OK I should explain what you just watched, because I haven’t had that dream since I was 13.

What you saw are scenes from video games in a genre called dating simulation, or dating sim for short

The point of these games is to simulate the experience of dating. You play a character who spends time with attractive members of the opposite sex in a flirty manner, usually culminating in you becoming a couple               

In the last few years the dating sim genre has absolutely exploded. Hundreds of new games, mostly coming out of East and Southeast Asia, flooded onto Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, and other video game platforms

The sudden rise of dating sims fascinates me: How have they become so popular, and why now of all time? Who are playing these games? Why do they play them? And what does this say about the society in which we live?

Something tells me that there is more to this story than gooners doing their goonery business. In this video, I’m going to take a deeper look.

Now dating sims as a genre of video game has been around for decades. Most sources trace its origin back to Japan where it was first popularized in the 90s

Those early iterations of dating sims could target both men and women, and were mostly made with 2D or computer graphics. So players interacted with animated characters, not real ones.

The dating sim market back then was a bit niche perhaps but stable. No one expected rapid growth from this industry, but demand existed and profits were possible.

This peaceful equilibrium was interrupted however in 2023, when an unknown Chinese game studio, going by the name of Intiny, decided to make a dating sim using full-motion-video

Full-motion-video is a technology where you apply real footage captured on camera in the video game. Players would typically interact with the footage through the choices they make, resulting in an experience akin to watching an interactive movie

In the case of Intiny’s dating sim game, it just means that they hired real people and filmed them playing characters that players can interact with. They made a live action dating sim, if you will

Now full motion video is not a new technology. It’s been around for a while and has been used in video games before. So it was unclear whether there was anything fundamentally innovative with Intiny’s implementation

In fact Intiny’s dating sim game did not seem all that promising at first. Even Intiny themselves shared this pessimism. So much so that at one point, they tried to presell their game’s distribution right to another company, hoping that it would allow them to at least break even

So it was a surprise to probably everyone involved, that when this game was finally released, it went absolutely viral in China

The entire Chinese gaming industry watched in both confusion and amazement, as this random cheap dating sim climbed all the way up to the #1 spot on the country’s best seller list.

A game whose name literally translates to “OMG, I’m surrounded by hot girls”, from a studio no one had heard of, somehow outperformed all the Triple A titles from established game publishers with millions of dollars of budget

The whole thing looked like a glitch in the matrix, and inspired a massive influx of new entrants into the industry

Endless streams of game companies began making their own live-action dating sims like it’s the new gold rush

Hundreds of such games have been released since then;

Some made the charts, others flopped. But needless to say, this once quiet niche industry is now booming

But what’s so good about these games anyway.

To answer that question we need to understand what it’s actually like to play one of these games.

Fortunately the youtuber here before you has dropped more than 50 bucks on these games over the past months, and is now a seasoned veteran in this domain of human endeavor. So let me tell you about them

In these games you play from the perspective of a man, typically an average man, who, as a result of some very strong plot armor, finds himself in the company of many attractive women

The specific plot and context in which this happens can vary widely by game

For example you could be renting out the spare bedrooms in your house and for some reason all the renters are hot Korean girls

You could be a studying at a college, where your classmates, teachers, and sometimes even the school nurse all look like Instagram models

The most bizarre one I came across was where you play as a cultivator, like you are try to cultivate your chi in 14^th century China. You are being trained by a chi master in a temple on top of a secluded mountain.

Your master is supposedly thousands of years old but looks like a college student, and all the other trainees under her tutelage are all girls and all of them have a crush on you

Anyway the plots in these games can be ridiculous but not as much as the interactions you have with the characters

For the most part all the female characters, sometimes even the male ones, are attracted to you. It’s not usually clear why they are but it’s usually clear that they are

Now they are not full-on in love with you right away, for that you are going to have to work for it

The characters might test you, tease you, play hard to get or otherwise give you a hard time but underneath all that is a consistent premise that these interactions are, at least implicitly, romantic in nature

Visually speaking these games are generally made for the male audience, although to a varying degree depending on the game

Some games are, shall we say, more tasteful while others can have fan service so over the top as to make even female audience blush.

Now there’s a common misconception about that point. Some people think that these games are just pornography. That they are nothing more than gooning materials for gooners and their ejaculatory projects

That is not true

First of all these games don’t contain actual depictions of sex

And porn is banned in China by the way. Production of porn is a criminal offense so any dating sims coming out of China are categorically not porn in a way the game producers’ lawyers are ready to defend in court

But not only are these games are not porn by definition, they are not porn by function either; meaning they are not meant to be used as porn.

I kind of wish that they were though. That would make these games much simpler to conceptualize from an analytical perspective

But the reality is that what these games are attempting to do is much more ambitious and perhaps concerning

Dating sims are not selling sex. They are selling emotions and emotional intimacy

And they do that by simulating the experience of human relationships

In other words, these games are not there to simply give you a beautiful woman to look at. Rather they are trying to replicate an experience of romance with said woman; And in so doing, take you through the full arc of a romantic relationship with her, from the initial attraction to the chase and courtship to the final closure

·         conflicts will arise in the relationship and you’ll have to work with her to solve them

·         Difficult decisions will need to be made which will have an impact on the relationship

·         And through these trials and problems you and her will grow closer and grow together, just like in a real relationship

And although romance are these games’ main focus, some of these games don’t just stop at romantic relationships. They seem happy to simulate any other types of human relationships so long as it adds to the gaming experience

For example in one game I got a father, and had some sort of father-son relationship with him. In another game I got an aunt.

More commonly though, you get a male friend. And some of the games can take these friendships pretty far.

In one game, I got a best friend who is also my business partner. We run a company together, negotiate deals, deliberate investment opportunities and solve problems for the company.

It was us against the world. The bromance was going strong

But at one point I find out that he’s been betraying me. He is committing tax fraud under the table, manipulating the accounting records so that he and his goonies can get paid extra

I did not see that coming. My feelings were hurt

At that point you can choose to confront him, he would try to explain himself. You can choose to listen. There’ll be a fall out between you too. And then later, you can choose to forgive him, and rebuild the relationship

That was a full arc of a friendship that requires some effort to navigate if you choose to go down that route

So how far and deep can these games go with these simulated relationships?

Well there is no theoretical limit. It’s more of a creative decision by the game creator

Indeed there is nothing about the full-motion-video technology that prevents depth. As a storytelling device it can be as effective as any other long form medium like books and movies. Maybe even more so in some respect given that the audience can interact with it

So whether the final product is brainrot or work of art is entirely up to the production team’s creative vision and execution

So no these games are not porn. We are dealing with an entirely different product category here that targets a fundamentally separate need in the market

The simplest way I can put this is that:

·         porn targets the problem of horniness

·         while Dating sims target the problem of loneliness

Despite this difference however, porn and dating sims do share a similar flaw: they both exaggerate

·         Porn exaggerates sex

·         While dating sims exaggerate relationships

In the case of porn this is actually a common criticism that you may have heard of before, in that porn is not an accurate depiction of what sex is like in real life. It’s an exaggeration of sex and as such can give people unrealistic expectation about sex

Dating sims do the same thing but for relationships. They simulate relationships but they don’t do it faithfully or accurately. What they present instead is a surgically curated version.

These games cut out the “boring” parts of relationships while keeping only the most entertaining highs and the most dramatic lows. And the result is what looks more like a highlight reel of a relationship than a real relationship

Even the mannerism of the characters can come off as exaggerated at times

The female characters can sometimes be a little too bubbly, too happy to spend time with me, and laugh at my jokes a little too hard.

Now it sounds like I’m complaining that my steak is too juicy here. (I know, I can’t believe I’m complaining about that either)

I think the issue is that, anyone who has dated in real life, would know that people don’t usually act like that in romantic situations

And that knowledge breaks the immersion a bit for me. As a result I can’t take these games seriously as a functional replacement for real relationships

And that is probably a good thing, because as a result, I don’t find these games to be super addicting.

To me these games are like comedic entertainment that I can play when I feel like it. After playing for some time, I would naturally get bored, and go do something else

Its entertainment value is worth the 10 bucks I spent on it and it doesn’t leave me worse than it found me; so it kind of functions like a Netflix subscription in my life

But that’s of course easy for me to say since I’m lucky to be this somewhat well adjusted member of society.

I happen to have a modicum of social skills and some emotional capacity to fumble my way through the necessary social situations and make connections with people in real life

But if I didn’t have that, my relationship with these games could look quite different 

What if I’ve never dated a girl before?

What if I’ve never even talked to a girl before and not sure how to start

What if I don’t have any friends, and don’t know how to begin to make them?

What if I’m alone and confused and isolated, living in a city surrounded by people yet don’t know how to connect with them?

To people like that, these games might no longer be this funny thing that they can pick up and put down

To them these games can represent something entirely different

For example, there’s an interview with a third-year medical student in China who’s never dated a girl before.

When this guy played a dating sim for the first time, he said that he, quote

“opened the game at 11 p.m. in bed and played straight through until 3 a.m., stopping only when his laptop ran out of battery.”

He said quote “my smile never left my face that night.” Because according to him, for the first time in his life, he experienced women showing affection towards him, even though those affections seem to come out of nowhere

That’s kind of sad, but there’s more:

He said he was learning about women and relationships through the game, and uses it as a dating guide. He even believed that “The first few chapters of the game in particular are very educational for straight men.”

Now that’s not ideal right? Learning about relationships from dating sims is like receiving sex education from porn

You are not getting accurate information

Now one might worry that bro would go up to women in real life and start saying the things he saw in the dating sims, and make a fool of himself

But that’s actually not a problem. If bro can find the courage to talk to women in real life, then I’m not worried about him

He’ll fumble and get embarrassed and learn from the experience; and will be just fine with that level of proactive efforts

More likely though, he would spend his days immersed in video games instead of interacting with people; because the games are a much more comfortable, low-effort alternative to the intense fear and pain of rejection from the people in real life.

In other words the simulated intimacy from dating sims would simply erode his motivation to seek out real intimacy

But you might be wondering, how many men are like this anyway?

We are talking about people who never dated a woman, maybe don’t even have any friends, who are legitimately considering dating sims as a substitute for relationships

That sounds like a problem that would only affect a very small minority of the population right?

Well unfortunately the stats here are pretty stark:

I learned this from a conversation Oprah was having with Scott Galloway.

·         If you walk into a morgue, and see five bodies dead by suicide, 4 are men

·         One out of four men can’t name a best friend, one out of 7 men don’t have a single friend

·         Almost half of all men aged 18 to 25 have never asked a woman out in person

·         And if a man doesn’t have a relationship by the time he’s 30, there’s a one in 3 chance he’ll be a substance abuser

Knowing that, it begins to make sense why there’s such demands for these dating sim games

Now having this many disenfranchised young men in a society has historically been a huge problem.

This is called The Young Male Syndrome in evolutionary psychology

It describes an observation that when there are large groups of young men who are not doing well, don’t have any opportunities to get ahead, and no prospects for a mate, they tend to become dangerous. They would start stirring up trouble, joining gangs, engaging in riots, crimes, or even revolution

This observation makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, because in an ancestral environment, when a young male had no opportunities to acquire status or mate, he could perceive that there was "nothing to lose." Therefore to avoid genetic failure, extreme risk taking could become a reasonable strategy

Now traditionally, societies have absorbed these surplus young men by sending them away, usually to war, or raid, or other frontier expansion projects; you know some kind of risky and organized engagement that is far away from the community

The idea is to let these men unleash their young male syndrome somewhere else so that it won’t harm the community

A lot of men would actually die during these campaigns. And those who survived and returned to their community, would have gone through immense hardships and demonstrated competence to some degree. This in theory would give them more status and mating opportunities back home.

But that is obviously a brutal solution that is no longer practiced in most developed modern societies; Most of our communities don’t routinely send our young men away to keep the peace

But we still do have a lot of disenfranchised young men in our societies as data suggests

So the question is why aren’t most of our streets on fire

Well there is a theory called ‘the male sedation hypothesis’.

It’s a term coined by podcaster Chris Williamson that was later included in academic research from David Buss’ lab

The theory suggests that the reason our streets are not on fire is because instead of sending young men away like we used to, we now sedate them.

Modern technology, especially digital technology, gives young men fake versions of the things they used to fight for in real life.

·         For example men can get their need for sex from Porn

·         Their need for competence and status from video games

·         And now they can get their needs for emotional intimacy from dating sims

These low-risk simulations act as a safety valve that pacifies the young male syndrome. They take the edge off the frustration that historically would have led to riots, violence, and unrest.

The fire that used to burn down cities is now being vented safely into the digital realm

Now most people have mixed reactions about the male sedation hypothesis, myself included.

On the one hand, sedation seems better than nothing.

To keep disenfranchised young men sedated with some degree of comfort in their mothers’ basement seems better than having them rioting in the streets burning cars and punching grandmas

But on the other hand, most people would agree that a life spent sedating oneself with digital products is far from any version of human flourishing

Personally I think the most salient part about sedation is the blanket removal of pain.

Pain as a biological signal has survived millions of years of evolution, probably because it’s so useful

At a basic level, pain not only tells us something is wrong, but also motivates us to fix it, because pain doesn’t go away until the problem is fixed, it’s quite a strong motivator

But pain is a double edged sword. This is especially the case in modernity, which is an environment that is quite evolutionarily novel. And in such an environment, pain can be the motivator for both self-improvement and self destruction

It’s like fire: You can use it for cooking and warmth and illumination, or it can burn the house down

Whether it is productive or destructive depends on how you use it, or fail to use it.

But just because fire can burn down the house does not mean that the solution is to remove fire entirely

Our current solution of male sedation however, is like removing the fire entirely

We are removing pain, and along with it, motivation

And that is especially problematic in the realm of relationships and emotional intimacy, because that is an area that requires social skills

Social skills come naturally to some people; others are going to have to learn it.

And that’s a process that can be incredibly difficult and uncomfortable.

It was certainly difficult for me to learn it back when I was a teenager.

In fact I cringe at the memories every time I try to recall them

For me it took a lot of failures. These are social failures so they were embarrassing. But I had to keep trying until I figured out how to do it correctly

The only reason kept at it was because of pain

I was lonely, which sucked. Knowing that that was the alternative to learning to socialize meant that I didn’t have a choice but to keep trying

The pain of loneliness was greater than the embarrassment of putting myself out there, but that math is changing right now with better and better sedation technologies

I didn’t have these dating sim games back then, but if I did, I wonder whether I would have just given up. Because getting intimacy from dating sims is much more painless and comfortable than doing the work to find it in the real world.

So with all that said how should we conceptualize the recent rise of dating sims?

Well these are fun games to play; and if it’s your cup of tea, I’d say enjoy them

Laugh at the cheesy dialogues and fall in love with your imaginary girlfriend. But Once the credits roll... do go outside.

Sure real life’s spawn time is a bit long, the NPCs are usually ruder, and you can’t really save your progress, but the graphics are better, and if you put in the effort, the gameplay is much more rewarding.