Okay, this morning we’re going to talk about nonmonogamy in Scholomatch. There’s a lot to say about it, so prepare yourself for quite the thread. There are two different parts to this – why nonmonogamy is a central part of Scholomatch, and the form it takes. Let’s start with the former.
I’ve always loved relationships in video games, as far back as fiery Annah from Planescape Torment, or even my own head cannon for the characters in Final Fantasy Legends 2. Romance between my little digital friends as we save the world? Yes, please!
But there are a few things about the way that romance is often implemented inside of larger game-designs that leaves me frustrated, and the biggest one is the degree to which you have to replay huge amounts of content to experience relatively small amounts of content that you’re looking for. Mass Effect is probably the best example for me, personally. Tali has my heart, but I’m curious what the romance stories were like for Liara, Garrus, etc. But to play those experiences I’d need to replay a couple hundred hours of other stuff, much of which will be identical on my second playthrough.
And for me, that issue is more prominent in the visnov genre. I remember loving Hatoful boyfriend, but not loving rereading the same text panels over and over again as I tried desperately to find the pigeon of my dreams. So, one of the main goals with Scholo was to create a dating sim that let’s you experience all of the content in exactly the ways that you want in a single playthrough. Hence the design that all characters have platonic and romantic paths and you can romance none of them or all of them. This in turn helped shape our setting. Certainly there are dating sims that let you date everyone all at once, but those tend to fall into the harem genre, where every character you meet is specifically interested in the player. I’m not going to yuck a yum there, but that’s not the content we wanted to make. So what’s a setting/premise that works well for light-hearted non-monogamy presented as healthy relationships?
That led us towards college, where young adults are starting to figure things out, celebrating their independence, and there’s generally less hard and fast cultural expectations around dating. This obviously isn’t universal, but it was the setting we best felt would encourage non-exclusive relationships without overtones of cheating or manipulation. And we try to set that up right in the tutorial, with Riley explicitly laying out that everyone is dating everyone and having fun with it.
As we started on that, we started talking about ways to make it feel less like the player arrives at this place and everyone is weirdly horny for them, specifically. And the solution we arrived at (that I love) is that actually everyone is dating everyone else, to a degree. You get to date all the cuties all at once, but we remove the feeling of player-centric obsession by making it clear that your partners also have other healthy interests. The player gets to exist in this dynamic tapestry of people and emotions, and engage with that however they want. It also leads to even more fun romance stories and generally makes the world feel more alive with all the other characters interacting with each other and talking about each other.
This led to a challenge. We didn’t want the game to feel like an unrealistic power fantasy, but we do want players to have control over their experience. So we wanted to give players agency over feeling more central in relationships, without feeling like they’re controlling other people.
The result is a lot of situations where the player can choose to encourage other relationships or not, giving the PLAYER some power over what romances are and aren’t happening around them, without feeling like the player CHARACTER is controlling romantic choices for other people.
I’m very happy with the result. It’s worth mentioning that the game’s non-monogamy is more of a Why-Choose than a deep exploration of polyamory. You can get yourself into a few throuples, but there’s not a wildly dynamic polycule simulator or anything like that.
