Not Your Average Waifu : Fostering Immersion through Game Mechanics in a Dating Game

Sammanfattning

Since the typification of the dating genre in the mid-1990s, dating games have struggled to accurately recreate the experience of communicating and having romance with another person. Previous research on the dating genre has focused on the issues of transactionality and oversimplification of dating as depicted by the games, despite expectations from some players that engaging with the dating genre will prepare them for dating in the real world. To address the unrealistic depictions of healthy relationships in the dating games, we created Lost Soul’s Guide to Dating, documenting our development process following the methodology of research-through design. We made multiple iterations of the game and examined what did and did not create the immersion we were striving for. By approaching the design process from the perspective of experience design, we developed a conversation mechanic that limited player agency in favor of placing more agency in the hands of the NPC. Throughout the design process we discovered that balancing the player’s agency with the agency of the NPC in favour of a more character-centric design is a key aspect of creating an immersive dating experience, even though it works best when the quality of dialogue and game aesthetics are high as well. We believe that our design was able to resolve many issues raised in previous research about the unrealistic expectations and transactionality set by conventional games within the genre, and can be used in broader contexts of modeling human interaction in games.