Dating simulator games inspire legion of followers—and detractors

Ever since she was a small child, Chinatsu Kurahana has loved to draw. These days she creates beautiful anime-style men for popular computer games like "Lamento" and "Togainu no Chi." Since she became an established freelance illustrator three years ago, her characters have won accolades in Japan and abroad. Her anime men are handsome and wild.

They are also often in bed together.

“I work on dating simulation adventure games for women,” Kurahana says. “There aren’t many things that make women happy, so I want to make some.”

Dating simulator games are one small corner in the wide world of Japanese "otaku." Most take the form of "bishoujo" (beautiful girl) games for the PC. Playing styles range from virtual conversations between the player and the characters in "galge" (girl games) to overt pornography in "eroge" (erotic games) and "yaruge" (sex games). In "otome" games, the player is a woman going after hot guys, while in “boys love,” it’s just dudes getting rude. The dating sim scene is complex, and is getting a mixed response as it spreads overseas along with other “Cool Japan” exports like music, anime and manga.

Dating sims trace their history back to adult-oriented games from the early ’80s like Koei’s "Night Life" and Enix’s "Lolita Syndrome." The former illustrated sexual positions and provided players with a “rhythm calculator,” while the latter featured mini-games in which users would disrobe young girls. A company called Hacker was even making “unlicensed” erotic games for the Nintendo Famicom Disk System. Such was the demand that the NEC PC98 used compatibility with such games to beat off its competition and emerged as Japan's primary computing platform in the ’80s and most of the ’90s, until Windows 95 came along.

Dating sims really took off with the rise of affordable PCs in the mid-’90s. At the same time, the chronically underfunded anime industry imploded under demands to produce hit TV series like "Neon Genesis Evangelion," a rare bright spot in a recessionary market. Many young creators switched over to dating sims, which are cheaper to produce, have a dedicated audience, and are often free of corporate influence.

“There are some big and really successful 'eroge' makers, but the majority of companies are small, independent groups of four or five people, and they sell maybe three to five thousand copies of a given title,” says Francesco Fondi, 37, who founded Play X in Italy in 1998, the first magazine outside of Japan dedicated to dating sims. “The games are cheap ways to experiment with new stories.”

The bulk of adult-oriented games today center on love, specifically getting girls to fall for you by sweet-talking them and increasing their “love meters.” They feature slideshow images of static, two-dimensional characters, accompanied by text and voiceovers. The lack of three-dimensional images has a lot to do with the low production budgets, as do the limited number of animated scenes.

But fans say the close-ups of flat anime characters actually look better than slicker polygon imagery. The flow of the game depends on which characters players choose to talk to, how they respond to prompts, and how they behave during dialogues. In essence, dating simulators are interactive visual romance novels.

Dating simulation market worth Y25 billion

The 25 billion yen dating simulation market comprises some 200 makers who account for 400 brands. A game that sells 150,000 copies is considered a smash hit, and industry insiders estimate there are between 200,000 and 300,000 players in Japan. Of these, a core of maybe 10,000 users buy at least five to six games a year, each of which can cost between 7,000 and 10,000 yen. Successful illustrators like Carnelian and companies like Nitro+ are extremely profitable, yet the shrinking youth population and ongoing economic downturn have some distributors worried about long-term domestic sales. At the same time, the market is just starting to open up overseas through the efforts of a few small companies that are porting the games to English.

“We’ve been really happy to see the way fans outside of Japan have learned about this wonky but fun culture of adult dating-sim games and embraced it,” says Peter Payne, 41, founder of online web shop J-List. “At first it was an uphill battle with each customer as we explained what the genre was and why it was important for people to try games about love and sex. Now, many fans come up to us at conventions with some knowledge of the various kinds of visual novels that are published in Japan.”

J-List started in 1996 selling quirky products from Japan via the web, mainly music CDs, which cost around 3,000 yen new but which could be obtained cheaper through used music stores. Payne decided to try his hand selling localized versions of PC dating-sim games—then dominated by DOS-based titles—and partnered with "eroge" maker Jast in 1998. Since there was no system in place for distributing adult-themed software, J-List had to create a distribution network to sell the games to shops.

The effort has paid off. “We’ve been able to make a profit from every game we’ve licensed,” Payne says. “We’ve been bringing out some really awesome games, which have done extremely well in the Japanese marketplace… Our big news this year was that we’re now the licensor of Nitro+, one of the most famous visual novel publishers in the world.”

Controversy erupted over 'Rapelay' game

While J-List is a success story in the cross-cultural exchange of dating-sim culture, the Internet age has been a mixed blessing. As the profile of games has risen, the industry has come under increasing public scrutiny. Earlier in the year, a major controversy erupted around the game "Rapelay," which was released by the Yokohama-based company Illusion in 2006. The title (whose name is a contraction of the words “rape play”) is described by its creators as a “real-time 3D groper game.” Provocative scenes include gang rape in train station bathrooms, after which victims must be convinced to have abortions.

"Rapelay" was created for a small segment of the domestic "eroge" market, and was never licensed for sale overseas. Yet when a ring of software pirates cracked the game and sold it through Amazon’s UK website, the media backlash that followed was swift and vicious. The game was denounced, first in the UK then in the U.S., and the feminist group Equality Now sent letters of protest to the publisher calling for the title to be banned. Illusion acquiesced, erasing references to the game on its website, and Amazon and eBay put a halt to sales.

Thanks in part to the controversy, Japanese lawmakers have recently proposed a bill that would outlaw underage pornography, including its animated forms. Similarly, back in 1986, rape game "177" was withdrawn from the market under government pressure. The Japan-based Ethics Organization of Computer Software, which administers ratings for videogames, scrambled on June 2 to preemptively ban “rape games.” This action is not legally binding, and used software and “amateur” ("doujin") works are exempt.

For their part, dating sim makers are firing back. Minori blocked access to its website by anyone outside Japan. A message in English (cleaned up here) explains: “Intellectuals and politicians said, ‘Japanese 'eroge' are becoming a problem in foreign countries. Therefore we should hide 'eroge' away from foreign countries, and also its content should be limited and censored.’ OK, so we obeyed their words at once and blocked you so you stay out of trouble… If you [petition the Japanese government], we might be able to recover our freedom of speech and remove the barricade lying between us.”

Other companies are pressing on undaunted. Even as the "Rapelay" scandal was playing out, representatives from Hobibox, a major distributor of dating sims, traveled to the U.S. to promote Manga Gamer.com, a site that provides fans outside Japan with translated downloads of popular products. As a sign of their high hopes for the future of the dating sim market overseas, the group attended Anime Expo in Los Angeles, where 45,000 fans gathered over the Fourth of July weekend.

“We are careful not to include the types of games getting a bad reaction overseas now,” says Holibox spokesman Junya Tamano, 34. “Dating simulators that become anime are well-known overseas, and many fans in America were coming to our booth asking about them.”

Such titles include "Higurashi no Naku Koro ni" and "School Days," both of which went on to become mainstream hits despite being criticized by the Japanese public as too violent. The former follows a group of students as they navigate adolescent love affairs, a series of mysterious murders and growing paranoia in a fictional rural village. The latter involves a school-age love triangle that can result in murder or suicide. Both became popular TV anime and mixed-media franchises, and Manga Gamer will release the first four "Higurashi" games in October.

Hobibox and its partners made far more sales than expected at Anime Expo, and are now planning to attend events in France, Germany and Taiwan. Tamano stresses that the games they promote overseas will have to be easily understood—the focus is on titles that offer moving images and have no “hard” erotic content. Yet very few games produced in Japan fit the bill, he says, namely because only blue-chip titles by large makers can afford to budget for in-game animation.

As to the hard content, "eroge" with scenes of sexual violence represent a shrinking percentage of the dating sim market. The bestselling titles are text-heavy, mildly erotic works centered on the melodrama of young, tragic romance. One example is game maker Key’s second title, "Air," originally released as a standard "bishoujo" game for the PC in 2000, but then reformatted for the Dreamcast and PS2 without sexual content. It eventually made it onto the PlayStation Portable and Softbank 3G cell phone before becoming a manga, anime series and theatrical film. Responding to the expanded potential, Key’s third work, "Clannad," was released for general audiences and contained no sex scenes at all.

“The place of rape games in Japanese 'otaku' culture is a minor one,” says Hiroki Azuma, 38, co-director of the Academy of Humanities in the Center for the Study of World Civilizations at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. “What’s important isn’t the images in these games, but how such images are consumed and the environment of their production.”

Azuma, who released a detailed study of dating sims in his book "Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals," points out that many "otaku" play visual novel games as "nakige," or “crying games,” that give them an emotional response. He argues dating sims offer patterned characters and relationships that can be consumed and reproduced in pursuit of a pleasant experience. The ways characters are created and approached is a distinct cultural style that in fact has very little to do with reality. Indeed, the people and interactions in dating simulator games aren’t exactly realistic.

Creators note the same thing. “The percentage of fiction in dating simulators targeting men is higher than that of women,” says Kurahana. “The further the character or story is away from reality, the more popular it becomes.”

As dating simulator games come to the fore of Japan’s media subculture, young creators are increasingly embracing it as a form of artistic expression. There were thousands of amateur dating sim artists at the summer Comiket earlier this month. Some were making smut, others masterpieces, and most something in between. All of them were sure that it was more than pornography that so compelled them. With this ready supply of creators in Japan, and the growing demand overseas, the genre is surely here to stay.

“Dating simulators show us our dreams,” says Kurahana. “Love is a theme that has dominated entertainment from the beginning of human history. I just want to explore new ways of telling the story.”

This story originally appeared in Metropolis magazine (www.metropolis.co.jp).