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Love’s Hate Story

Here in North America, the biggest games are about shooting the biggest opponents with the biggest guns.

Interactive text stories with manga art? Not so much. For that, we trust in Japan. But even their most popular titles are about shy boys who suddenly find themselves rolling in a harem of shy girls. Stories like that hold zero interest for Toronto developer Christine Love. Her Korean history-inspired digital dystopian tale, Analogue: A Hate Story, is an odd duck for any demographics.

With its follow-up, Hate Plus, out this week on Steam, Love, who only years ago imagined herself as a novelist, is just as surprised as anyone that this mega-micro-genre has become her full time job.

“They don’t hue close to what’s considered commercially successful, let’s put it that way,” says Love. “It’s what I do for a living now, and I am so humbled by that. What the hell? I’m making a living off visual novels about cute girls and patriarchy? It’s strictly a niche, sure, but it’s a niche that pays my rent.”

Love admits she’s the type to Facebook stalk her friends, which explains the voyeuristic virtual anthropological nature of her work. Each of her games focuses on tracking the relationships of others through data and webspace, be it in the bare-bone chat logs of 1988, or the social media networks to come.

Analogue: A Hate Story is a hard sci-fi, though that isn’t to say it’s invested in laser battles or anything. Thousands of years into the strange future, you are assigned to investigate a drifting ghost ship, the Mugunghwa, and access its records to deduce why it vanished.

Navigating with two rival kawaii AI programs, and against some password-locked hurdles you’ll need their help to crack, you discover that the Mugunghwa was a floating Korean kingdom come. Somehow over time, the modern crew culturally reverted back to the Joseon Dynasty, where women were devalued, denied education, and a family’s nobility meant everything. The beginning of their end is marked by the arrival of the Pale Bride, a cryosleeping beauty from another era, awoken into a world that splits the difference between Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Mike Judge’s Idiocracy.

“I want you to feel alienated, that’s a first reaction,” says Love. “Then once you’re feeling lost and hopeless, you’ll wonder how anyone survived this. That’s the thing it’s based on a real era of history, where people dealt with brutal, real awful oppressive situations. But they survived, coped. I feel like that’s the real question behind Analogue. How does history survive this? If you can’t imagine what it’s like to live in that kind of place then you don’t understand history. And if you don’t understand history… well, you know there’s a western cliché for that.”

Analogue isn’t only commenting on the past. Today, other games, visual novels included, and their male players haven’t exactly been treating female enthusiasts with much respect. Christine Love, uh, loves visual novels and how they can uniquely present interaction. She likes Narcissu, where the player is terminally ill with lung cancer, not the endless parade of ‘bad smut’ dating sims. “They’re a lot like AAA games here, except with terrible prose instead of shooting men,” says Love. “We have space marines, they have high school girls we’re seducing.”

Despite bemoaning the Mugunghwa’s patriarchy, *Hyun-ae, one of the AI bots, encourages you to play dress-up with her, cooing over a maid outfit you’ve unlocked. It doesn’t take many clicks to find YouTube playthroughs with running teenage commentary, full anticipated chuckles for sex-having that never comes.

“Dissonance is the best way to make people thing about things,” says Love, who hopes that weird juxtapositions, between the cutsey style and grim content, help more engaged players connect the dots between what’s speculatively wrong in her fiction, and what is actually wrong today.

Though a sequel, Hate Plus is about how the Mugunghwa’s darkest chapter came to be, whereas Analogue was about its ultimate downfall. With that new timeline, players can mirror a sci-fi take on inequality with contemporary issues, which is the ultimate illustration that our world is a terrible world.

“I think it’s important to focus on what’s going on in your own backyard,” says Love. “I made a game about Korean history but it’s not about modern Korea. I don’t want to judge Korea for this. It’s about how, now, we as Westerners can work on our own shit.”

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