Imagine that four handsome, successful men are romantically pursuing you. There’s Li Zeyan, a strong but cold CEO; Zhou Qiluo, a sunny boy band-type; Xu Mo, a brilliant scientist; and Bai Qi, a special forces police officer who’s always at your beck and call. Oh, and he can also fly.
Such is life in Love and Producer, a mobile game that has become a surprise hit in China, attracting millions of women looking for love. “The men in the game are more attractive than real boyfriends,” says one fan, who asked not to be named. “They’re very attentive. They’re generally more into feelings and emotions.”
Love and Producer is a mobile game that follows the story of a young TV producer who is dedicated to reviving her late father’s TV show that explored mysterious incidents and anomalies revolving around Evols (humans with special powers, think X-Men but different). In the game you explore the main plot and produce shows, making tough decisions by selecting the right crew and guest stars, according to their strengths, for each episode.
But it’s her four love interests that have captured female gamers’ imaginations. “I’ve been playing nonstop for a year,” says Zhao Xueyue, 29, who works in marketing in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. “There are four types of boys who I can choose to talk to. When a girl is single, she likes that type of thing.”
wo months after it launched in December 2017, Love and Producer had been downloaded more than ten million times. Developer Pape Games, based in Suzhou, a city near Shanghai, used voice actors to create phone and video calls and social media updates. It’s just like real life. Except it isn’t, of course.
Players can even purchase special voice episodes – a strange mix of ASMR and video game in which your virtual sweetheart lulls you to sleep with a late-night telephone call, complete with built-in silences so players can reply to their amour’s questions. Li Ke Hui, 32, from Beijing, bought two of these episodes.
“One of them is about when you’re having ‘aunty visits’,” she says, using a Chinese euphemism for periods. “He’s very caring. Men never really know what actually happens when we’re having this thing – cramps or it’s not just cramps. You feel horrible from the inside out.” Li says that she would talk back to him, that he would wait for her, before he continued talking. It was like a massage for her ears, she says.
Aside from the slick production values, the most striking quality of the game is its attentiveness to women. Last year, in January, one fan even bought a £29,000 LED billboard ad to wish a happy birthday to Li, the CEO character in the game.
But it’s perhaps not surprising that a game of this kind would take off in China, where half of the 544 million mobile gamers are women. Keen to tap into this market, Pape Games has focused on attracting a female fanbase, and the company says 70 per cent of its production team are also women.
“Female players are quite demanding,” says senior producer Meng Juan, whose team spent three years developing the game. “For us, understanding the spiritual needs of women in modern society, addressing their psychological feelings, and game quality are things we should not lose sight of.” But nobody expected the game to be such a runaway success.
That success is especially noteworthy in a country where dating and sex equality have different standards to the West. Another player, Yan Xi, 32, an editor of a university newspaper in Beijing, says the game reflects a growing trend in China. Unmarried women were once stigmatised, she says, but it’s now more common and accepted by society, at least in the big cities. “Women have more choices – choices not to be in a relationship,” she says.
“We are influenced by traditional concepts”, says Zhao. “In the West you can separate dating from marriage, but in China dating is the first step to marriage”. In the game, the female protagonist is dating four different men at the same time. “That’s another thing I like about this game”, she says. “That’s like a fantasy. I wouldn’t do that in real life”.
While Love and Producer does not address equality issues, for many players it is enough that the it simply includes multiple men doing a lot of sweet talking.
Considering how many TV shows, movies and novels feature romance as an integral part of their story, it’s strange how romantic games are still relatively uncommon. Early attempts like Leisure Suit Larry have aged badly, while Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, which features an infamous love scene where players must guide protagonist Ethan in making out with a female character, brought a whole new dimension to awkward. And for those who played it, and saw it through to its poignant end, who could forget the blossoming romance between Tidus and Yuna in Final Fantasy X?
That love story, however. was told mostly through cutscenes. Lovingly crafted though they were, this doesn’t contradict the opinion that video games are not a medium well-suited to romance and that the genre is better explored through more passive mediums. But, slowly, that’s starting to change.
“There’s a wonderful new generation of players and developers alike who want something deeper, something more, something that’s more meaningful than ‘pew pew’ and ‘vroom vroom’”, says Heidi McDonald, an American game designer and author of Digital Love: Romance and Sexuality in Games. “I’m seeing a shift where people want emotional connection”. Games such as CD Projekt’s The Witcher 3, Atlus’ Persona series, and even BioWare’s Mass Effect and Dragon Age have drawn acclaim for their implementation of romance, using player choice to affect plot development and requiring players to actively influence what happens in the game’s romantic situations.
But problems remain. Many games present simple, mechanistic approaches to their romance. Typically, in these games, romance happens in a transactional way (such as “give this character enough cookies and they’ll love you”), or it happens by choosing specific choices in a dialogue tree. “Sometimes there is a gameplay benefit to the romance”, explains McDonald. “In Skyrim, if you get married, your spouse lives in your house and fixes your equipment for free whenever you are home”.
Another issue is that games mostly depict heterosexual relationships. Games that force players to enact straight relationships in order to advance the story are a real turn off to queer players, says McDonald. But single player RPGs, especially, can offer a safe space for experimentation around romance and sexuality.
Games such as Fable, The Sims, Mass Effect and Dragon Age have allowed players to have same-sex relationships. A recent addition to the small roster of games that have same-sex relationship options is Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which is set in ancient Greece, a time that predates the modern invention of heterosexuality. That game however recently drew controversy after a DLC forced players to pursue a straight relationship even if your character had been gay all the way through the main story.
In many ways, video games offer the ultimate wish fulfilment. You can be a turn-of-the-century cowboy roaming the wilderness, a stealthy operative facing insurmountable odds, a racing driver, a space marine, or a dude with a sword in an epic tale of love and destiny. And there are no rules for which games you must play. Huan Na, 31, a marketing manager in Beijing, says she played Love and Producer because she likes to be in control. She liked Bai Qi, the special forces officer, the most, and Li Zeyan, the CEO, second most. “I like dominating men and secrets will make him even hotter”, she says.
But she stopped, preferring to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on her Nintendo Switch instead. “I like to be the guy in the world where I can choose what I do and don’t have to follow a schedule,” she says. Love and the Producer offers a fantasy – but for Yan, it was one that might encourage unrealistic expectations. “There’s this police officer, he’s always there when you need him, whenever you have a dangerous situation. This doesn’t happen in real life, you can’t rely on a guy like this. He will not always be there when you need him. That’s a female fantasy”, says Yan.
In China and the West, games are finally grappling with the complex themes of love and romance. But that Love and Producer indulges female fantasies, and has been so successful, still feels almost subversive.
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This article is part of our in-depth series investigating how technology is changing love, sex and relationships.
From keeping an intimate secret from the internet to the battle to destroy super gonorrhoea, we’ll explore the technologies and ideas changing how we all live and love – for better or worse.
