Kindness Coins, or Chemistry Casino: A New Take On Romantic-Sexual Narrative Design

[Music] thank you hi everyone thanks so much for having me here at GTC and thanks for coming to my talk on kindness coin design I wish I was there with you uh but thinking of you all uh so my name is Michelle cluff I'm a oops and already my slides are broken my name is Michelle cluff I'm a game writer editor narrative designer and partner in the narrative Co-op tail Spinners I've worked on a variety of titles including some romantic interactive fiction which is very relevant because I'm really really into romance sex appeal and sexual content in games I co-founded and chair the igda special interest group for romance and sexuality as well as our Discord based Community which is being relaunched as faram the forum for erotic and romantic interactive media I've also talked about sex and sex appeal at GDC before like a lot a lot a lot in fact somehow I've

talked about it so much I talked my way into writing a book on the subject it's called passion and play it's due out April 14th you can check it out at the bookstore with a discount for pre-order but you can also get get a preview here because one of the chapters inspired this talk about kindness coins many of you have probably heard of them and even if not chances are you've encountered them in some of your favorite games it's an extremely popular design for romantic and sexual content both in Indie and AAA but it brings a lot of um baggage and while kindness coin romances are compelling and emotional and sexy this can often be due to the writers being awesome in spite of kindness coins not because of them now many uh games reject kindness coin design entirely and embrace completely different gameplay and narrative systems to explore love and sex and that's great but this talk is about how we can create systems and structures that are like kindness coins but with more organic chemistry nuanced

relationship Dynamics and less potential for ick so this talk is going to cover kindness coins what they are why they're bad why they're sometimes good next we'll discuss the narrative benefits and possibilities of moving away from generic kindness and into character specific chemistry uh and finally we'll explore two models that reimagine the old kindness coin approach through that chemistry one reframes the format to reliably build romantic and sexual tension the other subverts the format in favor of unpredictability and chance now quick disclaimer this is not a talk about how to write good romance sex or chemistry there are other great talks on the Vault about that including some of mine but this talk is more focused on designing narrative systems to tell romantic and sexual stories and to serve as the foundation for what we write so with that said let's start with kindness coins kindness coins are a nickname given to a particular narrative system which you

tend to see in visual novels and RPGs in which the player does nice kind things for an NPC like giving gifts which then earns romantic conceptual affection from the NPC as a reward hence kindness coins the implication that you're earning or paying for love with kindness so this is a visual of how this Dynamic tends to work in games the player chooses nice or kind actions for the NPC usually as part of a dialogue tree or Choice menu and these actions are often clearly signaled through UI by hard icons pop-ups and so on examples of these actions could be compliments agreement favors gifts loyalty quests or just spending time together every time the player character does one of these it adds to an internal value for the NPC and we'll call this value affection sometimes it's tracked sometimes it's a temporary pop-up and sometimes it's hidden under the hood from a narrative perspective this variable measures how much the NPC likes the player either romantically or sexually

so the NPC's affection keeps increasing until it hits a specific threshold which then triggers a response that evolves the relationship either by unlocking more gameplay or more commonly showing a major relationship beat in a cut scene things like communicating interest first kisses confessions of love and of course sex then it usually either transitions into a more linear a traditional story or The Loop will repeat with new thresholds where the player keeps making nice choices and the NPC rewards them with more love or sex so at this point you're probably seeing some well issues with this system and I think that a slide sums them up pretty well there is a lot to criticize about kindness coins and most people focus on the larger negative cultural implications about transactional relationship models entitlement to sex and gender relations and all worth their own talks but for this talk I want to focus on the narrative and writing

issues that make it harder for us to write good romance and sex stories for one kindness coins rarely develop or reflect the player character versus the rest of the game you can role play wildly different personas in a game but kindness coins are often completely disconnected from those you could be playing a puppy killing monster or a literal saint but either way when you talk to your love interest it's all hey babe I got you a flower I hope you like it and none of the rest of that matters very often kindness coins have to be written that way in order to work for whatever personality type the player is playing so we as writers have to write more generic stuff that can fit any character not too good not too bad just nice so that's an issue another issue is that kindness coins flatten out your cast of NPCs so you might have a very very cast of NPC love interest with different romantic arcs and that's great but you still end up engaging them all in the same way and they still all respond positively again

it's kind of the vending machine model they may all dispense different cutscenes and content but you're still putting the same currency of niceness into them which drains them of nuance and difference kinase coins can deny your NPC's agency over their own desires this isn't a mutual Romance the player is Romancing at the NPC bombarding them with niceness until the NPC responds positively they're a passenger in the player's car while they are driving towards a relationship and yeah they might be a willing passenger but you know they could be driving themselves in that direction but without a strong sense of the NPC's drive and desires we kind of don't know why they'd be driving in that direction or want to get with a player other than oh they were nice to me which brings me to another big issue kindness coins conflate platonic feelings with romantic and sexual attraction someone of your preferred gender is kind to you apparently the only natural reaction is to fall madly in love with them and sex them up if that were true I

would be having Torrid affairs with every nice person I've ever met and I'm already fully booked with work so I don't have time for that kindness is great but Making Love and Desire the default reaction doesn't reflect what makes those feelings different from just platonic respect so at best the writer still has to do the extra work of fleshing that out anyway and at worst you have a platonic Dynamic stuffed into a romantic or sexual one with no chemistry behind it and also to be blunt this is where kindest coins can trigger bad memories of real life experiences many women have had encounters with guys who weaponize this logic and expect sex for their kindness people on the a spectrum or with platonic friends of their preferred gender have also often had bad experiences with this and that's not to say that kindness coins are to blame for these cultural attitudes but they can certainly bring them to mind if they're not handled well and if your players are frustrated with experiencing the stuff in reality they're not going to want to experience it in your game so yeah there

are lots of problems with kindness coins now let's talk about some of the good things because yes they do actually exist and by identifying their strengths we can work towards improving or replacing them with structures that keep those strengths but ditch the weaknesses so for one thing it's ridiculously easy to do the code and Logic for this Loop is a super basic program instructor anyone can learn I know because I did that little twine thing there it's also a very simple and straightforward from a design perspective it's robust enough for an entire game by itself but it's also simple enough to add to a larger project that's why you see it in everything from baby's first visual novel to a full AAA game and to be fair this can also make it easy for us to outline and plot out major and minor beats it's a flexible framework to work out not just the big cut scenes but the minor interactions along the way and it can easily be expanded or shrunk as needed every year players kindness coins provide a simple easily accessible way

to engage with a romantic and sexual narratives they like the story might have twists and challenges and unhappy endings but the system for experiencing it is dependable and straightforward pick the right options and the relationship story will progress the options are usually obvious and if they're not that's what walkthroughs are for and many of your players really appreciate that aspect of kindness coins and that's not because they're lazy or because they need spoon feeding or because they're in title then sells wanting boobs many of those players are players of marginalized genders and sexualities who just want simplified safe spaces to enjoy a fantasy many players are busy and stressed and don't want to strain their brain just to kiss their favorite character they're not there for the transactional element of the relationship they're there for romantic and sexual stories that they can navigate in an easy stress-free way and you know look some people people like Dark Souls some people like Kirby some people like both but at different

times and contexts so while we need games that explore love and sex and deep complex realistic ways we also need games that Embrace good old simple wish fulfillment just you know maybe not kindness coins specifically okay so how do we make better wish fulfillment how do we ditch the coin metaphor reframe this thing that increases for the NPC how do we reframe their response and how do we give players choice Beyond Bland niceness now let me think I just oh oh yeah yeah that'll do it I pause it that one of the best ways to improve this system is to ground the relationship and the storytelling in chemistry and attraction which I'm defining here as anything that inspires non-platonic interests be it romantic sexual long-term short-term whatever and this approach has many benefits for one when I say anything I mean anything by defining chemistry in a holistic way you can have the most profound connection to the most deliciously

shallow appreciation of a person imaginable and sometimes of course you'll luck out and get the entire package in one relationship but sometimes it'll be skewed more to one end or the other and that's interesting too broadening how we view attraction frees us up to tell more kinds of love and sex stories and more ways people can be drawn to one another also when I say it can be anything I also mean in terms of player actions and more importantly gameplay because chemistry can be baked into every gameplay system not just dialogue and that's not to crap on dialogue love it but physical and emotional attraction don't just happen when you're talking to someone they're happening all the time so there's no reason why NPCs couldn't be attracted to the way your character fights or their look or how they move or how they chop wood pet cats conquer kingdoms you get the idea if narrative design is considering how systems can tell stories then for God's sake let us use these systems to tell

romantic and erotic stories and if you do it offers more interesting possibilities for player role-playing and character development because now it's not just giving gifts and saying nice things it's choosing options to Define who you are and what your traits are and those sparking attraction because the NPC digs those things for example if you're Romancing an NPC who finds adorkable people irresistible yeah you could game the system by saying and doing adorkable things and that's totally fine because well now you're role playing an adorkable person and someone this NPC could be attracted to speaking of this approach gives a lot more room to flesh out and differentiate your romanceable NPCs different people are attracted to many many different things so instead of blanket blend niceness making every character Swoon you can go into what each NPC wants and what differentiates them mind you this means actually figuring out things like your character's turn-ons relationship goals what attracts them how they act on

it so add that info to your character bios at a friendly reminder this includes your Ace characters as well where some or even all of the answers might be nothing but that's still an answer rather than I got nothing so you need to think about this lastly it's a lot easier to write romances where the NPC is active versus reactive because the player Dynamic is no longer I will wear them down with favors it's I'm acting in a way that this person finds attractive and then the ball is in the NPC's course they might have this internal feeling that's inspired by player action but they decide how to act on it in a way that works with who they are now I could talk forever about the systemic and narrative possibilities of chemistry and I know this because the first draft of this talk had 30 minutes on it but that talk will have to be next year this year let's get back to the kindness coin system and see what it becomes when you swap out the kindness and coins for chemistry I call it the

chemistry card tower in the chemistry card tower the player chooses character actions that attract a specific NPC this causes a value attraction to count up and when it reaches a threshold it triggers a major relationship beat usually the NPC acting on their attraction now you might be thinking that it's exact same thing as kindness coins with the exact same problems but I'd argue the subtle differences even in how we as writers frame it in our heads have huge impact on our writing even shifting from coins to a card tower is a better metaphor to apply because now it's about building something not earning something with car towers each card builds the tower higher and the tension with it bigger and higher until inevitably the tower ends up falling with chemistry card Towers the cards are every interaction that piques the NPC's interest you're building the chemistry and the attraction and attention higher and higher until your characters fall

into each other's arms or you know they ask each other out for drinks that also totally works there's a fantastic example of this in ttrpg called Starcrossed which uses this at its core gameplay and story mechanic albeit with Jenga instead of cards the player's role play characters who are mutually attracted but have to resist for some reason but every time they do something attractive they have to remove a piece from the tower when it tumbles they surrender and act on their desires it's a great way to conceptualize certain relationship Dynamics and can be good inspiration for actually writing dramatic arcs of love and lust so let's take a look at the new Loop to see more of the differences from kinase coins firstly there is a already a big difference in the nature of the player choices and actions rather than generic niceness they're interesting varied and specific to the NPC they can be super shallow deeply meaningful they could be dialogue they can be gameplay and of course if you're Romancing a different NPC those will all be entirely different actions and attractions they are

probably still clearly signposted though because this model is still aiming for Simplicity and liability yeah and next there's the impact of framing this is attraction not affection for one it avoids that conflating platonic warmth with sexy romantic warmth but it's holistic to allow to that broad range of types of interest and most importantly framing it as attraction better connects it to the NPC's specific active desires not reactive gratitude as such the threshold has more weight and meaning it means the NPC's attraction has built to a point where they have to act because their feelings were too strong to ignore they choose to act because they Embrace their feelings or they're compelled to act because they've just been overwhelmed by their feelings uh in terms of a hypothetical example let's look at how this could work in a game like Dragon Age 2. in the actual game the dialogue system lets you shape Hawk's personality outside of romance towards three personality types if you go one step further though those

personalities could slot in nicely with certain love interests and what they might be drawn to in a partner and then their romance scenes take on more context they visit you that evening because they're moved amused or inflamed by who you are not just when you're with them but all the time a model like this uh can be easily converted to a chemistry card tower that runs in every moment in dialogue choice not only romance set pieces so same Loop subtle differences big impact most of the strengths of kindness coins are arguably not the weaknesses and yes you are still choosing the right options to get with a digital hottie but the options are more interesting the getting with is more organic and the story has more depth if kindness coins are about saying and doing the right thing until you're rewarded with love and sex then chemistry card tower is about being the right kind of person to make the NPC feel that way and that's what I mean by better wish fulfillment giving the players a clear easy path to romantic and sexual Arts they want but

making that path more meaningful and more interesting both to take and to write in terms of good places to use the chemistry car Tower one is obviously game genres like RPGs and visual novels that already use kindness coins heavily there's no need to design entirely new systems and reinvent the wheel you can iterate on the one that's already there which makes your producers and the people with money very very happy uh romantic and sexual narratives with themes of matching compatibility and certainty because part of the appeal is that you know where things are going to end up when you pick that option and for players that are seeking more idealized experiences stories or at least ones that are easy to engage with okay great what if none of those apply what if your target player base wants the complication and weirdness and pain of real world sex and romance what if they want it to be hard or maybe you want that maybe you're making a game where the toner themes don't lend themselves to stories where love always wins or where you always know what to do you may

want to tell more realistic stories about confusion uncertainty the random chance that love punches your players in the face because you know let's face it at least when they start like love and sex can involve uncertainty and luck some of it is just a situational luck of meeting the right person at the right time or experiencing a random moment together that you can't plan for and to be honest in reality you can't really plan for attraction either the spark is tough to predict even when you have a type it's no guarantee if you meet that type that you'll actually dig them plus you know people don't come with walkthroughs in UI you don't know what's going on in there Ed if you're like me you'd barely know what's going on in your head none of us know what the hell we're doing look it's goddamn Miracle anybody ever manages to hook up with anyone and yet we risk it anyway we take the plunge into mysterious Waters because the love or booty we're looking for is worth it and you know what that all sounds like great fodder for

storytelling and it just so happens we're telling stories in a medium where luck and random chance are baked into the foundation hence the second model with chemistry Casino as the name suggests this model incorporates chemistry and attraction but adds unpredictability through game systems like RNG through the writing and through hiding information and feedback in the chemistry card tower you know what the NPC finds attractive you know they'll become attracted you know they're going to act on it eventually in chemistry Casino you might not know any of these things for sure because they're hidden from you or because they're genuinely random now this still encourages role playing and exploring attraction but from a different angle one that doesn't offer guarantees so for example the NPCs type might not be clearly communicated meaning you can't just pick an obvious trait that they dig you have to feel things out in the moment based on what you think you know about them are you right you might never

know for sure but all you can do is try and also being someone's type doesn't always translate into automatic attraction it helps and is makes more likely but it may not be guaranteed a good way to look at it using Dice from something other than the casino is your characters attract traits in this maybe more like modifiers on a dice roll in d d not a seduction role but a role to see if there's a spark there if you have a lot of traits they're drawn to it's more likely but it still might not turn out that way in the end and of course this works in Reverse too you might be the opposite of who they usually like but boy for some reason they're just feeling it with you so actual randomization in chemistry Casino design so using things like randomized characters events RNG this is great for games with that game design and narrative design already in place for example Crusader Kings 3 basically a soap opera generator thanks to its random characters and events marriages

adultery pregnancies you name it this makes for great emergent storytelling around love and sex but for more traditional game stories it can be a bit trickier so for one thing for players most do not want to be blocked from romantic and sexual content by one stroke of bad luck particularly if they've been playing for hundreds of hours and for writers let's face it effective romantic and sexual storytelling can often depend on very non-random things like characterization pacing logic so having random things just happen out of nowhere with no narrative connecting tissue is going to wreck the whole story potentially if you want randomization and traditional narrative try a hybrid model either have the narrative be modular and easy to shift around or have the randomization be light and subordinate to the narrative a good example of this can be found in Monster prom where the goal is to ask a monster out to prom there is a chemistry system where their attraction is based

on whether you have high stats in the traits they like but the scenes and challenges where you build those stats and traits are largely randomized every time so if you end up in the wrong encounters you might be going stag so that's one approach the chemistry Casino the other is to fake randomization a rigged Casino if you will and this is where narrative really comes in because even if the player can just keep picking the right option and locking a guaranteed Romance the narrative and other systems can make the relationship feel like luck and yes some people will filter it out and post a walk through but you can ensure that those that go in blind still experience that feeling of gambling with their heart or loins so how do you do that but one of the easiest things to do is to hide everything more specifically hide immediate feedback for romance actions don't indicate the right choices of what the NPCs think or like or think keep players in the dark the way real people are in the dark when they first

start dating someone let them yes let them stumble let them experiment the uncertainty drives tension and that tension is what you can tap into to power your romantic and sexual tension now the most obvious ways to hide things obviously is the UI making sure that there's no Hearts no pop-ups no you know anything like that um but there is also feedback like that to hide and avoid in writing in many romances the dialogue gives explicitly clear feedback whether the player's romantic interest is reciprocated or not but what if your player flirted and instead of that the NPC just raised an eyebrow smiled a little bit and changed the subject here are your players going oh my God what does it mean which you know it's kind of like real dating feels sometimes so where format and scope allow lean on things like body language that can be ambiguous and subtle other ways to make non-random romance systems feel random there's the always the old will they won't they Dynamic but

writing it in a way that makes they won't feel like an equally likely outcome you could try approaching it like a sexy romantic whodunit only in this case the mystery isn't the identity of the killer but the nature of the feelings involved and write the eventual connection not as inevitable even if it secretly is but as a lucky win or a little miracle and that can mean themes of motifs of happy chance and sexy coincidence or it could just mean writing to capture that feeling of jumping out of a plane and finding out that yes oh my God your parachute does in fact work in other words taking a chance making the leap of faith and it all working out in the end remember love and less can sometimes be uncertain and confusing and possibly even terrifying but that makes the successes all the sweeter to see this in action I highly recommend checking out the visual novel first bite because it's great example of random feeling narrative hiding a non-random chemistry card tower it's an erotic

Gothic horror dating Sim about vampires where you impress and attract them and they will have very hot vampire sex with you and if you fail to impress them they're going to eat you it's the Dark Souls of dating Sims it's tense and part of what makes it tense is that although there are right choices you can't really guess what they are and you can't always trust what the vampire's responses are are they smiling because they like you or because they're toying with you the danger intention make the sex hotter and the happy ending feels like you just won the lottery so friends writers narrative designers I came to bury kindness coins not to praise them but new things can Sprout from that soil or you know emerge like a zombie whatever these two models are in no way the only options for romantic and erotic narrative design and there you can probably point out to games that are already using them at least to some degree but I hope they'll still be useful Frameworks for you all um I feel like they're great ways to take this tarnished kindness coin Dynamic and reforge it with writing and

narrative design into something better and I also feel like they're great ways to tell different stories about Love and Desire whether it's those forces as Unstoppable or whether it's just little impossible daily Miracles both Visions can be beautiful and compelling it just falls on you and your team to decide which works best for your game so to sum up go for chemistry not Bland niceness give your NPC's Agency use every game system to tell love and sex stories explore the design and narrative differences between Randomness and predictable outcomes keep creating and supporting gleefully simple shallow wish fulfillment and create and support content with more complicated realistic Visions Design Systems to make heart race right moments that launch a thousand ships and create stories about sex and love that take flight thank you very much if you're interested in the talk Farin the book or anything else I'd love to chat or you can reach me by email Twitter DMS LinkedIn or

friend me on Discord check out my book at the store and have a wonderful and a safe GDC thank you very much [Music]