 The dulling monotony of every day accompanied her every step. That is, until she heard his music. It was a melody sent from the heavens surely, inspiring, enlivening, enchanting with color. A serendipity and clumsiness would have it. Florence ran into this inspiration phase first, and a love story was born. Suddenly, the cloudy melancholy of her future could be wiped away like dirt on a screen. Conversation flowed with ease. It was like a puzzle of decreasing complexity solving itself. She had finally found her muse. She too shared in this creativity. The world was now her oyster. Love was the solution to her woes. Not all is easy, of course. Anxiety beckoned when he moved in. Her space crowded by accommodation. And of course, the enemy of love starts to seep in, routine. Love was a break from routine, but routine is evidence of love's maturity. Repetition turns into bitterness, resentment, and then the inevitable, grief. How could something so transcendent be reduced to tears and dread, to pangs of despair amidst the slowly resurfacing mundanity of life? Perhaps love was a lesson. A lesson that one's muse shouldn't be projected onto an ephemeral object, but located within. Love is not a fantasy, not creative inspiration, not escapism, not accommodation. It can be played with. We are the muse that plays with love. In games, we play with love. We are involved in ways other mediums don't allow. We are there with cloud as he is torn between Tifa and Aerith in Final Fantasy VII, each embodying a different aspect of the protagonist's psyche, as well as the themes of the game. We are investigating Johnny's memories of his beloved into the moon, viewing love as an abstraction from the outside. Mass Effect and RPGs give us options to romance people that we fancy. Agency invites us to fall in love ourselves. The greatest love stories are never just about love though. Pride and Prejudice is about social hierarchy, as much as it is about Elizabeth and Darcy, and Casablanca is about the selflessness that love requires in letting go and fighting for something greater. Romeo and Juliet was about two sides of a conflict, reconciling over this tragedy. What love is though has perplexed us for eons. Plato thought it existed in different guises. The Romantic Centrubitors thought it might be sully if indulged too enthusiastically. But Shakespeare said it best when he said, It is the star to every wandering bark whose words unknown although his height be taken. Love is the north star guiding a ship. We don't know what it's made of, but it's real as anything in the world. Interactivity gives us a way of expanding this repertoire of themes, but there is something strangely paradoxical in the way we often portray love in games. We suggest that it can be reduced to some kind of algorithm. Psychologist and sociologist of love argues it arises when friendship and lust fuse, when decency and kindness marry with an impulsive desire for another. But can love be reduced this way? To an algorithm. When we decide to romance someone in Mass Effect 2, we look up the optimal decisions to make, like a pickup artist does when he devises algorithms to seduce women. Love becomes strangely mechanical when portrayed in this way. We have instrumentalized love by reducing it to mathematics. Its worth has become known. And what do we seek in many of these games? Well, that moment of climactic love making. Love is being perceived through the lens of satisfying some mating protocol. This is why we must stress that playing with love is not reducing it to a game. Games have fixed rules, but play is free to explore. Game designers have crafted elements of love in fascinating ways. In EECO, Fumita Weda gets us to understand selflessness and love when he ties our health to Yorda, so we protect her over ourselves. Our every step must be measured with the well-being of Yorda in mind, because success in the game is tied to her. Love creates its own rules. In The Last Guardian, Trico has exhibited petrification in the face of glass ornaments throughout the game, but he leaps through his fear to rescue us from certain doom. This love needs to be earned, though, slowly and painstakingly throughout the entire game, as you contend with this beast who is as uncooperative as he is endearingly hybridized. We love what we care for, but we also care for what we love. But playing with love invites us to examine the less romanticized aspects of love as well. Uncharted 4 invites us to explore the mature but mundane love of a domestic couple. They have set aside their obligations, their goals, and allow for a space where they can listen to one another, hear each other's dreams, and, yes, play. This requires effort. It is just as easy to slip into procedure and routine when you are safe from the knowledge that your significant other will not leave you. But Elena, although the love of his life, is also holding him back from his true love, adventure, glory, and treasure. True maturity, at least the way it is depicted in the game, comes not from lies, deceit, or manipulation, or from suppressing your passions and dreams, but sharing in your dreams together, of openly communicating your hopes, your anxieties. Love has perils as well, it forces a choice. In The Witcher 3, you must choose between either Triss or Yennefer. Players are often torn between them, I know I was. Personally, I would choose Triss, but for Geralt, Yennefer seemed better. Regardless, you must make a choice. The game is chastising us for our greed, for playing it like a game that can be optimized. Love implies a morality then, a set of values that transcends instrumentality and reveals who we are as people. Love is seductive. It engulfs our senses with a fervor that overrides reason. But we must be wary not to confuse this with lust, with fantasy. In Metal Gear Solid 3, Eva seems to be the quintessential Bond girl. Of course, she reveals herself to be a double agent. We can't objectify an instrumentalizer because she has been doing that to us all along. Catherine takes this seduction and makes a game out of it. Catherine is your long-standing girlfriend, intelligent, driven, and responsible. But Catherine is our subconscious reaching out to us to simply indulge our baser instincts. We are haunted by our indiscretions in matters of the heart. But play is about love in more ways than just romance. In a famous episode involving a polar bear and a dog stalking an iceberg, the polar bear, although starving, did not eat the smaller creature, but played with it. It valued play over its instincts to survive. To do this, though, there has to be something else that love seems to require, self-handicapping. When you play a game with your little cousin, you have to sometimes let them win. You have to suppress your instinct for domination to encourage them. Just as an orchestra requires instruments to play in unison and not try to drown each other out, empathy requires you to bring yourself to where someone else is, to stop pursuing goals and to live in the moment. In heavy rain, you are playing with both your sons, a game of make-believe swordsmanship. What is the correct way to play with love here, though? Do we beat our kids, teaching them the lesson of tough love, or do we intentionally fail to make them feel better? And so love exists between the cracks. It is in the moments of levity and Prince of Persia amidst their quest to save the world. Discussions about hope, purpose, ideals, and philosophy, mixed with charm and wit and playful teasing. But like with Eco, you also rely on your companion. She saves you after every mistake you make. Ellica is as much there for the player as she's there for the Prince. Then a beautiful thing happens. You are fighting a seductress. Ellica is nowhere to be seen, though. So how do you summon her? Why you jump off a tower knowing she will save you? Because love is about dependability, about reliability, about trust. It is a leap of faith. But this aspect of love can be poisonous. Not just for ourselves, but for others. The shout of the Colossus, when Wander and ourselves slay Colossi to bring back the woman we love. We realize something else about love, that our obsessive impulse to pursue it can damn others in the world itself. It can compel us to tear down mountains and slay giant beasts. But our love for another does not usurp the welfare of others. Naughty Dog claimed the theme of the Last of Us was love, the parental love that Joel and us share for Ellie. Except this love often jeopardizes not just others, but humanity at large. In the culminating sequence of the game, Joel tears through dozens of people who would dare stand in between him and Ellie. Players are conflicted about this ending. It speaks to the paradox of love. Love is selfless, but also profoundly selfish. It is to be mired in one's own obsessive desires, as much as it is to give back. This is why Nier's ending illustrates one of the most transcendent aspects of love, self-sacrifice. Kine is vulgar, crude and often obnoxious, but she has a vitality and spirit that carries the entire game. Unfortunately, she dies, in no small part because of her love for us. But fortunately, the game gives us a way to get her back. Hours of effort it will take, multiple playthroughs. But then, we can sacrifice our save data, something we are so selfishly attached to as gamers, to let a fictional character live in a fictional story, only for us to be erased from time. This isn't Rick's sacrifice in Casablanca. This is our sacrifice in the real world. And so playing with love cannot just be about choosing one person or the other. This is just a wish fulfillment of an adolescent. It is not about algorithms of seduction, of optimization, or explicit goals of any kind. Play can explore ideas and concepts, both intrinsic to love and that transcends it, but also allows us to participate in the exploration of these ideas. Not by force, but by invitation. It requires love.