Years ago, a woman wrote online that after being beaten at home, at her lowest, she held her phone and asked: “What do I do, Li Zeyan?” Someone answered with a sneer: isn’t Bai Qi a cop? Why doesn’t he come and save you?

Li Zeyan and Bai Qi are two of the love interests in Mr Love: Queen’s Choice, Papergames’ 2017 hit. The exchange stayed with me because it shows how close these games sit to real life: the people who play them bring everything with them.

Players come from every kind of life. Some are well looked after, some stand firmly on their own, and some are going through a hard stretch and come to the game for a little comfort. Whatever their circumstances, real life doesn’t stay outside when they open the app.

About ten years ago Papergames began making romance games. They are labelled “for women”, but what they really give shape to is something everyone carries: the wish to be loved and cared for. I said the same in a job interview: the longing for love and freedom belongs to everyone. If people come in good faith to experience what love is, rather than to belittle or sexualise a character, the product fits them.

So the question for the people who design and run these games is simple. When you create a new character and launch him, what is in your heart? And why do real-world problems keep spilling into the virtual one?

Love and Deepspace launched in January 2024 with three love interests: Xavier, Zayne and Rafayel. Two more, Sylus and Caleb, joined later, and players broadly accepted them. The sixth went differently.

As in Case 01, I take the event apart in four layers (with a persona comparison inside Layer 2) and question each one in turn. The rule is the same: every layer has to explain something the layer above it can’t. If it doesn’t, I have stopped too early.

Most headlines stopped here. His rugged, Western-leaning model stood apart from the five refined leads, and memes comparing him to a footballer spread far beyond the game.

But looks can’t carry the whole explanation. Overseas, the same face drew a petition of more than 220,000 people asking for him back. Same character, opposite verdicts. Whatever decided this, it wasn’t his face.

As a player, I don’t accept that we were wrong. It was never about beauty.

Players measure a newcomer against the world they already live in. Valko had only indirect mentions in a lore section and no setup in the main story. He didn’t arrive through the story; he was dropped onto it.

His visual grammar was different too. A break in style can work, but only when the story gives a reason for it. Here nothing did. Sylus and Caleb, the two leads added after launch, had been met in the story first, and they were accepted.

A persona in a romance game is more than a job and a look. I read each lead along four lines: who he is, what bond he has with “you”, what emotional promise he makes, and how the story brought him in.

What the comparison shows

So the persona problem was not that he was a werewolf. It was where he was placed: in an occupied corner, with no bond to the player, and introduced in a scene that cut against how the other five treat her.

In a romance game the relationship is the product, and a relationship is a promise kept over time. Players were still waiting on the five: by one count the longest-stalled main story had gone more than 500 days without an update, and many bond chapters were unfinished. A sixth lead meant a sixth claim on the same team’s time, and a card pool in which everyone they already loved became harder to draw.

Then came the voice. Answering grief with “but his eyes are shiny” told players their concern was being managed, not heard. The first apology answered the feelings and skipped the questions. Trust lost in a week took a cancellation and a permanent promise to stop the bleeding, and even that did not fully repair it.

People mocked players for this game: a socially acceptable sex product, cheap emotional value. But aren’t those part of love too? Love is complicated. It has physical desire and psychological fit, hatred and jealousy, being together and being apart.

Within that complexity, every character in the game is trying to help us repair the most original child in us. Only that child can create love. In a romance game, do we love the character? We love that child.

That is the meaning. That is the first intent.

Each of the five teaches something:

Valko arrived with a job title and a species: chairman, werewolf. What was missing was one sentence: what will loving him teach me? Without it, players didn’t see a lover. They saw a product, and they declined to pay.

A line that circulated among players makes the same point from the other side: what a character’s love means is not the money you spend on him, but whether your real life goes well.

Case 01 ended on fate: a cause settled before two people ever met, which only has to appear lightly to undo a love deeper than the sea. This game answers back. Asked whether he believes in fate, Sylus says: “信不信又怎么样，不畏惧就行了。” Believe it or not, what matters is not being afraid.

That is what players were asking the studio for. Not a new face, but proof that the love they had already been given was made with intent. Please give us hearts made free by strength and resilience, like theirs. Please give me the courage and wisdom for all of life.

This is a story about love, virtual or real.

I use the same test on Row. Every time he takes a new role in my stories, I ask what this version of him gives the reader that the others don’t.