She doesn’t distance herself either, unless the player does something to make her uncomfortable like snooping through her wallet or putting on a pair of her underwear. Despite her loneliness, she isn’t immediately committing herself because she had sex with someone willing to listen to her in her moment of need. While its writing can be unnatural, with sometimes illogical reactions to player actions/responses, sex isn’t used as a convenient symbol of romance, nor is it brushed off as a casual affair without ramifications for either party.ĭepending on players’ actions, the relationship between them and the woman, Robin, takes so many different shapes, reflecting various factors.
This gets at the heart of One Night Stand‘s triumphs.
While there are up to twelve endings, none offer the stereotypical situation with the guy and the girl falling in love under unlikely circumstances. Rather than sitting at the goal-post, sex acts as one piece of a complicated whole. Still disoriented, with the battery sitting at five percent, the protagonist begins attempting to piece together last night’s events from the various objects strewn about the woman’s floor while also making occasional conversation. The phone buzzes incessantly, signaling a text from the player’s friend, asking what happened last night. The protagonist awakens beside a half-naked woman, clothes strewn about the floor, stricken by a hangover. Real human relations aren’t defined by such a binary state, something which is understood by developer Kinmoku. One Night Stand is the antithesis to the AAA product, whereby you’re either in a relationship or you’re not. Yet, with all these strides toward representing subjects such as mental illness, the industry seems content with its narrow interpretation of sex. This subject matter is taken into account within the medium’s viability as a window into someone’s inner workings, portraying similar issues through vastly different gameplay systems and visual language. Games have seen fit to express mental illness through various avenues, whether it’s Hellblade or Sea of Solitude. This gamification betrays the complexities associated with intimacy and its implications within relationships. By holding rewards behind this end-point, sex becomes just another system to game. Treating sex as the end-point of a linear cycle rather than some indiscriminate point on a non-linear timeline is the issue. Sex is the point at which games typically solidify a relationship, rarely introducing consequences for failing to keep up with one’s own partner. Even in games that frame sex as an expression of a couple’s love, the relationship’s gamification reduces sex to a trophy-one which, after the player reaches this status, the relationship can go on ignored.
It can be anything and yet, despite the freedom afforded by the medium’s interactivity, sex is almost universally implemented identically as a lustful pursuit. With such a push toward legitimizing its narrative strengths, the lack of progression within recreating intimacy in the AAA space is a failing of what gaming is capable of. Even among the crop of the uninspired, attempts are made-however imperfect-to tell complicated stories broaching a wide range of subject matter.
While gameplay systems continue to converge to a point that AAA game from Studio A is sometimes indistinguishable from Studio B’s AAA game, the industry has largely made a concerted effort to enhance the narrative experience. However, this homogenization trivializes what sex can mean to different people. While this has stifled creativity in some areas, it makes sense to homogenize the gameplay experience as much as possible if a safe return on an investment is what companies are after. Whether it’s standardized control schemes across similar genres or shared ideas such as crafting systems, AAA studios are targeting the broadest audiences based on data they think represents the people within that audience. Logistics are one reason the industry has seen such homogenization over the past decade. Games are expensive to create, produce, and market. One Night Stand is far from the perfect human experience, but it avoids the biggest pitfall of AAA gaming-that being the gamification of romance.
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