A little known fact? People who play dating sims descend from molluscs.

As my July novel slowly, slowly unfolds, more and more of the girls become likable.  I am not very surprised, since girls tend to be likable in real life as well. My research (watching anime, reading manga and trolling forums) has shown me that the ideal format for my story would probably not be a novel or a screenplay or a movie, but a computer game.  More exactly a “dating sim”.  Now, I am used to playing The Sims, and both Sims1 and Sims2 had dating expansions: Hot Date for Sim1, and NightLife for Sims 2. There is no such thing for Sims3, which is a shame, since I find dating in that game hard to do. My sims usually end up adopting some random kid when they approach the latter part of their adult life. -_-

Anyway, it turns out that dating sims are not actually about The Sims, but is a genre that is very popular in Japan but very unpopular in the west.  In such a game, you play a boy or (in fewer games) a girl, living through a specific time of their life where they have the opportunity to meet a number of different people.  The goal is to form a romantic relationship with a person of the opposite sex (or, in extreme rare games, of the same sex).  The games differ in that some of them offer an ending depicting sexual intercourse, while others do not. There are often released two different version of the same game, where the non-explicit version has more of the milder content.

I think this is a great idea.  It saves people from experimenting on each other. On the down side, the reproductive rate in Japan is really low. The country will be almost empty in a few generations unless something changes. Hopefully the production of robot catgirls will eventually be high enough to replace the falling population.  (That was a joke.)

Anyway, I’ve tried out one of the few dating sims in English. Well, supposedly there are more of them, but this is an innocent one and you don’t play it online so they are not gathering information about you. It is vaguely recommended for people who are curious about the genre.  The game is called “Summer Session”. It can be run on Windows, Mac or Linux. The graphics look dated, as it were, but that probably means it runs on pretty much any old machine that you can get it installed on.

I’ve played through it a couple times. It is kind of neat that you can learn from your mistakes so you make new mistakes next time.  ^_^  Unfortunately in real life you can’t go back and do it over like that, so that’s why we need to listen to the guidance of Heaven. Incidentally, Heaven says to not get too absorbed in such games, but then that’s just common sense.

I am pretty confident that my writing is better anyway.  Although it won’t have multiple endings. Probably.