Why Can’t We Learn To Love?

Will Looks At Love in Gaming. We Can Make War, So Why Not The Other Part? We May Get The Booty, But Was The Journey Worth It?

[IanVanCheese]

Because love is gay. Penetrating other men with bullets is super straight, but love is for the gays.

Seriously though, Love is hard to show over the short span of a game. Even series struggle to do it well.

[Wargrave]

Films can tell a good love story in an hour and a half. Why can't a game do the same over almost ten times that?

[amywelshcastle]

I think there just isn't enough time dedicated to relationship building. Even if a game is over 10 hours long, a good chunk of that will be spent running around killing things. Not exactly romantic.

A lot of games also happen within a short space of time, or have no sense of time at all. Love needs that pacing to feel realistic.

[CrossingEden]

Because films are light years ahead of video games when it comes to writing, characterization, dialogue, acting, etc. As much as some gamers would hope for, that will probably always be the case.

[Bimkoblerutso]

Even most movies have trouble depicting love, to be perfectly honest, because 90% of the time it is only depicted as the stage 1 "sexual attraction" portion of relationships.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if the question is "why can games not depict love?" then the answer is because most writers are incapable of producing a love narrative that is anymore deep or meaningful than what can be found in the first fifteen minutes of cheap softcore porn.

I have a feeling that most people are really only considering the hypocrisy of being able to depict violence so openly and not nudity / sexuality, so I suppose it's all kinda moot.

[iceman06]

The love depicted in movies is often the idealized style of love. It's often not what truly happens in real world love. Love is very personal and takes most people years to truly define for themselves. Tell ten people of different age groups to describe what it means to be in love and your likely to get 10 different descriptions. It's something that most of us have felt or have an idea about. That would be hard to really capture in a video game.
On the other hand, most of us have never been shot at or shot at someone in war or elsewhere. Most people don't put as much thought into negative feelings and thoughts. So, it's easier to accept a developer's idealized version of that over love.

[PoSTedUP]

i love videogames, and videogames dont have a lot of love in them. see da pattern?? O_o

[Grave]

Oh Dr. Liara T'soni, how my FemShep misses you ... is it getting hot in here?

[rextraordinaire]

Some games show it well. Some devs are master at character development. Thinking of Atlus here, with both Persona and Catherine, that are all about relationships (And demons).

[Yui_Suzumiya]

This is why Catherine is my Facebook cover photo :3

[NJShadow]

*Looks at article and comments*

Wait, have none of you played "The Last of Us"?

[ChozenWoan]

Good point, The thing that makes the "Last of Us" so good is that it shows how Joel developed fatherly love for Elle. We usually forget that there are types of love based relationships that don't involve sex.

[Yui_Suzumiya]

Yeah but it's Naughty Dog. They're an exception because of their unparalleled brilliance.

[Hicken]

If developers thought more gamers wanted it, I think it would become more prominent.

As it stands, though, thinking games and emotional games aren't really desired by large amounts, so it's rare that a game that features thoughtful stories or well-executed romance gain mainstream popularity.

[OtakuDJK1NG-Rory]

Western developers just what guns no love

[nunley33]

Love is a .45