Looking for Love in the Uncanny Valley

Loving a copy of the girl next door

I once watched a film called Welcome to Marwen. It starred Steve Carell and it was about this guy who built a doll-sized set of a European town during the Second World War called Marwen, in his backyard.

This man, Mark Hogancamp, had been badly beaten and had no memory of who he was before this attack. He was using the stories he constructed in Marwen to help him deal with his trauma.

In Marwen, he created a village and populated it with dolls that resembled his friends. He had his own doll and he even made dolls of the men who had attacked him. He used the dolls to stage scenes, many of them violent, that he then photographed.

In the film, as well as the documentary on the same topic called Marwencol, he reveals to one married woman friend of his that he has made a doll of her and that her doll and his doll are engaged to get married. She told him that that was going too far.

But imagine that for a while. A man takes a doll that resembles a woman that he knows, and he dresses this doll in the same clothes that the woman wears, and he puts makeup on the doll so that it more closely resembles this woman. He also has his own doll that is maybe a more handsome version of himself.

He then uses these dolls to enact an imaginary romance with this woman. Is there anything inherently wrong with this? The same thing is undoubtedly occurring without the use of dolls in the masturbatory fantasies of countless men and women. What makes it weird is telling the person about whom you are fantasizing.

The whole using dolls call for a level of obsession that probably isn’t too healthy, though of course in the case of Mark Hogancamp, that obviously wasn’t the case.

But let’s suppose that we could do away with physical dolls and simply create virtual copies of those we desire and have them interact with our own avatars in a virtual world. That seems somewhat less obsessive than actually purchasing and dressing up dolls.

Illusion, a Japanese erotic video game company is the industry leader in making erotic 3D games. The last two games produced by Illusion have been Honey Select 2 Libido (May 29, 2020) and Koikatsu Sunshine (August 27, 2021). Each of these games includes a character creation tool.

Let us suppose that someone had an attraction to the actress Anya Taylor-Joy.

Let us suppose that rather than the glamorous version of this actress he preferred to fantasize about the character that she played in the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit (2020).

The first thing this person would have to do is to find some images of the actress and attempt to create a facsimile using the character creation tools provided by the game.

The game Honey Select 2 produces more realistic of the two programs. The image below is an effort to copy the photo above. Obviously, there are limitations as to the clothing and poses available.

While Honey Select 2 tries to provide photorealistic virtual characters, Koikatsu Sunshine goes a different route. Its character creation tools are designed to make anime-styled characters.

The image below is a copy of the photo above from the Queen’s Gambit.

Once you have created the physical representation of your character there is the question of personality. In HS2 there are 14 different personalities to choose from while in KS there are 40.

This highlights the difference between these games. HS2 has realistic graphics but rather limited gameplay. It is set in a gentlemen’s club and so the game is less concerned with dating and romance. KS, on the other hand, is set on a tropical resort island that is exclusively for women, but an exception has been made in your case.

The difference in focus is due to the sophistication of the graphics. HS2 has great graphics, but it is rather simplistic in design when compared to KS which is set in an open world environment with as many as 40 different characters with whom to interact.

The differences in focus become clearer when we continue with creating our character. First, we must choose a personality from those available. Each personality is voiced by a different Japanese actress, in Japanese, naturally. The game has been translated to English so nearly all the dialog is translated in the subtitles.

In HS2, after choosing the character's personality, you must set the character’s mindset. The Mindset has three sub-categories. The first of these is labeled Traits which has eight possible personality traits from which you may choose one or none.

The second menu is labeled Mentality and it reflects how the character feels about the player’s avatar. These settings can change during gameplay based on the actions of the player. This shifting of mentalities is the objective in many of the game’s achievements, which when reached, unlock various gameplay options.

There are twelve options. The game divides sexual interactions into four types. These are love, hate, dominance, and pleasure. Each type has three possible levels for lowest to highest. For example, curious, affectionate, and lovestruck are the three levels of love.

The third menu is a list of 10 possible sexual traits. These settings all have an effect on gameplay.

The gameplay, in HS2, is that you start in your room. You can go out in the hall and scroll through a list of rooms where you might find a character or two that you can interact with or you can go to the lobby where you can pick the character and room that you want. The character will respond to you based on the settings you selected.

Let’s take a look at the character creation settings found in KS. We have already seen the list of 40 possible personalities.

On the Character settings, we have the date of birth and blood type which I do not believe have any effect. We can also select the purpose of the stay.

Next, we have the character’s personality traits from which we can choose as many or as few as we wish.

Next, we have the H-scene menu. H stands for hentai which is Japanese for perverted but we can just see it here as referring to a sex scene. This lists the character’s erogenous zone as well as her boundaries.

There is also a menu where one can choose what sort of things the character is interested in doing while on vacation.

The gameplay in KS begins in your room, just as in HS2. However, rather than being in a gentlemen’s club, this game takes place on an island filled with up to 40 female characters which you can meet and talk about certain topics in the hope that they might find these topics interesting. You can also ask them to go sightseeing, shopping, or to dinner.

As you play, time passes and the game moves through four phases morning, mid-day, afternoon, evening, and night. With 40 different characters to interact with the game is more of a dating simulator than a purely erotic game.

These then are the options available in the most recent erotic video games by Illusion. Honey Select 2 offers a near-photorealistic sex simulator while Koikatsu Sunshine provides a dating simulator on a resort island with 40 different women rendered in anime style.

Both offer the tools to make 3d copies of any female one desires together with a virtual sandbox in which to play.

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