For some players, a dating system in a game can be a big selling point. Baldur’s Gate 3, for instance, lets you live in a sexy fantasy where you spend your adventure flirting with your very attractive companions between fights. If you’re persistent enough, you’ll eventually be rewarded for that with a steamy love scene. Entire fandoms, ones that pump out adult fan art and fiction, have risen from that kind of fantasy wish fulfillment.
If you’re a player like Lucy Blundell, that experience can be very different. Blundell is the developer behind One Night Stand and Videoverse, a pair of visual novels that touch on dating culture in different ways. She also identifies as gray-ace, a nuanced identity within the asexual spectrum. For her, dating in games that treat sexual intimacy as the end goal can be more alienating than fun. Communicating that discomfort can be challenging, though, because asexuality is an often misunderstood identity that’s underrepresented in media.
Blundell is hoping to change that. Her latest PC game, revealed on International Asexuality Day, is Ace & Aro: Heart-to-Heart. It may look like a dating sim at first glance, but it’s actually a compact visual novel where you attend a friendly meetup for asexual and aromantic people. In a video interview with Polygon, Blundell explained why she felt compelled to make the project and how she hopes it will better represent the experience of people who are too often left out of games.
“It’s a game just about trying to build a bit of acceptance,” Blundell told Polygon.
The project may sound a little surprising if you’re familiar with Blundell’s previous work. After all, her 2016 debut, One Night Stand, takes place the morning after a hook-up. It’s very much a dissection of casual sex, something you might not associate with asexuality if you’re not familiar with the full scope of what that spectrum entails.
“I like to say it’s a game about sex that doesn’t have any sex,” Blundell said. “It’s about everything else around it that no one ever talks about.”
Blundell now considers One Night Stand as a game told through an asexual lens, but at the time, she had yet to come to terms with her own identity. She went on a journey of questioning and doubt, struggling to square the fact that she engaged with sex, but didn’t have as strong a pull towards it as other female friends she spoke to. It took a cartoon to help her realize where she stood.
“I think I just turned 30 and I was watching BoJack Horseman,” Blundell said. “Todd Chavez comes out as asexual throughout that. And I think that was the first time I’d seen asexual representation. Good representation. He just felt so uncomfortable, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s me!’ At the time, I rejected it. Sex has always felt like a bit of a weird issue, but a hurdle I had gotten over. I was kind of in denial for a couple of years.”
That instinct is understandable, considering that there aren’t a ton of examples of asexuality across media. There especially aren’t a ton of examples to draw on in video games outside of The Outer Worlds’ Parvati. The lacking representation means that it’s easy for people to assume that an asexual person is one that doesn’t have sex, full stop. That’s not always the case. The gray-ace designation, for instance, represents those who fall in between the sexual and asexual spectrums. That can mean that they still do have and enjoy sex, but don’t have the same drive as others. Intimacy can look very different to people who wear the label. The misconceptions around asexuality and aromanticism are what inspired Blundell to make Ace & Aro: Heart-to-Heart.
“Some asexuals are sex positive. They do want to talk about it. They do sometimes want to joke about it,” Blundell explained. “But there are also aces who are sex-repulsed that don’t want to talk about it… Discussing aromanticism, that’s even more misunderstood. It’s very often in media that the villain is the guy that is a serial killer and he can’t feel love. And that trope happens so often and it’s really damaging. I’ve known a couple of aromantic people in my life and they’re just quiet people that just want to get about their life and just kind of live on their own and not hurt anyone.”
I’m creating things; I really wish I was part of the solution.
Video games especially struggle to understand and welcome players from those spectrums. Like Blundell, I also identify as gray-ace. My experience playing games like Baldur’s Gate 3 is very different from my peers as a result. While I’ve seen colleagues hoot and holler over the RPG’s sex scenes, I found it off-putting that my companions would take every opportunity to relentlessly flirt with me and try to quickly lead me towards a sexual relationship. It’s hard to get close to them without the game funneling you towards a very specific climax, a writing detail that might go unnoticed if you’re not looking at the game from an asexual perspective.
“Mass Effect is one of the better games for romance that I’ve played,” Blundell said. “I romanced Liara in one playthrough, and Garrus in another. With Garrus, you go on a sniping session with him at some point. That scene was way better to me than any kissing or sexual stuff. Sometimes I don’t mind sex in a game if we’ve had other stuff as well, but if it’s just this is the end point and we fade to black and well done, mission accomplished, that’s the end of the relationship… That’s really dull. I just find it really boring. The older that I’m getting, the more that I understand myself and come to terms with my asexuality, the more I am choosing the friend options in games.”
So, what does it look like to build a game that’s inclusive of those identities? Blundell has thought about that quite a bit over her career, even if she’s never released an actual dating simulator.
“When I first decided to be an indie dev, I started making a dating sim that I never released because it was just getting so big and I couldn’t deal with it,” Blundell said. “But I wanted to make one because I’m always disappointed. I’m just always like, ‘Oh, they’re just so tropey.’ I’m just disappointed because I really like romance and I really crave it and I want a dating sim that meets my needs. It’s more about being there for each other, maybe physical touch, not sexual. The little acts of kindness, like sitting down and playing a game with someone, those kinds of moments really shining.”
Blundell started to model what that can look like with 2023’s Videoverse. The visual novel tells the story of a community that interacts through a fictional video game console’s internal social network, one that closely resembles the Wii U’s Miiverse. The game centers around a teenager named Emmett who forms a bond with another user, Vivi. Players can choose to turn that into a full relationship, and Blundell also designed an asexual route that lets the two enjoy a different kind of intimacy. But even then, Blundell felt like she could still do more.
“Whilst doing Videoverse, I was a bit like, I’ve made more of a heterosexual, straight romance here,” she said. “I’m creating things; I really wish I was part of the solution. I wish I was making things for ace and aro players that I’m always hungry for. Why aren’t I doing this?”
Between working on updates and porting Videoverse, she began developing Ace & Aro: Heart-to-Heart. The visual novel, which Blundell estimates will take around two hours to complete, takes players to a meetup for ace- and aro-identifying people at a barcade. The game has you mingling with people, learning both their personal narratives and the nuances of their varying identities. It’s a slice-of-life representation of a very real kind of meetup in the ace and aro communities that are rarely, if ever, depicted in media.
“I know a lot of people just don’t have access to these things, whether it’s language barriers or just geographical location,” she said. “So I thought about making a game version of it with people that you could talk to. And instead of it being just asking Google or something, we hear stories of five different characters and how each of them are different and how they all come to kind of asexuality or romanticism in different ways. Some of them later in life, some of them have kind of always known.”
While there is one romanceable character in the game, the end goal isn’t to pair off. Instead, Blundell is aiming to model different examples of intimacy that don’t get shown in media. For example, the barcade is full of minigames, including cabinets with playable arcade games. If you connect with someone, you might end up inviting them to play with you. That might not seem very special to some, but for someone who identifies as asexual, that act can be as meaningful as a kiss.
For Blundell, Ace & Aro: Heart-to-Heart can ideally serve two functions. One one hand, she hopes it can leave an underserved group of players feeling seen and understood. But for those who don’t identify as ace or aro — and know very little about either — there’s room for an overdue teaching moment. The game even lets players set if they’re a-spec or not from the beginning, offering a nonjudgmental option to attend the meetup as a total newcomer. Blundell hopes that the open invitation can pique some curiosity in players who want to learn.
“It’s about understanding that everyone is different,” she said. “For some reason when it comes to sex, everyone’s like, ‘Oh, to be happy and successful in a great relationship, you have to have sex.’ I totally disagree. Every relationship is completely different. That may be someone’s take on it, but it’s not everyone else’s. It’s just about opening that box.”
