Apparently, from a Nintendo DS game called LovePlus.12 Through its unique design and gameplay, LovePlus has driven grown men to dedicate years of their lives to its characters, including taking them on destination vacations and marrying them.3

Today, use of AI for “romantic roleplay” has begged the question of whether AI romance will become widespread.4 How can it not, when a company like Character AI deploys a conversation model that cost over $2 million to train alone?5

LovePlus offers an alternate take. Generative AI might power the engine, but the winner of this AI companion race might look more like a game than a chatbot or LLM wrapper.

How did a game played on a device no more powerful than a modern smart toaster become such a cultural force? What are the implications—for better or worse—for retentive, parasocial AI companionship today?

I found a patched English ROM of the original LovePlus, and dove in to discover its secrets.

LovePlus: Overview

The original LovePlus for the Nintendo DS was released by Konami in 2009 and exclusive to Japan. The game features three dateable characters: Rinko (younger; cold, sassy, tsundere), Manaka (same age; shy, smart, sheltered), and Nene (older; big sister energy).

You play a nameable teen male protagonist who befriends all three girls and eventually dates one. It’s set in a Japanese high school with underage characters, so obviously, the adolescent romance is at most PG-13 (all the more interesting that it attracted so many adults).6

The game is split into two parts:

1. In Part 1, which contains the core game loop, you have 100 days to get to know the girls, with the goal of receiving a “love confession” from one of them.

2. In Part 2, which is more freeform like today’s AI companions, you continue the game indefinitely with your girlfriend, going on a variety of dates and interacting with her via the mic and touchscreen.

LovePlus Part 1: An Engaging Game Loop

The lynchpin of LovePlus’s engaging design is its crystal clear game loop. In contrast, few AI companions today include a game loop, opting instead for a freeform experience with unclear goals.

For our purposes, I’ll define a game loop as:

1. Repeated decision-making

2. With feedback

3. Toward a specific goal

Decision-making

In LovePlus, each day is one game loop. Every day, the player wakes up, decides on four activities from a menu of options, plays out those activities, then goes to bed at night. The activities range from playing sports, to studying, to going out.

Feedback

Each activity changes your traits (e.g., the music activity increases charm and sensitivity, and slightly reduces intelligence), and each girl has traits they prefer (e.g., Takane likes intelligence and fitness). You quickly get a sense for their preferences and can plan your days accordingly.

Once you hit certain milestones, the girls might ask you to grab food or to walk home together. These sidequests become more frequent as you progress toward a confession, but the progression is seldom explicit—it’s up to you to read the mood of each girl, and how much they like spending time with you.

If you’re getting off track—say you’re far along with Rinko but your intelligence is still too low—she will chide you for not studying more.

Specific goal

The goal of Part 1 is to receive a love confession from one of the girls, after which you’ll gain access to Part 2, the endgame.

The confession itself is quite elaborate, and the game goes out of its way to build up to it. The night before, your character will have a bizarre wet dream about one of the girls, and will be asked to speak into the mic, saying “I love you” or promising that you won’t cheat.

The day of, she’ll pull you aside. She’ll first reminisce on meeting for the first time and all the memories since then, and finally confess her love for you. If you accept her confession, you’ll kiss for the first time, and she’ll call you by your given name (a very intimate gesture; up til then she only uses your family name).

Part 1: Takeaways for AI companions

Each day or game loop in LovePlus takes at least several minutes. For chatbots, is each message pair a loop? Each topic of conversation? Or maybe each role play scenario that has a beginning and end? Game loop design fundamentally impacts the pacing and feel of the experience.

Additionally, most AI companion experiences do not:

1. Clearly communicate what you’re working towards.

2. Clearly communicate how your actions impact progress.

They allow repeated decision-making as LLM wrappers, but within an infinitely large input space, without feedback, and toward unclear goals. Character AI isn’t designed with any feedback or goals. Others like Replika and Blush include a simple “closeness” meter, but it’s unclear what exactly players are building towards.

Instead, engaged players often organically imagine their own goals, like attempting to “break” the AI or sext it through a content filter.

Especially when building AI companions—which is still a new medium that most users are unfamiliar with (unlike a DS game)—I suspect that goals and feedback will need to be made extra obvious to the user at first (read: idiot-proof).

Of course, the specific goal doesn’t need to be virtual intimacy, but a truly retentive experience will give users something clear to work toward.

LovePlus Part 2: Limiting Player Choice

Choice in games is best given gradually and intentionally to the user.

In simple terms, games generally allow users to make two types of choices:

1. Gameplay choices that advance the game, like solving a puzzle.

2. Cosmetic choices that minimally impact the game, like customizing a character’s appearance or choosing a color scheme.

You might expect that a game about dating virtual girlfriends should be filled with choices, especially cosmetic ones. Why settle for anything less than your deepest, most specific fantasies?

The problem is that agency takes energy, and giving players choices before they’re invested in those choices is bad design.

Contrary to expectation, LovePlus doesn’t give you cosmetic choices in Part 1. Part 1 is made almost entirely of gameplay choices and is fairly railroaded, with plenty of feedback to help you make it to Part 2. The only arguably cosmetic choice is which girl to pursue, but even that has a large impact on gameplay, because they each have different personalities, backstories, and preferences.

In contrast, Part 2 gives players 10x the content. In Part 2, players can:

1. Suggest new outfits and hairstyles for their girlfriend.

2. Schedule full day dates at a variety of specific, in-game locations. The game uses a realistic calendar which includes holidays, birthdays, and your anniversary.

3. Call or email their girlfriend to catch up, or to schedule a date. Ringtones are also customizable.

4. Read up on dating tips on a fake internet browser, including best date locations for the season.

5. Receive and purchase a catalogue of gifts.

6. Access Love+ Mode (read on).

While gameplay choices can engage a wide audience and build investment over time, the bulk of cosmetic choices are best left to power users. By Part 2, players have spent a minimum of several hours treading the Part 1 game loop, and are more invested in the cosmetic and preferential choices they now get to make.

How invested do the players get?

One advanced date option is a 2-day (virtual) trip to Atami, with a complete, real-time itinerary that lasts from 8am to 2am(!).7 The itinerary includes everything from meeting at the train station, to seeing shows, grabbing food, and going to the beach. It even includes dealing with common traveling mishaps like losing a ticket or under-packing.

In 2010, the actual Japanese resort town of Atami launched a promotion attracting thousands of LovePlus players and their virtual girlfriends. Hotels in the real Atami trained staff to check in singular guests as couples, helping them indulge in the immersion and charging double fare for the experience.8

This is possible because Part 2 of LovePlus allows you to play in real time. The game will read the DS clock and calendar, such that a minute in real life = a minute in-game.

Real time mode is no joke. To go on dates, you must make advance plans for a specific time and date when the girl is available. If you’re late or you forget, she’ll be upset and you’ll have to win her back. Or, if you even stop playing the game for too long, she’ll also grow cold.

From Producer Uchida Akari:

There is no cutting corners. If you don't fall in love with the heroine in the friend part, you won't be able to enjoy the lover part.9

That’s serious investment.

Love+ Mode

Besides the main game, players in Part 2 also gain access to Love+ Mode, where they can directly interact with their girlfriend at any time. It’s the most similar part of LovePlus to a modern AI companion.

Players can speak to her through the DS mic (she responds to a limited catalogue of greetings, questions, and compliments), practice “skinship”—essentially PG-13 physical affection—and even work out together. Love+ Mode is always played in real time, so depending on the time of day, she might be going to school, exercising, or about to fall asleep.

This mode is especially freeform and is likely a retention driver for power users like Yuge, who claimed in an interview: "As long as I have time, I'll continue the relationship forever.”10

It’s easy to imagine an enhanced Love+ Mode, with modern voice recognition, generative audio, LLMs, and more. These capabilities would no doubt make for an even more immersive experience, but even so, it’s notable that Love+ Mode was designed to not be essential to the core gameplay. This, again, suggests that a freeform experience is best suited for power users.

Part 2: Takeaways for AI companions

Generative AI seemingly begs the ability to customize every part of the AI companion experience, from appearance, personality, name, etc. After all, it can all be implemented without the help of artists and writers!

I’d expect, however, that if LovePlus were AI-enhanced, Part 1 would mostly remain the same. Deep cosmetic options and unlimited agency are for power users who are invested and know what they want. Players who make it to Part 2 have shown a baseline level of investment.

In fact, reduced agency can reinforce a strong game loop by establishing baselines. Imagine if players had to say “good morning” to their companion every day, and on the first 3 days, the response is “hey how’s it going.” But if on the 4th day after growing closer, the response is “hey!! been thinking about you,” the player is sure to take note.

In contrast to Part 1, it’s much clearer how modern AI could enhance Part 2, whether through a larger asset catalogue, deeper conversation trees, or simply lowering the cost of development. Part 2 also includes the open-ended Love+ Mode, where generative AI would especially shine.

To create retentive experiences, experiment with taking away agency and easing players in. Don’t start everyone off with a full-fledged LLM wrapper before they’re invested.

The Real AI Risk..?

If I were to invest in a company building AI companions, I’d bet on something that looks like a game, with a proper game loop, intentional use of advanced AI, and clear differentiation between gameplay and cosmetic choices.

The explosive growth of apps like Replika and Character AI has been impressive (even if driven by use cases the creators are reluctant to support11). In contrast, the LovePlus series was never released internationally, but has attracted fanatical devotees over its lifetime, all without advanced AI.

So what happens if you successfully combine captivating game design with the enchantment of generative AI? You just might get widespread AI girlfriends, ready to replace you not only in the workplace, but in the bedroom.

Forget extinction by malevolent AI, and fear population collapse by loving AI companions.

Thanks for reading! If you’re building in this space or want to be connected to those who are, hit me up @qualiaspace or at kylecqian@gmail.com.

Thanks to my amazing friends for the engaging discussions and their help in reviewing drafts.

In simplified terms, Facebook’s mission is to connect the world, and it’s done just that. Despite the younger generation’s righteous exodus from the platform, its user base to this day grows faster than the world population.

But even if every single person in the world got on Facebook, your network would still be mostly people you know in real life. While this is immensely useful for keeping in touch with friends and family who you’re away from, an identity-based social graph is fundamentally limited. Your Facebook identity and social graph are mere digital shadows of their physical counterparts, and little more.

Meanwhile, a new trend is beginning to take hold in the neglected gaps of this status quo. It’s a complete reimagining of what social networks could be—a future free from the limitations of physical identity.

The Tyranny of Identity

On Facebook and Instagram, we inevitably compare our real lives to our friends’ curated ones. Before them, MySpace and its top friends feature scandalized schoolyards across the world. Even though identity-based platforms try to faithfully represent real-life social dynamics, they often end up warping them.

Overexposure to friends’ digital lives has had a deleterious effect on users, especially teens. It’s no surprise “Facebook depression” became a hot search term as early as 2009. By attaching our real-world identities to everything we do, these platforms feel suffocating and unsafe.

Nowadays, you can’t just have a conversation about basketball or mental health without your entire identity on display. At a glance, you could roughly tell a person’s age, race, location, body type, sometimes even religion, socioeconomic level, and institutional affiliations. Notably, they’re the exact things we tell kids not to reveal about themselves to strangers online.

As a result, despite growing up with worldwide, instantaneous connections mere taps away, digital natives feel more lonely than ever, especially in an age when an errant comment from years ago could get you de-platformed. In real life and on Facebook, you’re always signaling information about yourself which may not have anything to do with the context you’re in.

So why is this the case?

Some say it’s because platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and the bygone MySpace are “simplified and diminished continuations of the physical dimension people reside in.”1

Despite these platforms having unfathomably large user bases, you tend to only connect with people you already know in real life. For Facebook users, this is the digital equivalent of only talking to existing friends at a party whose guest list includes literally a third of the world.

This phenomenon is fantastically catalogued in a 1992 HCI paper, Beyond Being There, which argues that technology tries too hard to imitate or replicate the experience of “being there.”2

The paper introduces the comparison between a crutch and a shoe. Whereas a shoe can help you run faster, a crutch is designed to support you when you can’t walk normally, to get you as close as possible. A crutch will never help you run faster; it’s just an imitative substitute when the real thing isn’t available.

In this sense, Facebook’s social graph is a crutch that imitates real-world relationships.

Platforms which 1) require or encourage using your real identity or 2) rely on existing social graphs (contacts, classmates, mutuals) merely imitate “being there.” By mirroring the real world, platforms like Facebook are ultimately limited by the very physical connections they seek to transcend.

How might we do better? How might we build a shoe rather than a crutch? How might we leverage the unique capabilities of technology to create new ways of connecting which go “beyond being there?”

The answer lies somewhere in the rise of alts, finstas, burner accounts, and entirely pseudonymous platforms like Discord. In the not-so-distant future, deliberately facilitated pseudonymity could give rise to a truly digital social graph, rather than the acquaintance-based graphs of today.

The Pseudonymous Web

Reddit started as a link aggregator, Discord as Skype but cool, and Twitch as internet voyeurism. Each platform has evolved over time to become the biggest pillars of today’s pseudonymous web.

Pseudonymity is, in short, the use of a username, or a pseudonym, rather than a real name. It’s related to anonymity, in that both imply a level of obfuscation, but whereas an anonymous user would not want to be identified at all, a pseudonymous user maintains a consistent persona across multiple interactions. A top Twitch donor, for instance, might seek recognition for their continued support in the form of a badge or shoutout.

The pseudonymous web is growing, and not just in the West. Last month, a Shanghai-based pseudonymous social network, Soul, filed for an IPO with the SEC.

If the West’s sad, lonely, and tech savvy Gen Z are increasingly flocking to the pseudonymous web, then their Chinese counterparts might already be ahead. Growing up without siblings, bearing the crushing weight of their family’s hopes and dreams, and living in a society that leapfrogged to mobile, China’s Gen Z just might be sadder, lonelier, and even more tech addicted. If China’s youth is any indication of where youth are globally headed, then Soul is an excellent case study for the future of social media.

First launched in late 2016, Soul is “a virtual social playground” that is “appearance-agnostic, interest-driven, decentralized and gamified.” Unlike identity-based networks and, well, real life, Soul envisions a space “free of the pressure that often comes with the complex and delicate social relations in the physical world.”

This is what “beyond being there” looks like. The types of activity supported by platforms like Discord and Soul are a direct result of deliberately facilitated pseudonymity, and could not be easily replicated on an identity-based platform.

As we’ll see, the following opportunities emerge on pseudonymous platforms:

1. Interest- and personality-based connections

2. Value-add monetization

3. Lowered barriers to content creation

For each, let’s see how Western incumbents capitalize, and how Soul takes it a step further.

1. Interest- and personality-based connections

Unbeholden to their real world identities, users on pseudonymous platforms are free to connect with each other on the basis of whatever they choose.

The first step of this has been the creation of an interest-based social graph, with Discord as its poster child.

Sitting at over 140M monthly users, Discord is completely pseudonymous for everyone who wants to be, and encourages users to pick any username they want by appending a visually de-emphasized number at the end. Discord hosts a staggering variety of interest-based servers, ranging from creator fandoms, to blockchain development communities, to gamer friend groups.

Similarly, Discord’s asynchronous older brother Reddit has become more like a social network over time. There’s a subreddit for any random topic or interest you can think of these days.

Many of these communities are conspicuously missing on platforms like Facebook and Slack, which feel too “above ground” or “buttoned up.” On those platforms, communities are gatherings of differentiated individuals; in contrast, Discord’s pseudonymity signals that the topic of the community is itself the focus, and that all individuals are defined in relation to that topic.

Soul takes all this a step further. On Soul, it’s not just about connecting over a shared love for sneakers; it’s about connecting over fundamental personality traits, worldviews, or ways of being. And you don’t even need to be able to articulate those yourself; the app draws that out of you through a series of personality tests, then matches you with people it deems you likely to have chemistry with.

These tests are similar to Myers-Briggs or Enneagram, but instead of letters or numbers, “Soulers” get roles like “Pragmatist,” “Artist,” or “Thinker.” These roles are visible on each Souler’s profile, and are also used to sort them into one of 30 “planets.” These quizzes help Soul algorithmically match users with content and even other users.

Soulers can continue to add to their profiles by taking additional Soul Quizzes as well as using “Gravity Tags,” which “attract” more suitable content and other Soulers. Based on each user’s traits and engagement, Soul generates a chemistry score for every other Souler they interact with, out of 100.

From there, Soulers can self-organize into group chats or “Virtual Parties,” Soul’s Clubhouse clone. Similar to Clubhouse, it’s a collection of audio-based chat rooms where participants are split into on- and off-stage. Unlike Clubhouse, most of the rooms are either for hangout or karaoke (the latter highlighting the app’s Chinese roots), and, of course, everyone is pseudonymous.

While pseudonymous platforms like Discord and Reddit empower users to connect over specific interests or hobbies, Soul is a place for kindred spirits.

Together, these platforms form digitally native social graphs based on what people choose to emphasize about themselves, rather than on legal identity or physical proximity. These social graphs are difficult to create on identity-based platforms, as well as in real life, and are the result of meaningful connections between people who otherwise would never have met.

2. Value-add monetization

Users on pseudonymous platforms give up some of the individuality they might otherwise be used to having. On the flip side, these users tend to be quite open and expressive.

On pseudonymous platforms, users are eager for self-expression, recognition, and clout—and will pay real money for it. As a result, these platforms can monetize in ways that add value to users (e.g., Reddit Gold, Discord Nitro, and Twitch donations), rather than relying solely on ads.

Since the early days of Reddit, for example, users have purchased Reddit Gold to reward posts they like. A good chunk of Reddit’s historical revenue has come from Reddit Gold, which has since expanded to a number of other post awards, including subreddit-specific.

Similarly, Discord makes most of its money from users looking for more ways to express themselves. More than half of Discord Nitro’s benefits have to do with expression, whether through custom emojis, special profile badges, or boosting your favorite server. Like Twitch, Discord allows longtime server supporters to further express themselves via titles and rewards—yet another example of pseudonymous users signaling, within context, identities of their choosing.

Soul, on the other hand, allows an even more direct form of self-expression via virtual avatars, which may or may not resemble Soulers’ real selves. Soulers are free to craft a persona to embody aspects of themselves they identify with or aspire to the most.

Soulers can visit the avatar store and browse apparel from a selection of free and premium items, ranging from shirts and facial hair to masks and horns. Avatars are direct representations of each Souler, so dressing it up is essential for self-expression and standing out.

Soulers can even pseudonymously video call each other as their avatars, rather than showing their real faces, similar to face filters.

Thanks to the prominence of avatars, much of Soul’s revenue is generated from Soulers purchasing Soul Coins to use in the avatar store, and from Soulers gifting each other items.

To further enhance the importance of avatars, Soul’s algorithm also de-prioritizes selfies and other personally identifying information on the global feed, funneling self-expression toward on-platform features.

Pseudonymity gives users a blank canvas of an identity to eagerly fill out. This way, instead of primarily monetizing through ads, platforms like Soul can provide value-add features for self-expression.

3. Lowered barriers to content creation

In addition to more genuine connections and self-expression, pseudonymous platforms also have the potential for much higher levels of participation and content creation.

The current, non-obvious example is actually TikTok.

Rather than just passively browsing, 55% of engaged TikTok users in a given month claimed to have uploaded a video. On a monthly basis, that means engaged users are nearly as likely to post a video as they are to follow or to comment. If this figure is anything close to the truth, it blows the 90/9/1 rule out of the water.

Besides offering better video editing tools, how did TikTok achieve this?

While TikTok isn’t pseudonymous per se, it features something that replicates the benefits of pseudonymity: a distribution algorithm that acts on your content, not your connections.

The most important consequence is that anybody can succeed on TikTok. People don’t need to be friends with you or already be following you. With the algorithm, people can engage directly with content they’re likely to enjoy, despite having no existing connection to creators. No need to find your audience—your audience finds you.

Furthermore, the fact that you don’t need to import your real life friends lowers psychological barriers to posting. You’re free to experiment with whatever you want, knowing it’s not very likely you’ll get recognized—or worse, judged or cancelled—unless you go truly viral. TikTok is not explicitly pseudonymous, but its algorithm accomplishes similar goals.

Soul, on the other hand, shows how a democratized content algorithm effectively complements pseudonymity by using it to drive nearly all interactions.

To start, the global feed visually resembles that of Facebook or Twitter, but it works more like TikTok’s. On Soul, everything—from text to audio snippets to polls—is globally shareable, not just with your followers, but with anyone.

As on TikTok, the result is that anyone can succeed on the strength of what they put out, rather than having to rely on endorsement by blue checkmarks or being famous off-platform. There’s still a “Following” tab, but Soul’s bread and butter, similar to TikTok’s, is an algorithm that is neither follow-dominated (Twitter) nor limited to specific groups/servers (Reddit/Discord).

Soul also uses an algorithm to drive user-to-user interactions by matching them in voice calls or group chats. As previously mentioned, every other Souler you encounter has an associated score indicating how likely you are to get along. As a result, their recommendation engine not only lowers the barrier to posting globally, but also drives engagement for more direct connections.

The future vision of Soul is what they call an AI-powered “virtual playground,” where curation and discovery, regardless of form, is handled by an algorithm. This way, Soulers can find compelling content, meet kindred spirits, and go viral, all without Soul needing to know anything about who they are in person.

According to Soul’s F-1, an impressive 35% of monthly Soulers post content, and Soulers average 62 daily 1-on-1 messages. On Soul, putting yourself out there has never been easier or felt safer.

Putting it all together

Let’s recap.

1. Identity-based social networks have a ton of users, but are limited by real-world relationships and social dynamics. They’re crutches that merely imitate “being there.”

2. Pseudonymous platforms like Discord and Soul support communities and self-expression not found elsewhere. These facilitate connections otherwise not possible, and thus go “beyond being there.”

3. By capitalizing on what’s missing, pseudonymous platforms present the following opportunities:

   1. Interest- and personality-based connections

   2. Value-add monetization

   3. Lowered barriers to content creation

In a nutshell, pseudonymous platforms are all about encouraging users to include information about themselves that they choose to or even aspire to identify with, while allowing them to exclude sensitive or irrelevant information. This enables entirely new ways of forging genuine connections and expressing yourself online.

Democratized, pseudonymous platforms like Soul have the potential to upend social media as we know it. They create social graphs that reflect our inner selves, rather than ones based on physical identity and all the baggage that comes with it. Their continued success shows that to bring the world closer together, platforms don’t need all your personally identifying data. They just need to connect you with those who resonate with the deepest aspects of yourself, which you proudly choose to identify with.

This is the ambitious vision of Soul—a “digital playground” defying not only physical distance, but all the arbitrary circumstances that have, until now, kept kindred souls from ever crossing paths.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to chat, I can be reached at @qualiaspace and kylecqian@gmail.com.

Huge thanks to my amazing friends for reading drafts.