Why Are Women Choosing Virtual Boyfriends Over Real Ones?

The easy answer is that it embodies the internet ethos: more convenience, less hassle and that most elusive of contemporary attributes - control (or at least the illusion of it). JL 

Pip Usher reports in Vogue:

Virtual companionship, once a niche Japanese subculture, has mushroomed into a lucrative global industry. Voltage, a Japanese gaming company that specializes in romance games for women generated roughly $90 million in revenue in 2015. Voltage estimates that a quarter of its 40 million players are overseas. The company has adapted 33 games for the North American market, and opened a San Francisco office. Dating in the real world may be a bittersweet experience, but in a virtual universe, the player is master

Mook spends time with her boyfriend, Scorpio, every week. Handsome and mysterious, with dark hair falling askew over one eye, Scorpio can be a bit abrasive, haunted as he is by a turbulent childhood that makes intimacy difficult. Fortunately for Scorpio, Mook, a 24-year-old living in Bangkok, likes “fierce, tough-looking” men, and she is struck by a softness in Scorpio that only she gets to see.
Mook works for her family business. Scorpio, meanwhile, is a god and a former assassin—and a character in Star-Crossed Myth, a romance simulation app. He comes courtesy of Voltage, a Japanese gaming company that specializes in romance games for women and that generated roughly $90 million in revenue in 2015.
In order for their relationship to progress, Mook must continually download Star-Crossed Myth and its sequels. When she is not engaging with Scorpio, she is often flirting with another of her virtual boyfriends, all of whom are available, at all times, in the palm of her hand. “[These apps] give me a chance to hide away from my real life, in which I don’t have a boyfriend,” Mook says. “And by playing these games, it hurts nobody.”Yuna, a programmer who lives in the suburbs of Tokyo (we’ve changed her name here), has been playing virtual romance games since a friend introduced her to Nameless—The One Thing You Must Recall, an app made by Cheritz, a South Korean gaming company. Nameless follows the story of Eri, a lonely girl who has obsessively collected ball-jointed dolls since the death of her grandfather. One night, five of the dolls come alive as handsome men. The characters’ neatly packaged archetypes (the seducer, the shy guy) belie complex themes of abandonment and abuse. With Yuna’s guidance, the characters can find happy endings, or not.
“Whether I create a catastrophic couple or the happiest couple is really up to me,” she explains. Yuna says the appeal of virtual romance games lies in the dreamlike world they offer. “Women have a common frustration that they cannot enjoy romantic situations like those in virtual games,” she says. The scenarios may be “unrealistic,” she adds, but they hold sway nonetheless.
Indeed they do. Virtual companionship, once a niche Japanese subculture, has mushroomed into a lucrative global industry. The first wildly popular virtual romance game created specifically with women in mind, called Angelique, was released in 1994 by a team of female developers at the Japanese gaming company Koei. Since then, others have been quick to capitalize. Voltage, the leading company in the Japanese market, currently offers 84 different romance apps.
The virtual romance gamer is attracted to drama-driven story lines, says Kentaro Kitajima, vice president of Voltage. “[They enjoy] our content like they would reading comics or watching TV,” Kitajima explains. Voltage estimates that a quarter of its 40 million players are overseas. The company has already adapted 33 games for the North American market, and three years ago, it opened a San Francisco office.
The games offer a range of approaches. Where Nameless allows the gamer to play matchmaker, My Virtual Boyfriend, an American app, takes a more direct approach, providing a wide selection of male sims that peer out and speak to the player in a pseudo-relationship setup. Whatever the plot, the aim is the same: to create an emotional connection. “When I read their stories, I feel like they are real,” Mook says of her digital suitors. “It’s like I understand them.”The desire for an emotional connection in the virtual world seems to coincide with a decreasing desire for one in the real world. A survey released by The Japan Times last year found that nearly 40 percent of single Japanese millennials were not interested in romantic relationships, describing them as “bothersome.” And in the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2014 that there were now more single people in the country than married ones.
For millennial women, in other words, the status quo is undergoing a seismic shift, one that engineers at gaming companies are busy mapping. Many of them say the appeal of virtual dating games comes down to control: Dating in the real world may be a bittersweet experience at best, but in a virtual universe, the player is master.
“[Women] dream of a guy who is handsome, controlling, and unreasonably in love with [them],” says Marcos Daniel Arroyo, a software engineer at Cheritz who has built a career on understanding what women want from virtual relationships. The games allow women to date the kind of men they are attracted to, but without any of the hassle or heartbreak. They fulfill, says Arroyo, “the fantasy of a relationship that cannot occur so easily in real life.”
Kitajima agrees, citing a “sadistic but charismatic” archetype popular among women worldwide. In real life, Kitajima says, there may be an incentive to avoid this type as a boyfriend or husband, but in the gaming world, the characters provide an outlet for women to tap into their romantic imagination. Fantasies can be explored without consequence.
And fantasies can evolve, as gamers cycle through the various types. Mike Amerson, the American developer behind My Virtual Boyfriend, says he sometimes finds himself in the unlikely position of offering romantic advice. He often receives emails, he says, from female users complaining that their sims have mistreated them. “They usually pick the alpha malefirst, which is more of a bad-boytype,” Amerson says. He usually replies with: “Next time, try the nice guy or geek personality, if you want someone to love you for who you are.”
Even in the world of virtual romance, love takes practice. It requires us to take risks, face rejection, and revise our priorities. Which begs the question: Can virtual relationships prepare gamers for real ones?
Mook and Yuna say yes. They view their gaming habits as a positive form of escapism that also happens to teach virtues like empathy and tolerance. “These games might help solve issues in your love life, as they make you see and understand new perspectives about love,” says Mook. “If a female can ask for less by playing a game—like, I don’t need a handsome husband because I get that from a virtual boyfriend,” says Yuna, “it could create a better relationship.”
Tempestt Storm, a producer in Chicago, says she uses My Virtual Boyfriend as a stopgap until she finds the real deal. Her sim is handsome and career-driven, with a well-rounded personality. In short, he’s exactly the type of man she hopes to end up with. “It offers me hope that whatever I’m virtually doing, or subconsciously doing, will eventually manifest into my real life,” say Storm.
“I won’t be on a date and say, ‘You remind me of my virtual boyfriend,’ but it’s healthy to practice a consistent relationship, even if it’s virtual,” Storm adds. “It’s sort of like a practice-makes-perfect type of thing.”