One of the most common ways to "get the love interest" in Visual Novels is simple. Get all of their events. But is that true for real life?
But first let's explore exposure as a video game mechanic.
Exposure as a Dating Sim Game Mechanic
The most basic mechanic for Visual Novels and Dating Sims is very simple. You trigger as many events as you can with the desired love interest. Then you increase your affection rating somehow as a result. Sometimes you may need to make a few correct choices. However at least this put you on their "path".
As an aside understanding this strategy was key in funneling players to get the "worst ending" in Fading Hearts accidentally. They would try this strategy on one of the love interests, make choices that are extremely tempting yet wrong, then get the worst but most deeply cathartic ending. The numbers and timing was tuned so that this would consistently happen if they followed that strategy.
Then they would have a huge desire to discover how this worst ending occurred. And when they did they discovered the method would understand the meaning behind it.
But more on that some other time.
Mere Exposure IRL
How does this work in real life? Almost the same actually. It really helps you get in the door and talking with a person you are interested in. Foot in the door. Just like in the video games.
However if you have consistent negative interactions all the time without some sort of random reward schedule it won't work further. And let's be honest... having all positive interactions all the time sometimes feel unnatural. So there really needs to be decent follow up.
Marketing tends to "Mere Exposure" this a lot with spamming advertisements at a basic level.
Fiction Mimicks Reality
So this basic dating-sim mechanic of exposure is very similiar to how it functions in real life. From what it can do and it's limitations.
Next time we'll get into how a dating game mechanic doesn't quite match up to how it goes in real life.
[Disclaimer: This article is absolutely written to (likely ineffectively) convince you buy our games while you gain knowledge. Enjoy the content!]