LovePlus
Overview
LovePlus (ラブプラス) is a dating simulation game developed and published by Konami for the Nintendo DS, released in Japan on 3 September 2009. It was followed by LovePlus+ (2010), a 3DS version (2012) and several successors.[1]
Description
The game's structural innovation is that the courtship is the tutorial rather than the goal. Conventional dating simulations end at the point where the player wins the affection of a character. LovePlus treats that point as the beginning: roughly the first hundred days establish a relationship with one of three characters — Manaka, Rinko or Nene — and everything afterwards is the ongoing maintenance of it, with no ending and no win condition.
Several design decisions make that maintenance demanding:
- Real-time clock integration. The game runs on the console's actual clock and calendar. The girlfriend has a schedule, is asleep at night, and notices the date. Anniversaries, birthdays and Christmas occur when they occur.
- Consequences for absence. A player who does not play for a period returns to a character who has noticed. The relationship state persists whether or not the player is present, which converts play from an activity into an obligation.
- Touchscreen and microphone intimacy. Interaction uses the DS touchscreen and microphone directly, including speaking to the character and being spoken to by name.
Reception and the Atami Weddings
The game sold strongly and produced a well-documented set of player behaviours that received substantial international press. Players took their consoles on dates and holidays, photographed them at restaurants, and bought a second seat.
Most reported was the arrangement with the resort town of Atami, which in 2010 partnered with Konami on a tie-in: players brought their consoles, augmented-reality markers around the town produced photographs of the character in real locations, and hotels offered rooms for a guest and a DS. In 2009 a player known as SAL9000 held a public wedding ceremony with the character Nene Anegasaki, streamed online and attended by press.
Japanese coverage generally treated the phenomenon as a curiosity; foreign coverage frequently treated it as evidence of social pathology, which says more about the coverage than about the players. Researchers who interviewed players consistently found people who were entirely clear about what they were doing.
LovePlus is one of the best-documented cases of a designed relational artifact producing genuine attachment, and it predates the current generation of companion applications by more than a decade. Its design lessons are precise and transferable: persistence of state during absence, integration with real time, and the removal of an ending are what convert a simulation into a relationship. Each of those is now standard in companion products, and each was demonstrated here first.
It also raises the question Turkle pursues in Alone Together — what is owed by a system designed to be cared about — and the asymmetry A.I. dramatises: the character cannot stop; the player can stop at any moment.
