The Game I Didn't Want to Post About: Girlfriend Construction Set (1989)

Note: I wrote the posting below in January and decided not to publish it because it was a juvenile, inane, misogynistic, non-RPG. But saying this only seemed to increase demand for the posting, so I'm offering it in lieu of having accomplished anything else this week (I was at a business conference).

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From nearly the moment I put this game on my master list--only because someone contributing to MobyGames labeled it a CRPG--people were telling me to take it off. But my rule is that if someone, somewhere, decided a game is a CRPG, I'll give it a try long enough to find out for myself.

Well, Girlfriend Construction Set isn't a CRPG. Not remotely. It has character development of a sort, but no inventory, and while there is occasionally "combat" of a sort, it's not based on your attributes (since you don't have any). But you're going to hear about it because I played it long enough to compile notes for an entry.

In traditional RPGs, you spend a lot of time creating your character. In this game, you make exactly one decision about your character--your name--and spend the rest of the time creating what you might call the game's most important NPCs: your girlfriends. Yes, that's intended to be plural. If you want to "win" the game, you can't just date one girlfriend the entire time; you have to become a serial romancer, dating a long succession of increasingly "better" girls until, ultimately, the perfect couple attends THE BIG PARTY.

Before even the opening screen, there's a warning screen indicating that the game has some sexually explicit material. It's too bad I can't call this a proper RPG because that would go on my lists of "firsts." Trickster got to spend half of January romancing Emanuelle in Brazil, and I'm stuck fighting giant worms and stuff. But this game goes to show that "sexually explicit" doesn't necessarily have anything to do with "erotic" or "titillating." The game is "sexually explicit" in the way that a 12-year-old is sexually explicit when he tells his friends that sex occurs when "the boy pees in the girl's belly button."

I probably should have started this posting with the same warning.

The game has two major phases--the "construction" phase and the "dating" phase--and you return to them repeatedly. In the construction phase, you set your girlfriend's physical and personality attributes. You start with a pool of 50 points. A "perfect" girlfriend--10s in everything--requires 100 points, so the best you can hope at the outset is for an average one. The process starts with the name and face.

Since the numbers represent the number of points you have to spend for that face, they theoretically get more attractive. I don't debate that 10 is probably the top one, but almost everyone else looks equally homely, cartoonish, or disturbingly childlike. I guess #9 has something going on, but she can't even hang up the damned phone long enough for her character portrait. All of the women, it must be said, are unmistakably from the 1980s.

After that, the game asks for a confounding list of physical measurements that left me realizing I'm 40 and I still don't have a handle on what an average woman's bust, waist, or hip size is. I had to Google Christina Hendricks to get a reasonable benchmark, even. Anyway, the combination of these measurements determines the overall physical rating on a scale of 0 to 10, with the consequent number of points deducted.

Finally, you answer a series of 8 questions designed to elicit your girlfriend's personality:

• How attractively does she dress?
• How trustworthy is she?
• How often does she get jealous?
• How would I rate her overall personality? (Here, I'm picturing the game's target audience saying, "Wait...girls have personalities?")
• What is her average type of mood?
• How well do we get along with each other's friends?
• How often do we have sex?
• What are her ideas on marriage? (Opening a little window on the psychology of the developer, "0" is she wants to get married right away and "10" means she wants to stay single forever.)

Melanie is a well-balanced girl.

With the girlfriend thus created, you begin the "Dating" phase of the game. You select from a list of 40 possibilities for the date--everything from "go out to dinner" to "go to a jello wrestling match" to "fly to Vegas for the weekend" (apparently, your PC has unlimited funds)--and call your girlfriend to see if she wants to go. If you choose the wrong type of date, you're likely to get a rejection.

What does intelligence have to do with going to the zoo?

If she agrees to the date, the game walks you through a number of scenarios that occur. Go out to dinner, and the waiter might spill soup on your date. Go horseback riding, and you have to decide whether to pretend to have fun while sustaining significant damage to your unmentionables. Head to a rock concert, and you have to decide whether to blaze one with her (if you do, you get stopped by the cops on the way home). Take her to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and she disappears into the crowd, returning later with a suspicious story.

Actually, that seems entirely plausible for New Orleans at Mardi Gras.

My favorite one is taking her to China "for dinner" (I guess that's dinner the following day) and getting caught up in a revolution.

This may be the dumbest scenario I've ever faced in any game.

This part of the game could have been more fun if the choices weren't so juvenile or obvious. For instance, taking my girlfriend to a baseball game, I manage to catch a foul ball. My choices are to:

• Give the ball to my girlfriend
• Hurl the ball at her head (that must be difficult since she's presumably next to me)
• Keep the ball
• Hurl the ball at some random elderly woman
• Throw the ball to a beautiful blonde a few seats away (although the game has it as "blond," making me wonder about my orientation)
• Hurl the ball at the third baseman's head

Obviously, only the first option is particularly useful when I'm trying to score points on my date. There are lots of other options throughout the "dates" that invite you to commit shocking acts of violence against your girlfriend for seemingly minor offenses, which would be a bit vile even if it didn't undermine the purpose of the game.

"Give her a bottle of sleeping pills" comes up as an option multiple times, even when it doesn't make sense in the context of the scenario. The sexual scenarios the game leads you into are best not described, not because I'm afraid of a little lewdness, but rather because they're just dumb. I don't have a problem with a little ribaldry in my fiction--RPGs or otherwise--but it helps when the author a) has actually had sex at least once himself; b) doesn't clearly hate the object of his sexual attraction; and c) understands things like the term "BJ" only applies to men.

Anyway, depending on your choices and how your girlfriend reacts, your status points either increase or decrease. If the variance gets too high, your girlfriend will dump you.

A smarter girl would dump me after going to London for the weekend.

But play your cards right, and the variance will get high enough that you eventually dump her and construct a better model.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that your girlfriend's physical or personality scores have much to do with the outcomes of your date. For instance, if you go to Hawaii, there's an excellent chance that your girlfriend will propose to you, regardless of where you set the "desperate to get married" meter. This scenario always resulted in a loss for me; if you reject her, you lose points; if you get married, it ends badly and you lose half your points.

It isn't that difficult to slowly work your way up to 100 points, at which point you can construct the "perfect" girlfriend and go to THE BIG PARTY. Getting to the party is a little silly, involving not just a perfect score but some precursor dates in which you (nonsensically) get a talking fish called Wanda (yes, I know about the movie; that doesn't make the game any less stupid) and get some passwords from cows at the Zoo. THE BIG PARTY is full of celebrities, drugs, orgies, and such, and you navigate through the various rooms before arriving at a "won!" screen in which both you and your date realize that you're perfect and are going to live happily ever after. There's a final list of stupid choices, all of which dump you to the DOS prompt.

According to MobyGames's profile on Tom Scheffler--clearly authored by Scheffler--he "improved" the game throughout the 1990s, released a Windows version in 2000, and was planning to release another one in 2009. The site says that the newer games feature "far more realism and depth" (perhaps he briefly had a girlfriend during this time). During this period of maturity, though, he doesn't seem to have realized the inherent misogyny in the idea of a "girlfriend construction set." I suppose there's nothing technically wrong with a dating simulator, but there is something wrong with one that espouses primitive ideas of a "perfect" girlfriend and gives you so many options to drug her and assault her.

The annoying thing is that the "scenarios" section of the game isn't a bad idea. I wish more CRPGs featured them. Though Girlfriend Construction Set isn't a role-playing game by any means, it is a game in which you "play a role," with relatively clear choices between good and evil (though I'm not sure the developer actually realizes which ones are good and which are evil). It'll still be several years before these choices start appearing with abundance in proper CRPGs.

Let's get back to the real list, with perhaps a more cautious eye towards MobyGames's definition of an "RPG" from now on.