind of bullshit is that? I'm so glad this author twisted their trilby on tighter and cranked out some hard-hitting journalism about how different genres of media have different content in them.