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Virtual reality games usually promise shoot 'em up adventures but in Hong Kong Friday lovelorn tech fans donned headsets to go on imaginary dates.
The city's annual Ani-Com and Games fair sees thousands queue to try out the latest consoles or buy up comic book collectibles, often dressed up as their favourite characters.
But for those who had spent too long alone in their rooms, a new VR smartphone app offered some romantic solace.
Users can choose between four female models and spend a vacation with them in either Japan or Thailand, joining them on trips to cafes, hot springs and karaoke.
They slot their phones into a plastic headset and are then immersed on a date, during which they can choose options for activities.
Promoters of the Hong Kong-made app, which is known by its Cantonese name "leoi yau" or "VR travel friend", said it was to help what they called "Otakus" to practise their dating skills.
The name is a Japanese term for obsessive manga or anime fans.
"We want to allow more people to try out what it's like to date a girl because there are a lot of Otakus who don't know how to communicate with girls," Margaret Ming, the app's communication officer, told AFP.
"This game can teach them how to get to know girls," Ming said, adding that there is some flirting involved in the story arcs with the models.
Helpful, or sad?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday July 29 2017, @12:55PM (21 children)
Why not real girls (or boys?) Other than not having humans this story seems to be the point of Facebook buying and fooling around with virtual reality.
I believe social VR is a major strategic mistake. The amazon.com user interface is not a VRML 3-d FPS rpg of visiting a bookstore (or now a days, a department store). My credit union website is not a 3-d simulation of standing in line and talking to a teller. In fact with online banking and direct deposit and all that I've only talked to a teller twice at my CU, I would imagine for millennials or younger the idea of human service is going to be absent. Likewise the user interface for dating is swiping on tindr or flirting on facebook, not some weird 3-d thing.
What could sell, however minimally, is education. A geology or archaeology "virtual field trip" could sell for just a bit less than actually going out there.
If you ascribe to red pill theory, which observation shows is very accurate regardless how much its liked or disliked to politically correct or not, the chicks have no interest in any guy below a 9/10 until they hit the wall at which point any beta with his stuff together will be preyed on. So the majority of men at 22 aren't going to be dating any women at 22 no matter how low the girls are on the scale, and if they want to get any at 30 all they need is to be known to have money, so they need a "work simulator" or whatever not a "dating simulator"
Also you can tell this is Hong Kong not Japan... no tentacles.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @01:18PM (12 children)
You answered your question by the end, though I would add a divorce court module at 40 where you lose half your shit after experiencing the most expensive and least enjoyable prostitution scam ever envisioned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @01:59PM (3 children)
Yeah, advertising the fact that you have money may not be a good idea, because you'll increase the chances of running into gold diggers. One shouldn't want people that shallow anyway.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @02:04PM (2 children)
Yeah, it's funny how you think real girls who are not gold diggers actually exist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @06:55PM
They just want you to have inordinate interaction with their families after you got caught having sex in their parents house....
Then keep bringing you into situations where their parents get ever lower opinions of you (mostly at their instigation) while talking about how important family is to their life.
But hey if the sex is good, what are you going to do until she asks you to put a ring on it?
And no I didn't. I ran like hell.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday July 30 2017, @03:02AM
Plenty of them do. My girlfriend is one of them. I am another one of them. You just don't hear about us because we're not getting complained about, is all.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @03:49PM (7 children)
What a bunch of pantywaist whingers. Get a hold of yourself, man. You *are* men, aren't you? Or are you some of those weak minded "red pill" types that are too stupid to make a go of it and get a girlfriend. I'm sorry Sally didn't kiss you in the closet in grade 1 but get over it and move on.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @04:32PM (6 children)
LOL, real men won't have anything to do with women. Why on earth would we want to have to work hard to impress a shallow woman to be with us? Then have to deal with decades of emotional blackmail on the off chance that she decides that she no longer loves us and decides to have the courts bend us over and take all of our good stuff?
Apparently you think that real men are tools.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @04:41PM
So, you're gay, right? Not that there's anything wrong with that. Bros before hoes, amiright?!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @05:03PM (3 children)
A real man can hold down a high paying job, buy a house, hang with his friends, do hobbies and stuff by himself, get a girlfriend, and raise a family. If he wants to, that's what a real man can do. What can a bunch of whiny whiners do?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @03:43AM (1 child)
And yet, most of the MGTOW have all those things except the women and children. In fact, the more money a man has, the more he has to lose if he's foolish enough to get married. With no-fault divorces, and a divorce system set up to provide for women, why would any man in his right mind take that risk?
Plus, if you don't get married, then you don't have to work as hard or if you do work hard, you can spend all the money on yourself having a good time.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @03:28PM
The main reason prostitution is illegal, at least I'm coming to think this, is because it would free men from horrors of divorce.
Secondly, so many here place the blame for a bad marriage on the man. Let's say you meet a wonderful, smart, independent, engaging woman and decide to become married. Then two years in she totally stops trying, stops working, whines and complains about everything. In the mean time you build a business, suggest and do counseling, try to make her happy but another 8 years down the road, you lose half or more of everything you worked your ass off for because that's how divorce works these days. Women have the same opportunities as men these days, at least below the CEO level which is sort of the irrelevant outlier level anyway, even for men, but when you get to divorce court, they are treated like delicate flowers from a time when they spent hours scrubbing clothes by hand, cooking, cleaning, and otherwise contributing if they did not work out of the home. Middle aged men are despised by society and abused by the law. We are treated like beasts of burden.
If you got lucky enough to marry someone not like this, congratulations, you won the lottery. For the rest of us though -- we just wish we had never been mislead by our mates and by the system we toil in. I hope I live long enough to see adequate sex-bots because the women who abuse men in this way are going to absolutely lose their shit once they see the end of their power.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @02:27PM
Apparently, ramble about what losers "whiny whiners" are on an online forum by comparing them to their idealized notion of the real man they wish they were.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @05:02AM
Hear that? That's the wail of the perpetually aggrieved man-child! At one time it was hypothesized to be a sort of mating call designed to draw in potential mates out of pity. More recently, it is understood to be maladaptive as it is actually repellent to members of the opposite sex.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Saturday July 29 2017, @02:03PM (4 children)
Actually, there's a significant shortage of real girls in China. To the tune of something like 20-30 million extra young men. This has to do with the 1-child policy plus a cultural belief in the importance of carrying on the family name. Boys carry on the family, girls don't, so many Chinese families selected for boys through abortion and possibly infanticide.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @04:34PM (3 children)
There's no evidence to support that belief. Those "missing" women aren't really missing so much as the local authorities turn a blind eye to girls that are never registered with the government. The gap between the number of men and women isn't anywhere near as large as you seem to think.
This is just a piece of feminist propaganda that they use to try to convince people that women have it bad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @05:40PM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_women_of_China [wikipedia.org]
Maybe you need to correct this then?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @03:47AM (1 child)
That evidence is based upon registrations. As I stated, a lot of those "missing" women aren't so much missing as unregistered because the parents don't want to pay the fine and the local officials are more concerned with local harmony than they are with following the central government's rules. In many cases, especially down south, there's a tremendous amount of resentment because they have never liked the governments based in Beijing.
Consequently, nobody knows that the sex gap exists, let alone why it exists if it does.
The page that you're linking to begs the question. It assumes that there are a significantly fewer number of women than there should be for the number of men and it then goes into reasons why that might be the case. But, there's little evidence that it's actually true.
Especially given that the Chinese government had a 1.5 child policy during the period where this is alleged to have happened where couples having a girl for their first child were allowed to have a second child without paying a penalty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @11:46AM
Since you think that makes the problem go away, you must think the options are:
children|probability
--------+-----------
B | 50%
GB | 25%
GG | 25%
Which yields an expected value of 0.75 girls and 0.75 boys per couple, yay!
But either there's no pro-male bias (in which case the one-child policy turns out a 50/50 mix as well), or there is, and it will apply at least as strongly to a couple with one girl, and a second female pregnancy. (I don't know enough about Chinese culture to compare, but in the US it seems most couples specifically desire mixed offspring, and are unhappy with all boys or all girls; if there's even a weak preference for this in Chinese culture, it augments whatever pro-male bias there would be under the one-child policy.) So in reality, wouldn't it be more like:
children|probability
--------+-----------
B | 50%
GB | 40%
GG | 10%
for an expected value of 0.9 boys and 0.6 girls per family. Sure, it's better than the one-child policy, but a long way from perfect.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Sunday July 30 2017, @06:48AM
It's only from a Red Piller's resentful perspective that the theory looks remotely accurate in reality. Heck, the next sentence you have alone indicates that it's wrong: most 22-year-old guys do have relationships with women their age, and the vast majority of 30-year-old guys are either in a relationship or can get dates if they want to. That is, assuming the 30-year-old guys aren't targeting women young enough to still be in college.
This snarky commentary on a rant by a resentful 'Former Nice Guy' [mightygodking.com] covers much of the rest. Here, I'll quote a few relevant bits:
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday July 30 2017, @10:38AM
Because the laws of physics preclude that sort of body shape. Or at least you'd need some sort of scaffolding, and maybe counterweights at the back to prevent her from falling over. Also, there'd be no way to store a tongue that long in a human mouth.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday July 30 2017, @01:07PM
>Why not real girls (or boys?)
>My credit union website is not a 3-d simulation of standing in line and talking to a teller.
And there you answered your own question. The reason your your CU website *isn't* a simulation of standing in line, is because it *doesn't* involve a real person on the other end. Without needing a real person involved, they can afford to be instantly attentive and proceed through the interaction as fast or slow as you like. Put a real person on the other end and you have to pay them by the minute - in which case maximizing profit (while keeping the prices to you as low as possible) requires that they have a queue waiting to interact with them so that their time is never wasted waiting for the next client to arrive. And also, unless you're paying by the minute, that they deal with you as quickly as possible and move on to the next person in line.