Courtesy of Hobibox. All Rights Reserved

While J-List is a success story in the cross-cultural exchange of dating-sim culture, the internet age has been a mixed blessing. As the profile of games has risen, the industry has come under increasing public scrutiny. Earlier in the year, a major controversy erupted around the game Rapelay, which was released by the Yokohama-based company Illusion in 2006. The title (whose name is a contraction of the words “rape play”) is described by its creators as a “real-time 3D groper game.” Provocative scenes include gang rape in train station bathrooms, after which victims must be convinced to have abortions.

Rapelay was created for a small segment of the domestic eroge market, and was never licensed for sale overseas. Yet when a ring of software pirates cracked the game and sold it through Amazon’s UK website, the media backlash that followed was swift and vicious. The game was denounced, first in the UK then in the US, and the feminist group Equality Now sent letters of protest to the publisher calling for the title to be banned. Illusion acquiesced, erasing references to the game on its website, and Amazon and eBay put a halt to sales.

Thanks in part to the controversy, Japanese lawmakers have recently proposed a bill that would outlaw underage pornography, including its animated forms. Similarly, back in 1986, rape game 177 was withdrawn from the market under government pressure. The Japan-based Ethics Organization of Computer Software, which administers ratings for videogames, scrambled on June 2 to preemptively ban “rape games.” This action is not legally binding, and used software and “amateur” (doujin) works are exempt.

For their part, dating sim makers are firing back. Minori blocked access to its website by anyone outside Japan. A message in English (cleaned up here) explains: “Intellectuals and politicians said, ‘Japanese eroge are becoming a problem in foreign countries. Therefore we should hide eroge away from foreign countries, and also its content should be limited and censored.’ OK, so we obeyed their words at once and blocked you so you stay out of trouble… If you [petition the Japanese government], we might be able to recover our freedom of speech and remove the barricade lying between us.”

Other companies are pressing on undaunted. Even as the Rapelay scandal was playing out, representatives from Hobibox, a major distributor of dating sims, traveled to the US to promote Manga Gamer.com, a site that provides fans outside Japan with translated downloads of popular products. As a sign of their high hopes for the future of the dating sim market overseas, the group attended Anime Expo in Los Angeles, where 45,000 fans gathered over the Fourth of July weekend.

“We are careful not to include the types of games getting a bad reaction overseas now,” says Holibox spokesman Junya Tamano, 34. “Dating simulators that become anime are well-known overseas, and many fans in America were coming to our booth asking about them.”

Such titles include Higurashi no Naku Koro ni and School Days, both of which went on to become mainstream hits despite being criticized by the Japanese public as too violent. The former follows a group of students as they navigate adolescent love affairs, a series of mysterious murders and growing paranoia in a fictional rural village. The latter involves a school-age love triangle that can result in murder or suicide. Both became popular TV anime and mixed-media franchises, and Manga Gamer will release the first four Higurashi games in October.

Hobibox and its partners made far more sales than expected at Anime Expo, and are now planning to attend events in France, Germany and Taiwan. Tamano stresses that the games they promote overseas will have to be easily understood—the focus is on titles that offer moving images and have no “hard” erotic content. Yet very few games produced in Japan fit the bill, he says, namely because only blue-chip titles by large makers can afford to budget for in-game animation.

As to the hard content, eroge with scenes of sexual violence represent a shrinking percentage of the dating sim market. The bestselling titles are text-heavy, mildly erotic works centered on the melodrama of young, tragic romance. One example is game maker Key’s second title, Air, originally released as a standard bishoujo game for the PC in 2000, but then reformatted for the Dreamcast and PS2 without sexual content. It eventually made it onto the PlayStation Portable and Softbank 3G cellphone before becoming a manga, anime series and theatrical film. Responding to the expanded potential, Key’s third work, Clannad, was released for general audiences and contained no sex scenes at all.

“The place of rape games in Japanese otaku culture is a minor one,” says Hiroki Azuma, 38, co-director of the Academy of Humanities in the Center for the Study of World Civilizations at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. “What’s important isn’t the images in these games, but how such images are consumed and the environment of their production.”

Azuma, who released a detailed study of dating sims in his book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, points out that many otaku play visual novel games as nakige, or “crying games,” that give them an emotional response. He argues dating sims offer patterned characters and relationships that can be consumed and produced in pursuit of a pleasant experience. The ways characters are created and approached is a distinct cultural style that in fact has very little to do with reality. Indeed, the people and interactions in dating simulator games aren’t exactly realistic.
Creators note the same thing.

“The percentage of fiction in dating simulators targeting men is higher than that of women,” says Kurahana. “The further the character or story is away from reality, the more popular it becomes.”

As dating simulator games come to the fore of Japan’s media subculture, young creators are increasingly embracing it as a form of artistic expression. There were thousands of amateur dating sim artists at the summer Comiket earlier this month. Some were making smut, others masterpieces, and most something in between. All of them were sure that it was more than pornography that so compelled them. With this ready supply of creators in Japan, and the growing demand overseas, the genre is surely here to stay.

“Dating simulators show us our dreams,” says Kurahana. “Love is a theme that has dominated entertainment from the beginning of human history. I just want to explore new ways of telling the story.”