Cooties

First Love

I’ve been playing Mass Effect 2 quite a bit lately, and I’m having a great deal of difficulty choosing between two of my female teammates. I can remember the days when there were no female characters in games. (Well, unless some of you want to classify some asteroids as “female”. If you do, under no circumstances do I want to know why.) I remember when women appeared in games simply as an object to be rescued. I jumped over a lot of damned barrels to get a pink heart above our heads and an unconscious gorilla beneath our feet. I jumped and smashed through so many worlds of deadly peril, told at every turn that my princess was in another castle. And don’t even get me started on Wizards and Warriors. No princess is worth that.

I’m not sure when female protagonists in games started, but I’m sure I’m not alone in falling in love with Samus Aran (once I realized she was a girl, anyway). There was something compelling about a woman in gaming who wasn’t simply a reward, but forged her way through without regard to her gender. Sure, this was nothing new by the time this got to gaming. Red Sonja had been around for quite awhile, as had Eowyn. For me, being able to guide a strong female character through their adventure or especially to have a character I created fight alongside them in a game helped me attach emotionally. So it was that while other boys my age were dreaming of Kathy Ireland, teenage me found myself crushing on the likes of Alias from Curse of the Azure Bonds and the Paladin from Ultima Exodus. The latter I named “Ariel” after the Little Mermaid. Hey, I was 13, there was a shell-bikini, and about two seconds of no pants covered by damnably opaque bubbles. You’d have done the same.

I miss being young enough that meeting your dream woman and consummating your relationship consisted of a kiss and to ride off into the sunset together, eternally happy. I believed strongly enough in this concept that once the hormones started flowing, and boobs started to become more and more important, that I only amended this plan slightly; First, the dream woman would show me her boobs, then we would kiss, then we would ride off into the sunset together with sax music playing. Sometimes the order would change. Later, as I got older and thusly able to watch more Cinemax on Friday nights, the plan would also feature us being naked in bed together with a sheet wrapped around our unmentionables in addition to the boobs, kissing, sax music, and riding off into the sunset.

Analysis Phase

It was in these delightful adolescent years that I happened upon a copy of Accolade’s Bar Games. It was a really big hit with my genitals, as one game featured both wet t-shirts and electrocution. The part I really remember was the pick-up artist game. Keep in mind, I was 16, and at the time had not even been on a date yet. I was the kind of kid who used to ask girls out by using the following pick-up line: “If your mom says it’s OK, would you like to go skating this weekend?” I was bad at talking to girls in real life, and this incompetence extended to the game. But it was my first introduction to what I would later know as a “Japanese dating sim”, except without all the gift-buying and other weird stuff. I never really got into those, but some people clearly do. Early on, I felt that the game mechanics far overwhelmed the amount of story, and it made the girls I was “dating” seem far less real. It did, however, make the budding programmer in me start wondering whether girls actually behaved in ways that could be exploited via algorithms. In retrospect, it is not a real wonder to me why I never had much luck with women when I was young.

Today we have games like Dragon Age and the Mass Effect series where you can build a rapport with an in-game paramour, with the possibility of turning the relationship in a romantic direction. You can even have sexual relations! (However, the sexual relations may be covered in burlap, which does not go quite as well with sax music and sunsets as one might think.) Unfortunately, these games have introduced another concept that my ladies-man skillset was completely unprepared for: a love triangle. As you may have guessed, successfully fooling one woman to be with me at a time is a miracle. I have no means of comprehending how to even schedule meeting up with more than one woman, much less doing so in secret. The thought of coping with all the anger and jealousy when all these women become aware of each other’s existence is enough to make my heart explode. Therefore, when I am faced with a decision between the hot mage chick and the nice girl who stabs things proficiently, I lose the ability to function. (To be more specific, I got with the nice stabby girl, then dumped her for the mage, then felt heartburn-class guilty for two days.)

Who says video games don’t teach social skills?

Race Against Puberty

Needless to say, it was a great relief when I somehow managed to bamboozle my wife into marrying me. Now I have to pass my accumulated knowledge onto my son, so that he does not make the same mistakes as me. But today’s youth handle dating and sex much differently than I recall watching my peers do it, and I’m quite sure it will be different by the time his hormones overtake his mind. My problems are twofold: I must somehow impart social skills that I do not have so that he is able to function near human females his age. On the other hand, if successful, I must help him make smart, healthy decisions about sex. Since I have a decade or so before I need to worry about this, the best plan I have involves writing some sort of AI that will come up with a plan before it’s too late. Think of it as Deep Thought, but instead of coming up with the Answer To The Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, And Everything, this one answers the question of How To Keep My Son From Getting Space Gonorrhea.

In the name of Science, I shall not fail.