HuniePop: Gameplay Analysis

Okay, so most of the time I tend to go for harder-edged games than HuniePop. I love Gone Home and Life is Strange, and I recently finished Starcraft II. There’s a lot that’s obviously good about those games, particularly in terms of provocative storytelling and mechanics. I love the childlike idealism of Artanis, the deep moral choices of LiS, and the very subtle way Gone Home teaches you that your assumptions and mindset are as much a choice system as when actual buttons pop up on the screen telling you to take a course of action.

So, I was lonely and bored over the Valentine’s Day weekend, and I decided it had been a while since I’d tried out a Dating Sim. I was lucky enough to pick out HuniePop.

Dating Simulators have a pretty awful track record in gaming. You can usually count on ‘FanFic’y 

levels of romance (contrived and pornographic) and average to provocative graphics (good or bad, always at least suggestively pornographic). The mechanics are also usually pretty basic. You meet a person... they ask you a question... you tell them the answer... if they like your answer, things move forward pretty quickly. HuniePop has a lot of that, but stands out in that it’s thoroughly more thought out in terms of its point system. The more you succeed, the harder the challenges get. Consequently, the more stringently you have to work the mechanics if you want to earn the maximum points. I’m a completionist, so for me attempting that is fairly automatic, even if the difficulty of this particular game could be ramped up a notch to drive the point home.

The fiercest (dressed) heroes in Thedas

In most games – especially RPGs – there’s a synergy between character identity and advancement. As you progress in the game, you make choices which confirm your character’s identity, allowing you to fit more comfortably into the world of the RP. There are very rare instances of friction in this, and when they occur the game developers are usually criticized for doing their jobs wrong, not giving the player exactly the option that they want. A perfect example of this is in armour selection. RPG fans can spend well over 3 hours in character creation alone designing the face of the character they are going to play. But most RPGs then have helmets and hats which obscure the character’s face or remove their hair. The tradeoff for this inconvenience is having higher stats: for whatever reason, the ugliest armours tend to provide powerful benefits to the characters wearing them. As a result RPGs very much resemble a group of diva fashionistas pummeling orcs and aliens. Developers are getting smarter about this these days: in Starbound you can select one armour for its appearance, and another for its stats. In a lot of games you can change the hue of armours to suit your character. The inverse relationship between identity and one’s ability to survive in a virtual reality is seen as a frustrating flaw in game design which needs to be overcome.

Not so, in humble HuniePop.

HuniePop presents the player with two game rewards that promote a very driven player: Sex, and CandyCrush.

The ‘CandyCrush’ part of the game facilitates the overall content of actual dates, outside of ordinary conversation. The player is told that certain coloured symbols have specific meanings (joy, passion, flirtation, romance, sexuality, talent, so forth), and that matching these symbol will reflect the contents of the date. Certain people will react more strongly (and give more points) when you match together symbols they approve of. There’s an addictive appeal to games like CandyCrush which lead people by the nose, promising that the next move will shift the entire dynamic of the puzzle and possibly provide a greater than expected reward. In short, people like to feel they are getting something for nothing, and CandyCrush provides that. HuniePop is possibly more effective because it doesn’t play terrifying clown music in the background while parading a host of cannibalistically delicious sugar-people across the screen.

Instead, HuniePop provides sexual icons who react positively to every matched set of symbols. First, the game sets these people up as desirable, and attainable. Then it tells you that by playing the game, you are desirable, and attaining these characters by provoking their interest and affection. It’s very manipulative, moderately addictive and very possibly evil*. If that were the sole extent of the game, I’d consider playing to be a detriment to any sane individual. But it’s not.

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* In the pure regard of storyline, it’s pretty much evil. I’m anything but a prude, and I believe if 7+ people want to be involved with the same person, and they are aware of one another’s existence, there’s nothing wrong with that. But given the attitudes and personalities of each character, it is clear that this informed consent isn’t always the case. The most horrifying breach of consent is with one of the hidden characters, a catgirl named Momo. Like a cat, she is intellectually on the level of a very small toddler. It’s pretty clear that Momo doesn’t understand what sex is, so playing through her full sequence is not entirely different to a simulation of statutory rape. Don’t get me wrong, I tend to believe cartoon & hentai characters are perhaps the safest way for pedophiles to explore their sexuality without committing actual crimes, and should continue to be optional in a virtual setting. But at the same time, anyone playing the game needs to be aware that the Momo arc is rape, or they may come to the incorrect conclusion that blind submission to authority is actual consent.

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The other part of HuniePop ties the CandyCrush ‘date’ to a point system where you can invest points to make the ‘date’ play easier, which you’ll have to do if you plan on beating the increasingly more difficult score requirements. You earn these points by speaking to people, asking them questions and responding correctly when they test whether you’ve been paying attention. Occasionally they ask you a question, and by selecting the answer that they want to hear, you earn a large sum of points. You also aren’t restricted to dating one person at a time. The game ensures that you must speak to multiple people before you can earn the upgrades to advance through a dating level.

So the interesting part of the gameplay mechanic is this: you are given a very basic character. In most dialogue options, you are provided a broad enough set of choices to build up an identity for that character. But in order to advance in the game, you have to surrender your character’s identity to reflect the desires of the people you encounter. You earn the most points by surrendering your character’s identity entirely, becoming a sort of machine that says whatever people want to hear that will lead you to what the game, and you as its player, are seen to value: affection, freebies, and sex. Those objectives are highly motivating. You’re even directly rewarded with pornographic snapshots of other characters after each date.

I’ll insert here that as grossly stock stereotyped as the characters in the game seem, the focus of the player should be on the fact that they are the one betraying their identity to that of a stereotypical ideal partner in order to get ahead. Whether the people they meet are actually stock characters is a different question. I think within five minutes of meeting a person, we pretty much invent a stock identity for them so as to predict their behaviour and yes, adjust our own. HuniePop doesn’t give you more than 5 minutes of dialogue per person, so it’s natural that you don’t actually get to explore their identity any more than at face value. The aim isn’t to reject stereotypes. It’s to reject the idea that people only exist as what we see when we’re around them, or that five minutes is enough to know a person completely, and that the stereotype is as deep as they go.

Another element which oddly reverses the traditional roles and sense of power that you’d find in an ordinary dating sim is that you are financially dependent on the people you date. You pretty much have to satisfy their notion of the perfect partner if you want to get any money. In other words, the game gives every indication that you aren’t the dominant personality in a relationship. It’s a weirdly perverse and old-timey retreat to couple partnerships, but one which I hope makes players recognise how much of themselves dominated people in relationships have to give up to secure their prosperity, and what a threat disagreeing with a partner actually presents. An awareness of that is the first step in realizing why people – even ones who rely on one another – need to have self-supporting identities outside of one another.

The game really pushes you to the limit in asking how much you value a sense of identity. A lot of games are made marginally more ‘difficult’ by pursuing an identity. But would you deliberately lose a game to preserve a sense of identity? Would you only select certain symbol matches because they reflect what actions make you feel good, or will you put that aside for what others want? Are you willing to fail and leave a game incomplete based on wanting to preserve a sense of self?

Or rather, are you prepared to armour yourself in whatever personality you need at that precise moment to make the mechanics work for you? Because that’s the other option you’re given, and what in RPGs is often seen as the objective, rational choice. If you’re being swarmed by zombies, the value of wearing a cool hat is grossly outweighed by the benefits of a helmet. In order to preserve your character’s ‘core’ identity, you choose reason over emotional aesthetic in determining the correct course of action. This is an easy choice to make. It is a case of identity A being dependent on identity B, i.e that something must exist (A) before it can make choices (B). The game mechanics then support the player preserving identity A, and rewards them for doing so even if it is at the cost of removing identity B. This could be expressed as:

If A, then (+-)B.

If A, then -B.

A, so not B.”

This isn’t ‘really’ a choice at all. The only choice you’re being presented with here is to do what the game says, or die.

HuniePop disentangles these two variables to make a much harder choice: A or B. The gameplay is geared in such a way that A, the optimization of the system, holds far more obvious rewards than the choice B, or the optimization of identity. The beauty of this being reflected in a gaming world in such clear parameters is that while some courses of action may be highly rewarding, we should never make the mistake of assuming that that makes them the best course, or the ‘point’ of the game. If the rest of the game isn’t wholly dependent on following those mechanics, they are merely one of several possible objectives: in other words, gameplay is encouraging one identity over others. This questions the very nature of what it means to be a gamer. Is a gamer a person who follows the objective laid out by the gameplay, or is it a person who creates their own point system and uses the reality they are presented with as a means of attaining their own objective?

This conundrum has tried to find a solution through sandbox gaming, where all points are removed and the player is encouraged to create their own system. But sandboxes are if anything even further away from our own reality than HuniePop (which is quite an achievement). HuniePop reflects a reality where it is automatically necessary to rage against the machine in order to achieve a sense of personal objective, which is far more along the lines of what we are faced with in our own lives. In life the systems we are a part of will always attempt to optimize at the cost of identity. Some of these systems are much along the lines of dependence on A: we must eat, we must sleep, we must bond. Others are more along the lines of an artificial identity B: we must get married, we must be democratically led, we must smell nice for others to respect us. In HuniePop, the identity B rooted into the world is the pleasure reward of the limbic system. But such an identity does not take into account other factors which might influence courses of action. For example, is it moral to say and do things you don’t enjoy to make another person happy? What are the potential consequences of dating a mother and daughter without them knowing about one another’s relationship? Is a relationship with several romantically-interested partners fair to one sexual partner? Without making assumptions about the operation of the game, one has to consider that all these actions will have potential consequences, and account for them.

With this in mind I had a much slower second HuniePop playthrough. I met all the basic characters, and I was as honest as possible with all of them, ignoring the point system. I dated one person, and on those dates I selected symbol tokens that reflected the inner narrative of how I believed my character would behave in certain dating environments. All the other characters were just people I met and talked to throughout the day as I went about my ordinary routine of gym, college, and socializing, and I treated them as interesting human beings with their own lives that weren’t solely focused on their utility to me. I accepted that being told I was continually failing didn’t necessarily mean that I was failing, just that I was failing to behave in the way I was being told to.

HuniePop ceased to be a dating simulator. It started being more along the lines of a normality simulator, which I think is pretty great.

In a totally different way, I Beat the Game.