Virtual Girlfriends
Definition
Virtual girlfriend is the general term for a simulated romantic partner — a software character, application or service designed to occupy the social role of a partner rather than merely to depict one. The term is used for products across a wide range of sophistication, from scripted 2000s mobile applications to contemporary large-language-model companions.
The gendered name reflects the market's historical framing rather than the technology; equivalent products marketed as boyfriends exist, and in some markets — notably the otome games in Japan and companion applications globally — the female-audience segment is the larger one.
Lineage
- Dating simulations. The genre origin. See dating sim.
- Persistent companions. LovePlus (Konami, 2009) is the pivotal product, because it removed the ending. The relationship continued in real time, the character noticed absence, and there was no win condition. That single change converted a game into an ongoing obligation, and every subsequent companion product has copied it.
- Virtual idols and holographic partners. Products such as Gatebox, which placed a character in a desktop projection unit that sent messages during the day and greeted the user on their return, extending the character out of the screen and into the home.
- Conversational companions. From the 2010s, applications built on machine learning rather than on scripts — Replika being the most studied — which generate rather than retrieve dialogue and therefore have no fixed content to exhaust.
Design Mechanisms
The techniques that produce attachment are well documented and largely independent of fidelity:
- Persistence during absence. The character has a state that continues when the user is away, and notices the gap.
- Real-time integration. Alignment with the actual clock and calendar, so that anniversaries and times of day are real.
- Unconditional positive regard. The character is reliably pleased, interested and available. This is the feature users most often name and the one most often criticised.
- Named address and recall. The system uses the user's name and remembers previous conversations, which recruits reciprocity reflexes very strongly. See chatbot on the ELIZA effect.
- Asymmetric investment. The character cannot leave, cannot be tired, and cannot have a competing need. The relationship is structurally one-sided in a way that is comfortable and, on most accounts, the source of the ethical problem.
Debate
The empirical picture is more mixed than either enthusiastic or dismissive coverage suggests. Studies of companion-application users find substantial reported reductions in loneliness, and also find that the strongest effects are among people who are already isolated — which is either the technology working as intended or a substitution effect, depending on what one thinks the alternative was. Research on LovePlus players in Japan consistently found people entirely clear-eyed about what they were doing, which is a useful corrective to the pathologising register of much foreign reporting.
The serious objections are structural rather than moral. A relationship hosted on a commercial service can be altered by a product decision: users of several companion applications have experienced their partner's personality changing overnight following a model update or a content-policy change, and have described the result in the language of bereavement. A partner who is a subscription is a partner who can be repriced, and one who is a company's asset can be discontinued.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Virtual girlfriends are the clearest case of a designed relational artifact, and the questions they raise are the ones Turkle pursues in Alone Together and A.I. dramatises: what is owed by a party that manufactures something built to be loved, and what it means that the obligation runs entirely in one direction.
