This might actually be a good dating simulator. Or – it’s at least interesting. ‘Dating sims are bad but Five Dates is interesting.’ That would be the title of this essay, if I had more space in the header. Five Dates is a 2020 full-motion video game from Wales Interactive, the team behind Late Shift, The Complex, and Maid of Sker, a Welsh folklore horror game we discussed six months back. There’s a cheeky bit of crossover thrown in here, actually – the main character’s friend plays games, and they include Maid of Sker footage in one of his calls. Cheaper on copyright permissions, I guess. As implied by the title, Five Dates is about a guy trying out online dating. It’s set (and filmed) during lockdown in the UK, and – yeah, it’s pretty good. More specifically, the use of full-motion video intersects with some of the problems of dating simulators in some really revealing and productive ways.

So – the basic issue with dating simulators, ethically, is how they position dating as an element of human relationship within a win/loss gameplay construct. They turn romance into a challenge that the player is trying to conquer in order to obtain sex. The win/loss framing implies that sex is the only successful terminus of a male-female relationship – that anything else is a failure or a lesser position. That’s the ignominy implied by the concept of the ‘friendzone’: it’s a gravel trap for men who fail to make it to the finish line. Trust and intimacy, in this framework, are marshalled not as features of a healthy human relationship but as transactional currency, accumulated and spent in pursuit of a specific goal. The whole thing is also incredibly patriarchal, by the way – with few exceptions, these games are largely about male protagonists pursuing women. It reflects a really unhealthy, adversarial view of straight relationships, where a woman’s willingness or unwillingness to have sex is viewed as a metric of difficulty, as the scope of the challenge to be overcome. This framing underlines the psychology as to why these types of men don’t like easy women: there’s no prestige associated with winning a game on easy. Real men play on hard.

So this whole framework is obviously super gross. Dating simulators are gross, and they feed into a really vile view of human relationships. I’d say they’re slightly less grotty when they soft-pedal win/loss states in favour of a branching ‘pick-a-path’ model, but they still struggle to escape the orbit of these issues. In that context, Five Dates is interesting specifically because of how it uses full motion video (FMV). We’ve discussed this before, with reference to The Shapeshifting Detective, but full motion video games are games that revolve around real-life filmed footage. They are bizarre, usually slightly low-budget games that often feel like amateur theatre even when populated by professional actors from film and TV. Five Dates is a perfect example. It has Mandip Gill, who’s a Doctor Who companion, and Georgia Hurst from Vikings, and it’s just so stilted – which turns out to be appropriate for a game about awkward video dates in lockdown. The silences and pauses and forced conversations that are endemic to the genre really speak to that 2020 experience of trying to connect online.

Five Dates has all of the standard dating sim features. You play Vinny, a straight (or sometimes straight) man deciding between five different girls. You play three first dates, two second dates, and one final third date, eliminating a girl each time. There are the usual rounds of getting to know you questions, and in classic dating sim style, you have to try and gauge how your replies will land. For example, the hard-drinking party girl Maya, who cuts your first date short to smoke weed with her flatmate, asks whether you’re introverted or extroverted. One of these answers will obviously garner a better result. She’s a party animal. She won’t be interested in shy or introverted guys. While that level of clinical judgement remains, Five Dates also prompts this sort of intolerance for polite lies. Sure, you’ll have more success if you tell Maya you’re extroverted, but do you want that? Do you care what she thinks? Having these real human actors in the mix shortcuts some of the mindless pandering involved in animated games. There’s more depth and subtlety to the performance, and the human actor playing the role also just triggers a different recognition response. You respond to the character in the way that you respond to humans. Maya seemed fun, but also superficial. I felt myself instinctively withdrawing from that. That’s not someone I want to spend time with. I didn’t look forward to being around her. It’s a bit of a drag pretending to be polite and sort of smiling along. I chose to cut Maya out of the mix (on both of my playthroughs, actually – I gave her a second chance) and move on to characters where I felt more of a connection.

Really, the strength of Five Dates is the combination of those two features: both the human actors and that mechanic of removing one person each time. Together they encourage you to engage with the values and personalities of each potential partner. You could lie to win someone’s approval, or you could just spend time with someone you like – someone who thinks like you, someone you can feel comfortable with. At each stage, you make decisions about what’s important to you. As much as each girl fits a rough stereotype, they’re played by real people, meaning your decisions are driven by your relational-empathic brain as much as by anything rational. Human actors elevate the characters beyond typical romcom archetypes – the party girl, the career girl, the hippy – and towards real people. I don’t know that Five Dates solves all the problems of the dating simulator. It’s not meant to be romcom Jesus. But the way it uses full-motion video exposes some of the shortcomings of typical dating simulators. It shows us the missing center for video games: it returns us to the human.