Can you make an AI understand love? The experimental games festival about relationships

Outside Somerset House this week, you might notice that two lampposts are blinking at each other. Unless you are fluent in Morse code, however, you probably won’t clock that they are performing Act II, Scene II of Romeo and Juliet. The installation by Geraint Edwards welcomes you to Now Play This, an experimental games festival, where you could also play a game about getting over a breakup by wielding a sword while riding a motorbike through a neon city, or listen to artist Laurence Young give a talk about getting his mother into the fantasy video game Elden Ring. Inside, attendees lounge around a digital fire, browsing books of love poetry.

Now Play This – now in its ninth year at Somerset House – can be relied upon to bring people together in unexpected ways. It has hosted everything from giant ball mazes to outdoor playground games and a game about chucking fascists out of your garden. But this year’s theme, love, has created an especially open, even intimate atmosphere. On a giant arcade cabinet in the largest exhibition room, you can play Breakup Squad, a game about keeping your friend away from their toxic ex at a party; outside, you can play Triangulate, a puzzle game where three players are given random instructions (“point at someone with one leg; rotate slowly; hold hands with a different person”) and have to negotiate how to use their bodies to find a solution that works for everyone.

Elsewhere, you can play a version of Pictionary against an AI, where the idea is to draw something in such a way that the other humans can understand it, but the robot cannot. Named Deviation Game, the project aims to interrogate how we coexist and grow to understand AI, says co-creator Daniel Coppen, who made the game with Saki Maruyama and Tomo Kihara. Ask humans to draw “love” in a way that a computer couldn’t understand, and you get some very interesting results – moons and stars, cats, a beautifully prepared bento box. “We like how we can use AI as a mirror to surface our collective bias about a particular topic, such as love,” says Kihara. “We are collecting how people drew ‘love’ during the exhibition period, and plan to convert the collected drawings of love into a map.”

A smaller room houses two games by artist Angela Washko. One – The Game: The Game – is a darkly satirical dating game about pickup artists and their tactics, a game that shows a twisted mirror image of love through the eyes of manipulators. The other, Mother, Player, is about the artist’s experiences of pregnancy during lockdown, a diaristic multiple-choice text game illustrated through vivid hand-drawn sketches. “Love and care hadn’t necessarily felt like an urgent or well-represented theme in the games space,” she says. “When I was pregnant in the pandemic, I started coming back to games in a very serious way, playing so much of them and starting to think about the missing perspectives of mothers and pregnant people in games – how many stories start with a dead mom, moms you never meet? I felt this urgent need to address that in some way.”

Washko’s games illustrate the festival’s sideways approach to its theme: some of the games you’ll find here are about romantic love, but most are less obvious. Nina Runa Essendrop’s role-playing game End(less), for instance, asks players to construct the life stories of earth’s very last souls from poetic fragments; “it’s about the idea of looking back at lifetime with a sense of love, and also being able to let it go and move on,” explains its creator. Another game, Point of Mew, casts you as a cat trying to cheer up your human with small acts of care. I really wanted to play Consentacle, a card game where you “help a tentacled alien and a curious human have a mutually satisfying romantic encounter”, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask a stranger to play it with me.

The festival’s director, Sebastian Quack, intentionally avoided a selection of exhibits that was too obvious, he says. “We wanted to avoid cliches … games can talk about love in a unique way. In film or poetry, when you’re reading about love, maybe you imagine yourself as the person speaking. But video games are systems and narratives, so you’re put into a position where you can feel a relationship, both the story and the logic of it, and maybe also the power dynamics. All the games here are doing that in different ways.”

The most interesting thing about video games, for me, is how they connect people to each other – whether they’re together in the same fantasy world, forming friendships and teaming up for quests, bonding over a shared love of gaming on social media and chat servers, or playing with or against each other in real life. Games have brought people together since the days of the arcades, but only rarely are they about connection. After playing this multifarious collection of games about love in all its forms, even someone who’s been playing games for their whole life may look at them a little differently.

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• Now Play This is at Somerset House, London, until 9 April