Came across this fascinating and disturbing article about a game called Love Plus for the Nintendo DS, and was so interested, stimulated, and frankly more than a bit freaked out by it that I felt I just had to write down some comments about it before it fades back into the news stream.

Basically, Love Plus is a dating simulator (a genre virtually unknown here, but huge in Japan) by video game giant Konami.

There have been plenty of dating sims before, but this one seems to be leagues ahead of the others in terms of sophistication and design.

For one thing, you can talk to your girlfriend. And not just in some simplistic “parser AI” way like the Elixa software of the ancient past. No, your virtual girlfriend (a term I do not use lightly) talks to you directly. You put on a headset and connect it to your Nintendo DS, and talk to her through the microphone, and she replies in real human speech via the game’s enormous library of hundreds of thousands of pre-recorded speech samples.

I am curious to see how well that works, to be honest. Having such a huge number of samples solves a lot of problems of speech generation, for example, how even the most sophisticated text to speech generation engine around today still sounds artificial and robotic, and lacks emotional color to its speech. That would not be a problem with samples derived from performances by professional actresses. But still, I have to wonder how realistically the software can respond. Surely that with any finite database of responses, there will have to be times when the responses don’t seem to quite fit what prompted them.

Perhaps the players of the game simply learn to ignore little things like that in order to enjoy the experience. Like how Internet chat users learn to sort of edit out other people’s typos in their mind in order to keep the chat flow going and not get bogged down in corrections and such.

Not only does this “real speech” add to the verisimilitude, but the game also includes real world locations that the player can, if they choose, visit with their virtual girlfriend in the real world.

So you can take your girlfriend to the Atami resort in the game at the same time you travel to the real Atami, and be eating in the same cafe in both worlds. Apparently, this happens quite a bit, which must make working at those particular places a little weird. A lot of “parties of two” where one of them is a Nintendo DS. A lot of Japanese guys making the same nervous little jokes about how their Nintendo DS is a “cheap date” or how you are not to worry, “she’s of legal age, ha ha!”. A lot of worrying that one of these times, one of these guys is going to order a meal for two and start shoving food into his Nintendo DS and saying something like “Come on, eat… you are getting so thin. I thought you liked tempura!”

Think I am joking? One guy actually “married” his virtual girlfriend in an online ceremony. I am sure this made his parents ever so happy. It would be hilarious if, at any point, his mother had yelled at him “Well if you love your Nintendo DS so much, why don’t you marry it?”

“You know…. that’s a great idea, Mama-san!”

“Come back here… it’s called sarcasm, dammit… ”

Jokes aside, the level of interactivity with this software is truly impressive. Your virtual girlfriend can even send you emails, and will get upset with you if you don’t reply fast enough. Piss her off bad enough, and she will throw a virtual snit and refuse to talk to you for a while.

All this high level interactivity is both fascinating and disturbing to me. And there are plans to make it even more engrossing in the future. Of course.

To me, this highlights a very disturbing question : what, subjectively speaking, is the difference between having an online partner who lives very far away and one who is not a real person, but software?

Think about it. If you have an online mate, to you, they are basically a profile, a picture, and some online interactions. You have no absolute proof that this person really exists. That is the most likely explanation, of course, and the one that meets the Occam’s Razor test, but still, you can’t rule out the possibility that they are highly sophisticated software. Or, of course, someone entirely different.

That, to me, is what makes a game like Love Plus disturbing. It could reach that level of sophistication quite soon. Evidently, it is already good enough to “fool” millions of people into feeling all the emotions of romantic love with absolutely no reciprocal emotion from another person. Just simulated responses.

Myself, I find the idea of a piece of software falsely engaging my emotions to be extraordinarily chilling, and disturbing on a deep and ugly level. Already, people are treating their robot vacuum cleaners like pets and buying designer clothes for their RealDolls. Having virtual people in your life seems like a logical, if not horrifying, next step.

But I am of the camp that thinks real world relationships are far more important than anything you can do online, and I am speaking as someone who spends most of his life here on the Internet.

I would give it all up for one decent real world relationship. That is part of why I just don’t do long distance Internet romance any more. If it is not going to turn into a real world thing, I am just plain not interested.

And I fear that virtual relationships will only further the trend of people having less and less to do with each other. Could we all end up locked away in our tiny compartments, hanging out with a group of cvirtual friends, developing a violent aversion to dealing with real people for anything?

It is not entirely implausible.

I have had it up to way beyond “here” with you people, and so I figured it was time I joined the spirit of the holidays and vent my spleen.

So listen up, all you Christmas bashers. You are not clever, special, unique, or different just because you “dare” to speak out against Christmas and tell people how much you don’t like it. We all will get along just fine without your oh so trenchant complaints about “commercialism” and “consumerism” and how much earlier the stores start flogging Christmas every year and how impossible it is to escape Christmas at this time of year and how “fake” and “artificial” it all is and blah blah blah. Everyone had heard it, nobody wants to hear it, so why don’t you just keep your precious thoughts to yourself for a change?

Yes, there is a great deal of crass, tasteless, thoughtless, atrocious commercialism that rears its ugly head and throws up all over Christmas every year. That has only been obvious since Snoopy. Way to keep us on top of the hottest social observations from forty six years ago there, Noam Chomsky. Here is a real mind blower for you : did you know that things are not always how they seem? Not only that, but you should be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it! I know, I know. These radical concepts might be too much for merely mortal minds to handle. Go ahead, take five while your paradigms realign. I can wait.

All done? Good, then let’s continue.

And yes, it is hard to escape Christmas at this time of year. That is not a bad thing. I think that in this modern socially shattered society, where we all live in our virtual walled cities where we do not have to associate with anyone unlike us for even a heartbeat and where the very idea that society asks anything at all from us is considered a massive affront to our personal freedoms, we should be overflowing with gratitude that anything at all unites us as a culture towards a single event, let alone one that is dedicated to the very highest of moral and spiritual ideals like Christmas. Christmas is the time of year when we celebrate love, compassion, family, togetherness, tolerance, and kindness. Every year, we need these things more and more. How dare anyone turn up their noses at all that down just because of some of the less pleasant aspects of the season?

I mean, who the hell do you think you are?

And sure, it is all “fake” and “forced” and “artificial”. That’s because it is part of society, and here’s a hot news update for you, society, indeed civilization itself, is entirely “artificial”. It does not fall intact from the sky and make us do what we do. It is something we human beings have created, expanded, refined, and improved over the years. It is as artificial as a strip mall or a beaver dam. Remarking on that fact as though it was some sort of extraordinary observation is just asking for the world’s biggest “Well, DUH!”.

And boy howdy, you are right to mention how they “start Christmas” earlier and earlier every year. Funny how you are the first human being to ever notice this. Must be nice to be so far ahead of the herd there, you dark sheep you. How does it feel to live…. in the future?

Oh wait, no, I was slightly mistaken, you are just saying what absolutely everybody else is saying. Alien life forms in distant galaxies bitch about Christmas coming earlier every year. It is beyond trite to bother saying it yourself. Just keep it to yourself.

And you are hardly the only person bothered by it. If I had my way, all Christmas themed displays and music would be banned from public places until December 1. But you don’t hear me complaining about it and ruining other people’s appreciation of the season.

And have a little mercy for the retailers. Every year, they do way more business during the Christmas season than in the rest of the year combined. For them, it truly is a magical, wonderful time of the year. So really, can we blame them for being a little over-eager and wanting to start that wonderful time a little earlier each year? If they could make it happen, people would spend like that all year round. It’s silly, perhaps, but understandable.

Finally, and most importantly, the true spirit of Christmas is simply far too precious and important and wonderful to give up on simply because you have gotten a good look at its less pleasant sides. The fact that keeping your Christmas spirit alive becomes harder as you grow older and the commercialized voices grow more ubiquitous and crass and our lives grow more busy and we grow more tired every year does not make it any less worth doing. In fact, the very fact that so many forces conspire to snuff out the Christmas spirit simply means that we need to cling to it and defend at all the harder.

Giving up on Christmas and falling into cynicism and jadedness is the easy way out. It is the path of cowardice, laziness, and the very forces that threaten to turn the whole thing into nothing but a consumer crapshoot in the first place. By giving up on Christmas, you are letting the forces of evil win. You are saying “I will let go of anything, no matter how powerfully good it is, if it becomes too much work”.

And then you turn around and complain about what other people are doing to Christmas?

So shape up or ship out, Christmas haters. Either admit that you are no better than the people you complain about, and have no right to say a word about it, or stop complaining from the sidelines and get in there and join the fight against cynicism, jadedness, and sadness.

Either way, do the world a favour, and shut the hell up.