Romance in games. I’m very vocal about it. So this week I wanted to draw your attention to an article I very much enjoyed:

I Wanna Kill Zombies and Aliens Together, by Girls Don’t Game author Monique.

Whether they’re willing to admit it, I believe romance is a memorable element that everyone can appreciate in games – when it’s appropriate. It makes a story more compelling. No one is altruistic enough to want to save the world. But they will go to the ends of the earth (or the galaxy) to save the one they love.

That said, I’m not very happy with romance in games, in its current state. Open-ended games like Mass Effect don’t delve deep enough to scratch the surface of what makes love so dynamic and so magnetic to us, and linear games take love out of our hands and make it, in many cases, far more epic than most of us appreciate.

Tomorrow I will be having a meeting to discuss the plot and companions of a NWN2 project I am currently working on, which is yet to be announced. One of the topics on the agenda is the depth of companion romances, so I will likely be posting my thoughts here as well.

On that same topic, I also found an interview with Ray Muzyka about the future of romance and sex in Bioware games. Despite the whole Blair Witch shaky camera stuff, it’s an interesting mini-interview: http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/03/10/bioware-talks-video-game-romance-in-the-post-sexbox-era/