Seduce your Players to Love the Game

Hello,

Today, we are going to talk about something, a very sensitive topic that will anger some of you because of your philosophical beliefs, insecurities, and/or fears.

We all know that most people are bad at love and incapable of understanding/fully expressing their own sexuality. This is something that you should be concerned with as it is also one of the most exploited things in our world. Our sexuality fuels our interests, personality, passion, willpower, and more. Our sexuality is very powerful engine to use, so for you who want to level up on life, I recommend studying yourself on this matter.

But with that, let’s get to our post. How we can use human sexuality as our advantage in game design? Human sexuality is so strong a power in us that we as game designers are able to create extremely engaging and powerful experiences for our users by getting them to express their sexuality in games. This can also be used to create effective commitment toward the specific game title.

Narrative Possibilities in Games

Do you know Mary Jane Watson from the first Spiderman? Or Hermione from Harry Potter? Men fell in love with those women by only knowing them through a movie screen.

Do you know Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt? Women fell in love with those men also by only knowing them through a movie screen.

If you think of how huge attraction a movie can create with a single directional communication (video to viewer), think of what games could create by using a game’s vantage of two directional communications (game to user, user to game) and possibilities of interactions with human-like characters. Our possibilities to create content that make people full of joy and love is endless!

Narrative elements and storyline alone are very powerful engagement tools we can use to encourage user s to immerse themselves to the game much more deeply. Creating well thought and designed narratives and storytelling for your game can make miracles as user s push themselves to go through the rough patches of the game. You have created engagement that does not require more inputs from game features as the engager is to find out where the story leads to.

On mobile, creating and delivering games with a strong narrative is much harder as casual user s do not want to read long texts, but prefer images and comics or other ways that do not require brain power (focusing and processing).

Narrative is also required to tie a user down to the game world and immerse himself into it by becoming part of the living legend of the story (Why legend? Men want to feel heroism (mix of being altruistic, courageous, and professional). What we can do to power up this process is to introduce communication features for the user. It should not just be single directional communication where user just taps to see bubbles of speeches, but ways that the user himself gains access to be part of the story and have the feeling that he is making the decisions of what happens next in the game.

Mass Effect, Dragon’s Age, and Elder Scrolls are games that provide this and with these features, those games are creating very effective engagement and attraction for the user in their games. Let’s discover together how we can use this communication aspect in human sexuality to drive engagement, monetization, and overall success of the game.

Human Sexuality

Human sexuality is something that you could write about for days and nights and die before you have even told the prologue.

Our sexuality is our strongest instinct. People spend enormous amounts of time in their life seeking satisfaction and completion of their sexuality (Think what we could achieve if we could just turn off our sex drive?). This need can be seeking a lifetime partner, seduction, one-night stand, pleasure, friendship, bonding, sense of belonging, or having a personal tribe to rely on.

Now imagine if we could provide these solutions for the humans. If we can create the world where humans could pursue the need of belonging or love. I am not talking about creating porn games or creating AI-girlfriends. I am talking about creating narrative heavy games where users are given possibility to express their sexual needs to a certain point.

Imagine if we can create a game that has cute and womanly female characters for male users and handsome and manly male characters for female users that offers possibilities for users to talk, bond, flirt, and seduce the AI character.

We could offer a thai-pub type of experience for our users (bar where people pay for female company). We speak, we flirt, we make our users feel loved and wanted, feel that they are important and special for the virtual character. When things progress forward, we can form a connection between users and AI characters and so can take this further. Our end goal is to get our users to fall in love and make a commitment toward the character. Love is funny thing, isn’t it?

Seduction Arts

It is in us all. We want to be best man and best woman for our ideal partner(s). We want to receive lots of attention, love, and attraction from others (receive a proof that we are best). This need is real in all of us who are capable of expressing own sexuality and so this is why we should find ways to seduce our users by creating a soft relationship with the in-game character. We can make the characters to nurture our users when they get burned in our game. Fuel focus and dedication when our users are facing rough patches and create simplistic, but effective communications between user and a character.

When you are designing ways to seduce your users, you need to find a ways to create lots of drama. By drama, I mean creating a positive and negative emotional spike for your user. By this, I do not mean shitty user experience, but to create challenging and low rewarding moments and easy and high rewarding moments that are tied into AI character feature. The goal is that the user must go through a lot of emotional baggage and grow more invested and attached to the character (it should not be easy to get AI characters’ affection).

You should create relationship between user and character to be that the user is the provider of the relationship by being the action maker, bringing goods back to home, protecting, and saving the day (being hero). Characters should be more caretaker as she/he will be always trying to make user feel much better about himself and his successes + kick his butt into more bigger challenges.

Spice up the seduction with our over-idealized romanticism (Current romanticism is over-idealized). Why? Because it works as a life philosophy for most of men and women around the world. This philosophy makes humans invest much more effort as duty of men and women (Paying for dinner, opening door for a woman, behaving like a gentleman, etc.). This feeling of duty can be very powerful as they have already implemented this mindset of putting lot of effort and having to go through the pain or misery just to (hopefully) get their reward of praise and affection of opposite sex.

When designing characters, it is of the utmost importance to make them dream-like. Creating a masculine man or feminine female for the user to interact with is a very crucial as they are desired partners for the users who have not become asexual (all non-sexual beings or people who have destroyed their sexuality by their philosophies). Masculine and feminine energy is a very attractive to its counterpart and should have heavy focus on your seduction design.

Power of Love and Commitment

Ask Machiavelli, ask a user, ask Don Juan. Everyone wants to feel some sort of love from other humans. It might not be committing solely to one person, but the power of love still affects every sexual being and this truth can be used to create a commitment between two humans. Basically, all humans who have a sexuality wants to be loved and wants to find their perfect partner(s), so let’s serve our customers and offer them such!

Powerful design in game is to track the user’s behavior, take it, rephrase, and send it back as a response from the character. This is very effective in real life as well, try it on next beautiful girl or handsome guy you meet and see how their eyes light up because they met a person who feels like they feel.

Think the following: You have a conversation with a woman, you have 3 options to say to her: “white-knight answer”, “seducer answer”, or “jerk answer”. When a user chooses one of these options, the game has an answer ready for the user that fits the user ’s persona and creates interest between user and game character. This way, we can “imitate” the user and make these two lovers bond together.

After creating this interest, it is crucial to demand effort from the user to capture this character’s attention. Think of a real-life relationship. If you as a man would only sleep, play games, not work-out, not have a healthy life, and just expect that your woman would clean, cook and serve you, you think she would stay with you? It would not work far and soon, you would be single again. Set the user in the masculine role (altruism, courage, professional) and the character in the feminine role (nurture, sexuality) and the relationship has a strong ground to build up.

So the takeaway is to initiate interest and demand clear commitment from user. If a user follows the tasks, he is rewarded with the attention of this character.

Jealousy and Competition

When we have the initial attraction and commitment from the user (His interest toward the character and he has performed altruistic acts in game to gain the favor of the character), it is time for the rollercoaster ride!

As I mentioned earlier, the key is to create positive and negative emotional spikes for the user to experience. Jealousy is a powerful tool to use, as you, the developer, can control all the odds of the game and so can introduce new events when you so desire.

Let’s say the user is male and he has met this very feminine character who he is interested in. Now let’s introduce a new character to the game. The character is a male AI-character and so the dynamic for jealousy and competition is set. This male character would start to steal the desired female character’s attention from the user. See, the problem in many games that offer character interaction is that the user is the game character’s only option and if the user keeps pursuing characters in-game, he will get her. Whatever happens in those games, there is no competition, and it is a user ’s choice to choose whether the game characters love him or hate him.

But now when the game has been set, and we introduce new elements such as a competitor to get the women, we drill deep into desire and attachment and make the user want to hunt the woman and get her attention.

Example: If the game is a hack’n’slash with scores, user is always compared to his rival AI-competitor and the reward would be the affection of the female character. He fights his way through the levels but lacks the score to get the primary attention of the desired woman (this can be shown as woman speaks and flirts more with the AI-male than with the user).

Romanticism and Oneitism

We all have this dream of a perfect relationship with handsome or beautiful counterpart. The relationship never has troubles, both persons behave like enlightened beings when they step inside their home, and romance and love spreads around the rooms. The couple ends up living together their whole life loyal to each other, doing their labor of loves and earning wealth and having a successful life altogether.

Our societies have over-romanticized our image of relationships and of love. This has blinded us to the truths of how things really work in a relationship (example: When getting married, you promise to go through good and bad times together, solving your problems, and growing together to create support for each other, but in today’s world, when one person has tough times in relationship, the couple do not even try to solve their problems together but prefers to break up and seek happiness from other people or things).

This kind of over-romanticism that most humans follow as a philosophy is one of the very powerful hooks to use in your game design. We as developers can use this idea well through our game and create Oneitism.

“What is Oneitism?”

Well, Oneitism, or simply, One-it-is, is the human dream of this perfect person who will complete a person’s life. The one person who loves you and cares for you unconditionally. Whatever happens, she/he will be there taking care of you.

When we are seducing our users, we should keep creating this dream-like character for users in mind. Sounds difficult? Well, the funny thing is that we only need to provide a good-enough character and it will do the trick. This is, again, because humans’ mind runs wild very easily when they have adopted this philosophy of romanticism. They spot one thing that matches with them perfectly and they are already thinking that they have met their dream girl/guy. Oneitism is very powerful tool to get users to think the character is perfect for him/her.

Power of Dream Love

Seduction is <b>very</b> powerful design that we can use as we so desire. What I highly recommend is to use these arts very carefully as it is very easy to use this to exploit human nature in a very extreme ways ($$$).

As I said, seduction arts are very sensitive topic for most of us and so if you get caught of malicious exploitations of one’s sexuality, your company’s and game’s reputation will be ruined very fast (thanks to ultimate SJWism, Internet, and romanticism.) So I recommend using seduction arts carefully and putting forth a lot of effort to make it subtle enough that it goes un-noticed by the users.

If you are interested in reading more about seduction arts and how to use it in your game design, I recommend using Google with following terms:
“Speed Seduction” (How to create attraction very fast)
“Sosuave” (Forum about dating, sexuality, and lot of nonsense like pick-up arts.)
“Book of Pook” (Recommend to all males: Good for personal growth as a man)

Best Regards,
Jero Juujärvi

This article was posted first at my blog: http://www.acquire-engage-monetize.com