Volcano Princess is a raising simulator released the Chinese studio Egg Hatcher. It follows the story of a father and a daughter, starting with one eventful spring when the girl was only five years old, then skipping ahead to her pre-teen years, where she goes out on her own, makes friend, fights demons, and studies for her future. After playing My Lovely Daughter (and making some pretty bold claims about child raising simulations and the objectification of childhood), I can't help but imagine these two games talking to each other.
In Volcano Princess, you eventually learn that the daughter you raised from twelve to eighteen isn't the same daughter you walked around with as a child. You see, your wife wasn't an ordinary woman, she was the Volcano Goddess, and you were her first creation. At some point (after creating everything in existence presumably) you decided to live an ordinary life and have a daughter together, but there was a problem.
A daughter inherits traits from both parents, but the goddess's divinity couldn't exist inside the mortal form, a form destined to age and die. So the one daughter was split into two, twins, one with a divine nature and one completely mortal.
A man name named Absel, a well-known adventurer, sensed the divinity inside the first child. He captured her and, in order to create eternal life for himself, transferred his soul over into her. He couldn't entirely usurp her consciousness -- a spark of her original, five-year-old self remained -- but in a way, he created a third daughter, one possessed by his will for eternal life and fame. Which is something selfish adults do, when they don't see children as creations meant to live their own lives, but as a method to further their own. They erase a child's identity, supplanting it with their own projections and desires.
It's also what Faust does in My Lovely Daughter. In the true ending, the game reveals that the soul Faust has been refining through repeated sacrifices wasn't his daughter's soul, but his own. He was never going to revive her with it, because he'd already lost her to his future self's petty vanity and desire to live forever.
There was time travel involved, of course -- just like in Volcano Princess. The Volcano Goddess herself rewound time over and over. Volcano Princess is a decidedly cozier game, but that's why I find it so interesting that they share this idea.
Faust was the only surviving parent in My Lovely Daughter, but the Volcano Goddess is immortal and unkillable, despite Absel's intervention. Perhaps that's what makes Volcano Princess feel more hopeful, in addition to the cozy aesthetics. Compared to Faust and his string of homunculus daughters slated for sacrifice, the Volcano Goddess had a much kinder wish for her offspring. It doesn't matter what her daughters lived for, what resources can be extracted from them; it simply matters that they live.
I referenced Action Button Reviews in my previous post about My Lovely Daughter, because I really do believe raising sims objectify children and childhood, and because Tim Rogers excellently analyzes how dating sims objectify women and love. He puts it this way:
The Point
"What I mean when I say Tokimeki Memorial objectifies women ... is that it does so in sort of the same sense Doom objectifies demons. You date Tokimeki's girls the same way that you shoot Doom's demons. In Doom, when you shoot a demon, it's usually the result of the fast twitch reflex hammering on the shoot button upon sighting the threat. The demon plays object to you, the subject's verb 'shoot.' When it fully realizes its role as object of your gunshooting verb, the threatening demon becomes a shot demon, splurting blood and falling backwards. This entire process of see the demon, categorize the threat, react, aim, shoot, watch its death equals an objectification. In Tokimeki Memorial, it's a little different. Tokimeki Memorial valiantly gamifies complex social interactions down into little bite-sized quiz games of lovely audiovisuality."
And the thing about time is you'll never have enough of it. Especially when it comes to childhood -- how many parents have seen their child grow up in what seemed like the blink of an eye? How many adults can say they wouldn't have done things differently, if they could live those years over again? What if we took different classes, made different friends, had a different kind of family?
Just as Tim Rogers shyly and earnestly courted the girl on the swim team the first time he played Tokimeki Memorial, I raised my first daughter as fullheartedly as I could. I kept my reloads to a minimum, except for a few times when I couldn't resist the temptation. Mostly, it was when something changed my daughter's opinion of me. Because that was the first stat the game introduced, I found myself fussily protective of it, aware of my mistakes and misunderstandings, trying to make up for them by giving my video game daughter the life she deserved -- and it wasn't a bad life, all in all. She became a wealthy entrepreuner, starting a foundation to fund the creation of people's dreams.
After my first ending, the game finally, gently gave me its permission to try again. An adorable angel appeared before me, assigned me a score for my parenting, and promised that wherever me and my daughter went, she'd be watching. She even removed the burden of being the perfect father by reminding me that stat represented a promise I made to myself. I was still a [Loving Father], even if I didn't get the exact score I wanted.
But since there was a score and all, what's wrong with wondering 'what if?'
Raising sims objectify childhood in the sense that they create objectives. Really, there are no objectives to childhood except to live through it. I might wonder what life I'd be living if my parents put me through different classes, if I made different friends at school, but there was never (and there's that word again) an objective score when I reached adulthood. When real people have objectives, they're promises they made to themselves ... or desires others had for them. They're not programmed in, they're something we create.
Of course with children, you can't really replay childhood, can't see what would happen if you did things a little differently, as if you were reaching into the game files and tweaking the code. But -- patches aside -- a developer also can't keep tweaking their code forever. At a certain point, they have to accept what they've made, and let it live.
It's probably no coincidence that the most dedicated completionists eventually start looking into the code of the games they love, or else they've developed so much understanding of the system they could recreate the code themselves. They develop strategies, quicker ways to use that system to meet the game's objectives, objectives they've decided to share. They become co-creators with the developer. Sometimes, it strips away the immersion and the mystery of the story, but sometimes that awareness is where the storytelling shines.
