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.