A Ramble about Romance, Intimacy and an excuse to talk about my favourite game from last year.

Blue Valentine (2010) was the first film I rented on my own. It was a bad decision. I cannot imagine what the cashier thought at the time. They suggested one of Michael Bay’s Transformers films and then something else animated. But I was dead set on this indie romance film. Desperate to carve out any semblance of taste. I remember their raised eyebrows to this day.

Directed by Derek Cianfrance, Blue Valentine stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams playing a couple whose relationship is on the brink of collapse. The film hops back and forth through time showing their meet-cute and how it falls apart; moments of tenderness juxtaposed with moments of cruelty. Each poignant moment is laced with tragedy and right up until the end, you hope they might rekindle the affection they once had.

You get one good love. If you’re lucky. That was the lesson I took from it. It fucked up my understanding of romance for a bit. As a teenager in Catholic school, how else was I going to learn how people work?

There is inherent horror to love. It’s vulnerable -- you’re sharing a life and tangling it with another. It’s exposing all your tender parts and weaknesses. It’s showing someone how to kill you and trusting them to never try to.

AAA games are uninterested in playing with the full breadth of the emotion. Romance is a common mechanic in games, you’re as likely to stumble into a debate on a Discord server about optimal builds as you are about who is the hottest companion in Mass Effect. Heartbreak is frustratingly less portrayed, let alone systemised. It’s at odds with the power fantasy that most big-budget games thrive on. Romantic systems are supplementary or afterthoughts that feel grafted onto the game. They are subplots and subsystems that need to come to a head before the plot is over.

Relatively smaller titles and independent games can centre relationships and dig into the arcs that are underrepresented in their larger contemporaries. Mountain Studios’ Florence speeds through a woman’s young adult life as she navigates burnout, a burgeoning romance, and separation. Death is a Whale’s piece breaks down how the game uses its interface and gameplay to depict lives blending -- the parts that are hidden and those kept on display. Atlus’ Catherine leans directly into the horror. The player controls Vincent Brooks, a man so terrified of commitment that his dreams are infiltrated by his own anxieties and intrusive thoughts as he wrestles with adultery. Catherine isn’t as small a game as Florence. It’s developed by much of the [in]famous Persona team and carries a lot of the polish and extravagant style associated with that RPG franchise. Like the Persona series, it uses the supernatural to express anxieties and emotions from the conventional world. Unlike the Persona series which relegates the relationship/romance aspect to an auxiliary system, Catherine spotlights it as the plot.

The itch.io shopfront is littered with games delving into all aspects of love and romance. Text adventures, mini-RPGs, and tabletop games that explore multiple interpretations of intimacy. My favourite of the bunch is author and playwright Franny Mestrich’s ‘answer these 10 questions and i'll tell you what kind of lover you are.’ It’s a small, free, text-based interactive fiction game that’s playable in your browser. It won’t take you longer than 15 minutes. Content Warning for a portrayal of toxic relationships.

Mestrich describes ’10 questions’ as ”a short story that's sort of like if a prose poem and a BuzzFeed quiz had a baby and they all fucking hated you.“ It’s a perfect description. The game starts innocently enough. A nameless interrogator asks “What’s your favourite flower?” “What’s your ideal first date?” It captures the feeling of an earnest conversation with a stranger. An old friend, maybe? It’s only by the third question, “Is that the same date you took me on when we first met?” when it starts to click.

It captures the feeling of an ‘oh shit’ moment, running into an ex at the cafe. With no names and no graphics, you fill those in yourself. When it reveals that you’re talking to an ex, the ex, you can feel the tenor of the conversation change. The questions immediately skew more personal. It’s alienating, Mestrich writes both these characters with a very specific history and dynamic, yet relatable. What they bring out of each other feels universal.

As you continue the game, your options restrict as it corners you. It presents 4 possible answers when it asks for your ideal first date and then three options for the next question, and then you get one response. You’re not allowed to be bigger than this conversation, and you sure as hell can’t walk away. You can’t shrink, either. They know where to poke that will hurt the most, they know how to make you fight back.

Break-ups tap into a fear of change. It feels sudden, a cliff face tearing off from the land and sinking into the sea feels sudden. But in reality, there’s been a steady erosion, rock face whipped by salt, rain, and heat. You have to make sense of what you’re seeing, your body fighting the muscle memory perfected over hundreds of thousands of tiny interactions.

Fighting is intimacy as well. Something is comforting in the violence of sharp words aimed at our softest parts. It means you remember my softest parts and how to get there. Memories, in particular, are easy targets. Unmooring you from what you’ve held as fundamental truths.

‘10 questions’ makes me think about bodies and lives and the priest in high school who sat us down and told us divorce was a sin. Maybe he was onto something -- our bodies seem eager to tie themselves into knots so tight you need to cut them off to get loose. I think about ‘10 questions’ every day and have been for just short of a year now. I want more horror games in the mould — break my heart and rip me to pieces.