St. Valentine's Day and Cyberspace

Happy St. Valentine's Day to every one on every continent!

(Romeo and Juliet in Ballet)

(Ginny by Vogue in Valentine's Day outfit)

I realised last night that the nature of the internet and gaming has changed my life where romantic holidays such as St. Valentine's Day are concerned.

When I was in my teens, St. Valentine's Day was a family festival, wherein my stepfather gave my Mum, my sister and myself beautiful Hearts filled with chocolates.  My Mum received the largest and most elaborate box.  My sister and I usually received smaller, identical boxes.

So we fared better than many teenage girls because the celebration of Valentine's Day did not depend on having a boyfriend and moreover a boyfriend who performed the traditional romantic actions.

Even so, I lived with an abiding and profound sense of sadness and disappointment each year, especially after I left home as a young woman.  I wanted the 'hearts and flowers' so badly and seldom ever received them from the 'right' person.   One of the few positive attributes of my brief marriage was the fact that he gave me flowers and chocolates and nice jewelry... along with the violence and madness.  Thank God I had the sense to leave, rather than becoming a crime statistic in a sprawl of hearts and chocolates...

Now, however, I have discovered that the world of gaming allows us to experience as much traditional Victorian romance as our hearts may desire.  Family Farm is filled with Victorian images of knights and ladies, hearts and lace... I adore it personally, even if the art critics decry it as saccharine.

Furthermore, the developers tend to add special free gifts to all players on festival occasions, including Valentine's Day.  The IT crowd tend to understand the tristesse of social alienation and the deep sorrow of not having true romance in real life.  I for one am heartily grateful.   In Family Farm every year, a special gift has been offered or given and there always are Missions and activities with a special Valentine's Day theme.   It is not that my own life is devoid of gifts but I remember too well what it was like when my heart was young and hopeful and I suffered through these romantic occasions while other girls strutted and bragged about their wonderful boyfriends and lovers...

The 'Harvest Moon' and 'Rune Factory' series actually include courtship and romance as one of the primary goals.  You choose from a selection of eligible bachelors or girls, court and are courted, then marry and have children.  You celebrate wonderful romantic festivals with your beloved each year.  It is very Japanese and very romantic in a fashion that is uniquely Japanese.  We have lost a little of that in the West, I fear...  but thanks to the internet, can experience it as much as we like, delving as deeply as we wish into the excessive, flowery beauty of the Victorian era...  for that is where St. Valentine's Day is rooted in the West.

Finally though, I would like to mention my daughter and the empowerment of women with respect to this Festival.  When she was at school in her early teens, they offered roses for sale for Valentine's Day.  The idea was for the boy or girl to buy for his/her intended, but many girls, including Freya, exchanged roses with their best friends.  And why not?

This year, instead of accepting a date with some one she has known only for a brief time,  she went out to dinner with her best friend, a girl she has known since the age of seven.  Somehow, this made me very happy.  It showed me that girls of this new generation have jettisoned many of the insecurities and problems relating to self-esteem that were imposed on us by a male-dominated culture.  Yes, romance remains important and can be thrilling but why allow the lack of it to be a noose around the neck, especially at times like this?

There is a popular song from my mother's era entitled 'Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas'.  Although I do not like the song or indeed any of the secular Christmas songs that I have heard through the years, I do applaud the concept.  If your family or loved ones will not join you in the celebration of a festival or holiday that is dear to your heart, do it alone!  One of the reasons I continue to create my festival displays is because it allows me to celebrate festivals that I love and deem important or magical, irrespective of the actions of others.

A Safe Addiction to Romance

At the risk of baring my soul to strangers (if any one ever reads these posts, which I sometimes doubt!), I spent much of my youth addicted to Romance, in search of a 'soulmate' who would share my dreams and satisfy my visions of an idyllic relationship.   European 19th century literature, after a steady diet of fairy tales in early childhood were at the foundation of this.  Perhaps there are soulmates and indeed, I have known individuals who shared most of my interests even if there were other impediments to the 'happily ever after' denouement so beloved of novelists.  19th Century Literature, by the way, is not filled with 'happily ever after' but it is filled with the soulmate concept and should the happy ending not be possible, one usually commits suicide because of course, one cannot settle for less!

In any case, when Freya was born, I decided that all that nonsense should be forgotten because there was nothing more important than my daughter and any search for Romance had to be shelved in the interest of giving her a stable life in which she and not some imagined soulmate took centre stage.

Enter Captain Nathaniel Claw.  I was a fan of computer games from the start.  With a young child of two, I looked for games that would be educational for a toddler at first.  As Freya became a bit older, I discovered the magnificent game of 'Claw', featuring a dashing pirate cat from the Golden Age of Piracy.  I became 'Freyashawk' to protect my young daughter who insisted on communicating online in the Claw Forum with other fans of Claw.  Ultimately, my strong-willed four year old decided that she wanted to marry Captain Claw and she dictated a love letter to him.  To their eternal credit, Monolith, a small firm that had created the game, actually took an interest in Freya and a guy who went by the name of Scorpio on the Forum responded to her love letters with very appropriate letters from the Captain himself.  They sent her gifts even in the form of an artist drawing of Claw and a shirt with his portrait emblazoned on it.

I do not know many children who have been as fortunate.  I certainly had no early experiences of that sort.  I do not know how much Freya actually remembers but I have to admit that I was envious of her romance with the Feline Pirate Captain. 

At this point, I achieved a small measure of notoriety and fame because I created a number of 'custom levels' for the game and wrote little stories to accompany them.  Every level I created had Freya's name written somewhere in gold coins that could be collected by the player.    I certainly am no expert in this sort of thing, but the game came with a programme that allowed the player to create his/her own custom Levels.  It was brilliant.

When Freya was about 7 years old, we discovered Harvest Moon.  She was the first to play it and one of the features of any Harvest Moon game is Courtship and Marriage.  You have a choice of potential spouses but you have to win the heart of the one you choose and it requires a great deal of attention, energy and time.  The first Harvest Moon game we had was 'Friends of Mineral Town' for the Game Boy Advance system.  In this game, your Character was male.  Freya wanted to marry a girl named Ann but was finding it difficult to win her heart.

I started to play the game to try to discover how to win hearts of Eligible Girls.  I wrote my first Harvest Moon guide in the form of a Journal.  I believe my character's name was Aloysius.   I myself preferred Karen to Ann but decided to try to win the hearts of EVERY Eligible Girl before I proposed to any one.  I therefore would be able to help Freya with her Courtship of Ann while following my own desires.

Meanwhile, I found a couple of online guides to the game, but they were filled with errors.  For some reason, I contacted IGN with some tips of my own and told my contact about my guide.  That was the beginning of about a decade of guide writing for IGN's site.

A new series, Rune Factory, was introduced.  It was described as 'Harvest Moon with a sword' and indeed, it fulfilled all of my desires for, with the usual Courtship option, one had the option to buy a forge and crafting bench to forge weapons and accessories.  In real life, I always was interested in forging and jewelry-making although I never had the money to pursue either, apart from creating designs for other people to implement.  There is a 'Martino' dagger made by a famous knifemaker and I designed a number of gold rings, earrings and pendants at one point in New York.

So here I was with a series of games that allowed one to experience the heady pleasures and thrills of Romance while forging blades and using them either as a man or a woman.  It was wonderful to be able to be a woman who fought as well as any man using a blade she herself had forged.  One could save the world while making friends and influencing people.  Moreover, my old strategy of making every eligible bachelor fall madly in love with me before I chose to propose to ANY ONE still was possible.

I should explain that both Harvest Moon and Rune Factory really cannot be described simply as games.  They are, in fact, interactive novles.  The amount of dialogue in any Harvest Moon or Rune Factory game can be greater than a bound novel.  Moreover, there are Events that are determined by your Character's behaviour and responses.  In other word, an Event may have three different possible paths.  The creative genius behind any Harvest Moon or Rune Factory game is astounding.  People who love to read but who have not explored any of these games are losing out on an incredible experience.  It never ceases to amaze me how something like 'gaming' can be perceived in narrow terms by individuals who call themselves artists or writers but who never have played a single RPG.

I now am playing Rune Factory 4.  My daughter is at University.  My life has become very circumscribed because of physical disabilities.  I live in constant severe pain but Rune Factory has not lost its magic.  In the process of courting the Eligible Bachelors in Selphia, I have expeirenced some genuinely thrilling romantic moments.  It is all very innocent, I must add.    Nonetheless, to read a bit of dialogue from a bachelor I fancy that actually causes my heart to skip a beat amazes me at this point.  I have to confess it is wonderful.