"Is there a party in your pants?" You type to your virtual boyfriend. "I didn't make it to the bathroom," the lush-lipped Ken doll replies.
In the past few weeks, all my friends have been interested in one title above all others: A tacky Japanese app called Boyfriend Maker. This, at the most crucial time of year for reflecting on big hits and hunkering down with holiday blockbusters?
Scratch the surface of social media just a little bit and Boyfriend Maker, which lets players build and customize a princely, decidedly androgynous young man, dress him and have conversations with him, is the talk of the town among players of all genders and orientations.
It's a garish conflagration of pink, blue and J-Pop aesthetics. Though conversation is the primary game mechanic, it's awkward and occasionally busted. In a flagrant breach of fantasy, your 'boyfriend' will routinely remind you that conversation costs energy, and to get energy you're forced to share these 'romantic' conversations on your Facebook wall. You can pay to ask more questions if you don't want to wait -- the exact sort of setup Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker was intended to mock.
Social game designers have wrestled with energy mechanics and forced sharing -- yet here's a game that not only makes players delighted to participate in its virality, but motivates them to share jailbreaking techniques so they can continue to play the app even after it is inevitably yanked from the App Store.
A lovers' spatSeems neither 36You or Apple knew what could happen, especially as the integration with SimiSimi was part of an update that only went live back in August, effectively sneaking it in a sort of blind spot for users, 36You and gatekeepers -- the task of keeping up with SimiSimi would have been monumental for anyone.
As of press time Boyfriend Maker is no longer available on the App Store, and is unlikely to pass muster again unless it develops a more predictably-safe chat engine. Its absence is causing a veritable outcry in social media circles, though, and it's interesting to think about its spontaneous boom and what we might learn from it.
It's more than just the alternating amusement and horror at a fantasy boyfriend spewing casually-offensive gibberish that helped Boyfriend Maker become an internet sensation. Part of what compelled players to try the app out was the unique pleasure in experimenting with a complex and inscrutable system, to unpredictable results (some of which reveal the Boyfriend's ability to identify Pokemon, albeit imperfectly, and to sing The Eurythmics).
Unpredictable Boyfriend
Wait, yeah, that happened. Earlier this week, Apple removed Boyfriend Maker because dewy-eyed dream date's patter regularly bordered on the extremely sexual, racist and vulgar. "I stole a car," my friend tried typing to her virtual boyfriend. "Correction: black guy stole your car," the placid Prince Charming declared in reply. Obviously, that's a big part of why everyone loved it, putting Apple in the unique position of quashing an app for the precise thing that made it popular: Try to read this popular Tumblr (NSFW) devoted to screenshots from the game without laughing. Somehow this game got on the App Store to begin with. Developer 36You disclaimed responsibility on the app's now-defunct Store page and on its website: "all statements of information contained in the responses, replies and/or answers in Boyfriend Maker are generated and powered by a 3rd party engine (API) and are the sole responsibility of such 3rd party engine (API) and not of 36You," it says. According to PocketGamer's report, the current core of Boyfriend Maker is the chat bot SimiSimi, which users can 'teach' to respond to certain word triggers with essentially whichever responses they like. The result can be terrifyingly intuitive, like song lyrics, primitively obscene, or whatever you'd guess the internet might want. It's impossible for 36You to anticipate or vet the bot's behavior, hence its disclaimer -- but shouldn't someone have maybe spotted this rogue variable in an App Store game marked for kids and up?