You mentioned in this episode the lack of romance-themed games – I have to say, that doesn’t entirely surprise me. I think there are a lot of factors that contribute, but I suspect that mainly it’s simply because we haven’t yet figured out how to present it. The presentation side of “saving the world by killing things with a sword”, for example, is generally fairly simple – you have a button that swings the sword, and whatever you hit takes a certain amount of damage. But romance is such a complicated series of interactions that it’s difficult to even understand the details of what’s going on when experiencing it in the real world. I think there are ways (or will be ways) to present those interactions to a player in a meaningful way, but I also think it’s going to take a while to get there.

On the other hand, Half-Life 2 (and particularly Episode 1) does a decent job of depicting a growing relationship between Gordon and Alyx over the course of the game’s events, mainly through Alyx’s reactions and attitude toward the player character. It’s one of the most effective emotional portrayals I’ve seen in a game, but it does take a while to build up to a point where it’s really effective.

Anyway, I got off on a bit of a rant there, but I mainly just wanted to say how happy I am to have the podcast back “on the air”. Keep up the good work!