It’s been a long time since I last went on a date. Even so, I wasn’t expecting Robert to move so fast.

Sure, he’s my type – casual, confident, gruff. But just this afternoon I was head over heels for newly buff Craig, who I hadn’t seen since college. Then my daughter kicks me out of the house so I don’t embarrass her friends and I head to the nearest bar.

Robert buys me two whiskies, takes me home and is tugging at my belt before I know what I’m clicking. A box pops up in the corner of my screen: “Achievement: Bad dad”.

Written by Vernon Shaw and Leighton Gray, is the unlikely hit of the summer. The game is an interactive story in which you guide a single dad through romantic encounters with other single dads. In July it topped the charts on Steam, the biggest online store for video games.

Dream Daddy has hit the mainstream, but there are hundreds more dating sims listed on Steam and stores like Itch.io, a site that lets anyone upload and sell games they have made. Dating sims have been popular in Japan for some time, but in the last few years they have found new audiences in the West.

In most of these games, you click your way through on-screen text, making simple choices about what to say and where to go. The aim is to find things out about potential suitors so you can sweet-talk them into liking you. There’s a collector’s mentality to it – you’ve gotta date them all. But many also have unexpected emotional depths.

Romantic Boogaloo

Dating sims are romantic novels in video game form, manga mixed with Mills & Boon. Many are childish, saccharine and superficial. But skim the lists and you can find titles that cater to everyone: Lads in distress, Hot or bot and Blood for the Blood God: A Dating Sim.

One called Rankr lets you play with a fake dating app, making matches and chatting with characters. Another lets you date sharks, and in Hatoful Boyfriend, a Japanese game that has set hearts fluttering around the world, you play as a teenage girl looking for love in a school for pigeons.

Amanda Cosmos, who works at New York-based games studio Dots, is a dating sim aficionado – in June, she organised , her second game jam focusing on games that explore romantic relationships. She thinks most people in the West got into dating sims through games company Bioware.

Bioware, based in Edmonton, Canada, is the studio behind the blockbuster role-playing games in the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series. These games are filled with hundreds of storylines and epic quests that put the fate of the world – or galaxy – in your hands. But they are also the first mainstream games to let you hook up with your sidekicks, some of which are talked about online like celebrity heartthrobs. The fact that Fenris is an elf and Garrus and Liara are aliens just makes them more attractive.

It’s the stuff of teenage daydreams. Out earlier this year, Persona 5 is another rich roleplaying game in which you can spend hundreds of hours playing as a 17-year-old school kid making friends and battling demons. You can also sink much of that time into seducing several of your teachers.

But dating sims can deal with more serious issues. “It’s a common misconception that dating sims are only light-hearted titillation,” says Frankfurt-based developer , who goes by the online alias Kinmoku. “Many look fun, cute and silly on the outside but are often sincere, difficult or even dark.”

Loquacious pigeons

Dream Daddy is as much about your relationship with your daughter, who you have raised alone after the death of her mother, than it is about chatting up other dads, for example. When I slink home from Robert’s house the next morning, my daughter cooks me bacon and eggs to ease my hangover. The reversal of our roles says a lot about our life together.

The awkward aftermath of a reckless encounter is interesting enough that Blundell made a whole game about it. In One night stand you wake up in a stranger’s bed and have to work out who she is and what happened the night before by piecing together clues you find in her room – without poking around too much and getting kicked out for being a creep.

Blundell got the idea for the game one morning when she saw a man sitting opposite her on the tram. “He looked hungover, ill and full of shame,” she says. She wondered if he was on his way home from a one night stand. “It’s something that happens to a lot of people but it’s rarely spoken about.”

The game lets people explore their feelings about such encounters. Some players have written to her to say that the game helped them reflect on their own experiences.

Hatoful Boyfriend similarly lets you explore feelings. Japanese developer and manga artist Hato Moa has said she made a game about pigeons simply because she likes them – she keeps pigeons and posts pictures of them on social media. But, ultimately, who or what you’re flirting with doesn’t matter. These pigeons are attractive because their conversation fizzes.

If you date all the pigeons – which takes multiple play-throughs – Hatoful Boyfriend has a secret ending and the game takes an abrupt turn away from pigeon fancying. You find yourself in an apocalyptic setting where everyone is going to die unless you save them and you finally find out why you’re a human in a school for pigeons.

“It goes way deeper into explaining the silly premise than you expect it to,” says Cosmos. “It starts to hurt. You’re like, ‘Wow, I really care about these pigeons, I hope they’re ok’.”

Elegant like Escher

Consistently weird

There’s not much to do in . I’m sitting in a diner watching as a waitress drops the bill on the table and my FBI partner gets up to leave. I pick up the bill, then – jump!

I’m standing outside a house watching as a man opens the door and my partner holds up her badge. I hold up my own, then – jump!

I’m watching as my partner prepares to question the grieving parents. I walk down the corridor to the missing teenager’s bedroom. There’s a wardrobe, a false panel and a hidden journal, then – jump!

Sometime later, I awake in the night to find an eerie red glow under my door and a bison by the bed.

Virginia is a game you play by watching rather than doing. You can move forward and look around, but there are only ever one or two objects with which you can interact in each area. What’s more, nobody talks. The game plays out like a silent film, with startling cuts between scenes that wrench your character out of your control and put her down somewhere else.

Using tricks lifted directly from TV and film, the game creates an experience closer in effect and tone to David Lynch thrillers such as Twin Peaks or Lost Highway than to other games. The result is delightful and disorienting, leaving you puzzling over the story and the motivations of your character.

Released last month by two-person UK studio Variable State, Virginia is billed as a “play” in its opening credits – a term that suggests both active participation and the passive experience of sitting in a theatre. “I think we were nervous to refer to it as a game,” says Jonathan Burroughs. “But I think now I’d prefer not to be ashamed about that.”

A fresh challenge

Burroughs and co-developer Terry Kenny met when working on an unreleased game at artificial intelligence firm DeepMind, before the company was bought by Google in 2014. Each had a history of working on blockbuster action games such as Battlefield and Grand Theft Auto, and Burroughs says he and Kenny wanted to do something different: “We were both slightly jaded.”

Other games have told stories by dropping players into an environment in which they must piece together a narrative themselves as they explore. For example, in Gone Home, made by The Fullbright Company in Portland, Oregon, you wander around an empty house picking up notes and puzzling over clues that gradually reveal what happened to your character’s family.

But whereas Gone Home lets you pick your way through a story by yourself, Virginia constantly urges you onwards – walk here, click there – and asks you to do little more than look. “By paring this stuff back as far as possible, there can be a more honest marriage between the actions that the character performs and the themes of the story,” says Burroughs.

Yet the most striking thing about Virginia is its use of cinematic editing techniques. Burroughs and Kenny were inspired by Thirty Flights of Loving, a game that takes about 15 minutes to complete released in 2012 by Brendan Chung at in Culver City, California. Chung studied film before making games and brought the techniques with him.

Thirty Flights of Loving used edits such as jump cuts – sequential shots spliced together to give the impression of passing time – and smash cuts, in which one scene is abruptly swapped for another for narrative effect. “This is fundamental vocabulary in film and television, but it was unseen in games up to that point,” says Burroughs. “It expanded the possibility for storytelling in games a great deal.”

Blurring the lines

Virginia takes the tricks used in Chung’s experimental vignette and deploys them in the video-game equivalent of a feature-length film. But after stripping away the freedom to explore and interact with the game’s world, what’s left? Why not just make a film in the first place?

It all comes down to the small amount of interaction the game does give you. Controlling a character in a game – even in a limited way – can make you identify with their point of view. This can trigger different emotional responses to those you get from watching a film.

“As immersive and involving as a film can be, you still feel like an observer,” says Burroughs. “It’s a different experience when you’re the one driving the pace of the scenes and making the decisions that will move the story forwards.”

Burroughs hopes that others will follow and explore this new territory, potentially mapping out an entirely new way to tell stories. “There’s an opportunity to create things that blur the line between games and film in this fuzzy middle ground,” he says.

Just how blurred those lines will be remains to be seen. Millions of people like to watch others play games on video-streaming sites such as YouTube and Twitch. Will people want to play a film-like game if they have already watched someone else play it?

“I do worry that this will shape the kind of games that are viable for commercial release. But, to a fault, Virginia was made with no particular commercial considerations and it’s found an audience,” says Burroughs.

“I take great comfort in the idea of games being as varied and strange as possible,” he adds. “I’m all for people making more weird things.”

Where are all the robots?

Complex dilemmas

Carebot dystopia

My fingers move in slow circles, gently at first. Chunky pink and red pixels flush under my touch. The music builds.

I’ve never done this on a bus before. As I stroke the screen of my phone I’m hyper aware of the people to my left and the woman behind me.

I get a rhythm going, learning what makes the ambient sounds swell and soar – and avoiding the rushed, rough strokes that bring everything to a halt. The beat kicks in, the colours pulse. I’m masturbating my phone.

is a game made by Andrea Hasselager and Patrick Jarnfelt, the pair behind two-person Danish studio Lovable Hat Cult. Last month Apple banned the game from its app store. “We were told the game contained excessively objectionable and crude content,” says Jarnfelt. “But what’s crude? It’s just abstract pixels. Just the idea of touching a sexual organ was a problem.”

Jarnfelt and Hasselager are at the centre of a growing community of developers who are making games that explore issues around sex and sexuality. They help run the annual Lyst conference, where developers meet to discuss and show off games such as Breakup – a VR experience in which you endlessly repeat the last few moments of a relationship –Ěýand Pocket Jockey – in which players make other players’ phones vibrate.

The third Lyst event took place in Hamar, Norway, last weekend. “The community is growing, we’re getting more and more participants,” says Hasselager. “Love, romance and sex are some of the most natural human emotions but they are portrayed so badly in games,” she says.

Pixelated porn

La Petite Mort is not the pair’s first game about sex. In 2008 the pair were co-creators of Dark Room Sex Game, in which to reach a musical climax. “You had to look each in the eye and communicate through body language,” says Jarnfelt.

The idea for La Petite Mort came to Jarnfelt when he was playing around with cellular automata–Ěýabstract models that can simulate complex systems, such as living things, just by following a simple set of rules. Jarnfelt got his automata to respond to touch – and immediately saw the erotic potential.

To make the game’s graphics Jarnfelt and Hasselager filmed the genitals of actual women, then pixelated the footage to such a degree that it is almost unrecognisable. “We’ve had people play through the game without realising what they were touching,” says Hasselager.

People play the game quite differently. When Jarnfelt tested it with a group of male friends, they all looked over the player’s shoulder. They were checking out each other’s technique, he says. “It became almost competitive.”

Others prefer to go off and sit by themselves. “The images are in your head,” says Hasselager. “But this is why it can become embarrassing to watch somebody else.”

Risky business

New York-based developer Robert Yang has also explored intimacy –Ěýand the awkwardness that often goes with it –Ěýin dozens of games. Yang makes games about gay men that are often tongue in cheek and funny, but they address serious issues.

Where mainstream games include sex at all, it is often presented as part of the game’s story as a reward or a goal for the player. But Yang presents intimacy as a process in itself, one that is inherently risky. “What if you tell someone you love them, and they reject you? Or what if you want to have sex, but you’re terrible at it?”

“When we think of sex as a process laden with tension, rather than a conclusion, it suddenly opens up a lot of emotional language in games,” he says.

Yang explores important themes that few others do, says writer and game designer Cara Ellison, “but he’s paid a huge price for it.”

Like Jarnfelt and Hasselager, Yang has had his games banned from certain online distribution services. He cannot sell his work through Steam, the largest online games store and he is not allowed to use the payment processing service PayPal.

Such companies have a relatively conservative policy about what they deem pornographic. There is a line that defines what forms of sexual content companies permit developers to include in games, but it’s blurry, he says. “And they can shift the line without warning. Even asking for donations puts me in danger of getting banned from PayPal.”

Grown-up games

We have a problem with prudishness when it comes to games, says Ellison. Sexual content is more common in films and on TV than ever and books like Fifty Shades of Grey are mainstream bestsellers, yet attitudes about sexual content in games have not caught up.

Many people still think games are for kids, says Jarnfelt. “It’s an antiquated view, but it has stuck in people’s minds and the rules have formed around it.”

Ellison feels similarly. She also thinks many people are still uneasy about games because of their interactive element. “People are slightly suspicious of that still, they think it’s much more influential to play a sex scene than merely watch one.”

But that’s ridiculous, she says. There is more to interactivity than pressing buttons to move hips, she says. In Yang’s game Hurt Me Plenty, for example, a player is locked out if they violate their partner’s trust. “It’s perfect for understanding exactly how important consideration of another body is,” says Ellison.

“There are lots of games coming out pushing the boundaries,” says Jarnfelt. “They’re not getting widely released but they’re getting made and that’s the first step.”

Games are obsessed with violence because players find it entertaining. But we also like sex, says Yang. “I suspect that sex is the only other cultural force in the universe that is sufficiently weird, scary, funny and sad to dethrone violence as the default interactive experience.”

Hasslager has a similar view. “It would not be obvious for me to make a game about war because I’ve never been in a war,” she says.

Tech all over

Breaking the dystopia

A calmer world

Before teeing off, I take a few seconds to line up the shot. Do I go for the cheeseburgers on the counter or the jars of mayonnaise on the shelf? It doesn’t really matter because the ball’s on fire. I hit it and half the kitchen explodes.

The shot ricochets off the wall and cupboards spill their contents. Tins of soup topple, saucepans clatter. Stacked plates crash to the floor and food splatters the ceiling. My score climbs. I get a huge bonus for smashing a hidden golden ketchup bottle. When the breadcrumbs settle, I look for the flag. It’s an easy putt: off the dishwasher, over the upturned trolley and into the hole.

. It’s a game of trick shots and high scores rather than five irons and bogeys. “Golf’s boring,” says Three Fields co-founder Alex Ward. But what really sets it apart is its simulation of Newtonian physics – the most realistic ever seen in a video game. Everything in the game’s environments – which range from kitchens to petrol stations to palaces – can be knocked over, spilled and smashed in a completely life-like way.

The game is set for release in June. I’m visiting Three Fields’ small studio of 11 people based in Petersfield, UK, to try out an unfinished build. Nearly everyone at the company used to work at Criterion Games, a UK studio best known for its award-winning Burnout series – racing games in which crashing was often more fun than winning. “High speed action with lots of destruction, that’s our background,” says Phil Maguire. “Dangerous Golf is Burnout with a golf ball.”

Render it quick

Other sports games aim for an accurate simulation of physics. Football games like Fifa, for example, go to great lengths to get the equations that model drag on a kicked ball just right, so that its flight through the air feels familiar and predictable to players. But Dangerous Golf is modelling thousands of objects at once. “It is terrifically complex,” says team member Paul Ross. “That’s why you haven’t seen it in any other video game until now.”

The team began by studying scenes in action films like Inception and X Men: Days of Future Past. For example, . “At the end of the scene there’s a massive mess,” says Maguire. “That was a huge inspiration. It got us thinking, how far can we push games in that direction?”

Films tend to look a lot more realistic than games, but they have it easy. Computer generated scenes – like the kitchens in X Men or Dangerous Golf – are created by crunching an enormous amount of data, which describes the positions of objects, the direction they are moving, the lighting effects and so on. The process is called rendering. For a film, render farms will run overnight, taking weeks to produce a second of footage, says Ward.

That’s fine for films. A scripted scene may only need to be rendered once. Not so in games, where the screen has to respond to your actions immediately. Instead of weeks, it may need to render a scene 30 times a second. And to get the data needed for each scene, Dangerous Golf first simulates the physical interactions of up to several thousand objects. “Most games – even big budget ones – have maybe four or five objects active at a time,” says Ward.

Faking flaws

The team is using techniques developed by Matthias Muller and Miles Macklin, researchers at graphics chip maker Nvidia, to model and different materials deform or crack. First, they model the physical properties of each object – its mass, centre of gravity and friction. “We looked up the densities of a lot of materials to make sure we had them correct,” says Ross. Fluids are modelled as tiny particles. There are about 5000 particles in a bowl of soup.

When a player takes a shot, the simulation tracks the energy transfer from the golf ball into the objects it hits – a wine bottle, say – and calculates how it would move or fracture. Then it does the same for any object hit by shards from the wine bottle and so on, in a domino effect across potentially thousands of pieces.

But even that isn’t good enough. “It looks too perfect,” says Ross. The simulation must also account for the tiny differences between real objects. “Every plate that’s manufactured is slightly different,” he says. “It has different numbers of atoms, it has a slightly different mass. We had to take these little differences and put them into the simulation.”

Why go to such lengths? Many video games look the part but the realism is spoiled if the physics is just slightly off. More detailed physics models could make games even more immersive – even if it is just to smash up some crockery.

Smashing fantasy

“It’s just a bit of stupid fun,” says Ward. But destroying things is cathartic, he says. Many people have fantasies about knocking things off supermarket shelves or smashing priceless statues. For that feeling to come across in a game it has to look and feel totally believable.

In the last few years games have reached a very high level of fidelity, says Ross, especially with techniques like photogrammetry, where many pictures of the real world are stitched together and used to model virtual replicas. It’s not always convincing, however. “Everything looks real but the world is static.”

On to the next hole. I line up a shot that takes out most of a public toilet. It may be stupid fun, but Dangerous Golf is pushing for greater realism than we have ever seen in games – environments that are not only photorealistic, but where things break when you knock them over. “We’ve got fully destructible urinals,” says Ward.

Trust issues

Weighty matters

Oiling the cogs

Something odd is happening on President Street in Brooklyn. While solar panels on the roofs of terraced houses soak up sun, a pair of computers connected to the panels quietly crunch numbers. First, they count how many electrons are being generated. Then, they write that number to a blockchain. Welcome to the future of energy exchange.

This project, run by a startup called Transactive Grid, is the first version of a new kind of energy market, operated by consumers, which will change the way we generate and consume electricity.

Transactive Grid aims to enable people to buy and sell renewable energy to their neighbours. To deal in energy at the moment, you have to go through a central company like Duke Energy in the US or National Grid in the UK, or one of their resellers.

Transactive can skip this central authority because its energy market is built on a technology called blockchain. First used to underpin the bitcoin currency, a blockchain is a cryptographically secure list of transactions. The list is stored on every computer in the system, and is continuously updated as each transaction is completed. The list for President Street is built using blockchain software called Ethereum. It deals with buying and selling electrons generated by solar panels. No central authority is in control: the computers monitor each other to stop fraud.

Buy and sell

The first devices were installed on President Street a few weeks ago. On one side of the street are five homes that produce some of their own energy through solar power. On the other side are five consumers interested in buying excess energy from their neighbours.

Lawrence Orsini, co-founder of Transactive explains that the blockchain makes it easy for anyone to set up and enforce contracts, with the transaction following automatically.

“You don’t have the billing components around it, you don’t have the infrastructure losses or the accounting losses in the system,” he says. Down the line, the company plans to build an app which lets residents set personal preferences for the distribution of the energy they produce. One homeowner might decide to sell all their excess energy for maximum profit, for example, while another could choose to donate a portion to a low-income area.

Community benefits

Either way, the energy and the money goes to benefit the community, says Orsini, not the large centralised power company. “When you buy energy from the community, the money goes back to the community.”

“Every kilowatt you buy, you pay for network. If you can cut out the middle man and do the trade directly, you don’t have to pay for the wires,” says Philipp Grunewald of the University of Oxford.

But the might of utility companies makes the road to autonomy rocky. Grunewald says that at one point solar panel users in Spain were paying less than their fair share for grid access. When a charge was introduced to account for this difference, some were forced off the grid entirely, which is bad for the system as a whole.

Despite hiccups like this, Grunewald sees the potential in projects like President Street. “People are disgruntled with their utility companies, and like this idea of becoming autonomous,” he says.

Disaster-proof your grid

Decentralised systems may also prove more resilient than a centralised grid in natural disasters such as hurricane Sandy, allowing people to rely on a local microgrid when the major infrastructure fails.

Other companies are hot on Transactive’s heels. , based in Vienna, Austria, wants to bring the same decentralised energy market to developing countries, to help distribute solar power. MIT start-up SolarCoin pays people with an alternative digital currency for generating solar energy, one coin for 1 megawatt-hour of solar electricity.

With blockchain, “it’s like the early days of the internet,” says Greentech Media CEO Scott Clavenna. When the internet was first introduced, it was hard to conceive of the drastic impact it would have on the world. “We’ve got all the parts to do some really interesting things,” he says.

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