Strange, horny game ads are flooding social media. I accidentally became obsessed

In his quest to discover why these ads are everywhere, Alex McKinnon ended up downloading too many of them – and investing too much

In a glamorous penthouse apartment, rain drumming against the floor-length windows, a chiselled man wearing nothing but a bath towel slowly undresses a beautiful young woman – only to stop when he notices a distinctive red mark on her chest. She has a birthmark – just like the baby he abandoned one rainy night many years ago.

“Are you Rachel? Born in 2003 in Bonneville?” he asks urgently. “I’m your father.”

At this horrific revelation, lightning crashes across the night sky, and also across Rachel’s face somehow. Inside Rachel’s head, a very disturbing and needless question arises.

“He shall be my … ?”

Option one – the obvious choice, Rachel! – is “Dad”. Option two is “BF”, meaning boyfriend.

So goes the latest Instagram ad for Whispers, an interactive mobile game where players advance their characters through stories by making strategic decisions, like whether their protagonist should have sex with the man she has just discovered is the biological father who left her in a rapidly flooding baby basket.

Mildly tamer versions of this ad have been bombarding me on social media for months now. You might have seen them yourself. They’re for an array of different mobile games – Choices, Whispers, Chapters, Episode – which each offer a range of visual interactive stories, usually romantic, in which you control a protagonist and periodically make narrative choices that affect the story’s outcome.

Depending which demographic boxes the algorithm has slotted you into, you probably get variations of these ads as well: makeover games, home renovation games, pimple-popping games that are also, inexplicably, about running a restaurant. Against my every instinct for mental self-preservation, morbid curiosity drove me to download as many of these games as I could find to learn more about these deeply chaotic ads and the companies behind them.

In the great tradition of Merge Mansion, the Whispers ad promises a scenario the game itself doesn’t actually deliver. I know because I played it, and many games like it. For dozens of hours over several weeks, my free time was given over to seducing princes, being rescued from raging flood waters by dreamy ranch hands, and having torrid affairs with CEOs who hired me to babysit their kids.

People who knew me during this period have described me as “possessed”. But the games themselves are the least strange thing about an industry that’s carved out a very specific place for itself.

In part, they’re the next logical step for the old bodice-ripper industry. While the quality of the art and storytelling varies widely between apps, many of the stories on offer play to the same conservative tropes and sexual dynamics codified by the likes of Mills & Boon (think titles like Billionaire Daddy, Suddenly Royal, Seducing My Professor and 50 Ways to Ruin a Rake).

Storylines are awash in brooding vampires, bad-boy doctors, werewolves with rippling abs and bosses with a total disregard for workplace sexual harassment policies. You meet a truly staggering number of potential love interests when they push you safely out of the way of charging farm animals.

The relative freedom of the medium, however, gives the games a little more leeway to break out of the confines that the print-and-ink books were stuck in for so long. Since publishing their first story in 2009, Choices has branched out into stories that grapple with climate change, bullying and eating disorders. Protagonists and love interests are typically customisable by ethnicity, while stories specific to LGBTQ+ people are slowly becoming more prominent.

Much of this progress has been driven by the players rather than the industry. The biggest titles, like Choices and Chapters, attract tens of millions of downloads, and have spawned sprawling and dedicated fan communities (the largest Choices subreddit, r/Choices, has nearly 40,000 active users). Besides sharing fanfic, fanart, recaps and theories, fandoms on Reddit, Tumblr, Discord and in-app forums passionately debate the sexual, gender and racial dynamics between characters and within storylines.

These games have a compelling financial reason to respect these fandoms: there’s a lot of money to be made from them. The largest interactive narrative apps can pull in up to $9m in revenue in a single month, and besides in-app ad deals, the biggest source of that revenue is in-game purchases.

While the apps are free to download and explore, advancing through a story requires spending in-game currency – coins, tickets, gems, keys – that costs real dollars. It’s possible to complete stories without spending anything other than the price of starting new chapters, but the drawcard of games like these – the ability to make choices that affect the outcome – is nearly always paywalled.

This was the difficulty I encountered in my first story of choice, The Royal Romance. You play a humble New York City waitress whisked off to Cordonia, a vaguely European microstate, to take part in a national Bachelor-style competition to win the heart of the prince and become the next queen. But whenever an opportunity arose to pursue anyone, up went the paywall.

Playing this one story, I spent more than $50 on unlockable options such as subplots, outfits and romantic trysts – many of which did little to advance the overall plot and left me feeling as if I’d been gently mugged. While cheaper subscription options are available, a regular reader could easily spend hundreds of dollars without quite realising it.

I wound up gently rejecting my other suitors and making a play for my prince’s hand – only to be blindsided at the last minute by a shocking scandal that could only be resolved in the next book. The grand and tragic love story that no doubt plays out over the seven other instalments in the Royal saga, however, will sadly remain untold – I have bills to pay.

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