Why Do So Many Dating Sim and Narrative Games Take Place in Schools, Anyway?
Are high school or college overplayed as game settings…or a perfect fit for relationship-driven genres?
As yet another summer and set of graduations kick off, it got me to thinking about how often I’ve seen schools as settings in dating sims, visual novels, and other games with friendship, romance, and story elements.
Why is school such an ubiquitous setting for this kind of game?
Is it just a vapid obsession with youth? Mostly younger game developers writing what they know? I got a couple theories about this as both a long-time player of these games and someone who’s been in game development almost a decade!
The Genre is Rooted in Pursuing Your Classmates
The game said to be the first dating sim was Dōkyūsei, which means “classmate” in Japanese. Visual novels for computers and consoles were a staple genre in Japan in the early-mid 1990s, with incredibly vast titles like Desire (Haitoku No Rasen) outshining thinly-veiled hentai games other publishers were releasing at the time.
