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"What's needed, from a gameplay perspective, is a romantic partner who is sometimes also functionally the villain. There's a reason people write buckets of fanfic about the secret love of Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter: passionately clashing with someone is a form of intimacy. It raises the emotional stakes between those two characters _far_ more reliably than attempts to portray attraction in interactive form." Emily Short on fine, fine form, about the difficulties of writing romance into games. An excellent piece of writing on game design.