Today we are talking to the super seducer himself: Richard La Ruina about his unique and controversial game Super Seducer. Super Seducer is an educational endeavour aimed at teaching men how to appropriately flirt with the opposite gender. It is available on Steam right now.

Super Seducer became controversial when it bruised the sensibilities of the more delicate members of the feminist community. The game has been hilariously misrepresented by the media either through negligence or a sincere attempt to make it seem raunchier than it is. To quote some headlines: “a Playstation/Steam game where players grab women’s ‘boobs’ and ‘asses‘” The article casually forgets that doing so gives you a fail state and thus is not encouraged. Though my favourite headline so far is from a male feminist over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun who described Super Seducer as “a blancmange of ineptitude and misogyny” if not for the pretentious and meaningless in context French in the title then for the cringe inducing white-knighting of the piece itself. Mourning the state of video game journalism aside, Super Seducer is a unique entry into the Dating Simulator genre and one of the very few dating sims aimed at heterosexual men.

Gamers have long been stereotyped as inept in the area of dating and social interaction. As someone who only briefly strays from my keyboard to buy orange juice and say ‘hi’ to people in the style of Stitch from Lilo and Stitch, I concede that may be a possibility. Can Super Seducer really make a positive impact on the lives of gamers and incels? Only time will tell! Without further ado here’s the man himself.

About Richard La Ruina

“I’m Richard La Ruina, a dating coach for men. I went from a 21-year old who had never kissed a girl and was depressed, to becoming successful with women and with great social skills. I decided to start a company to teach what I had learned. I’ve released books and video products and recently got into the games industry.”

You may have seen Richard on Good Morning Britain and Dragon’s Den in the past. His book The Natural is available for free on his website as a digital download. You can look for physical copies published by Harper Collins And Random House. Richard also releases a plethora of content on YouTube related to stealth attraction.

The Interview

This interview is an edited with the permission of the interviewee.

To read the raw version click here.

What Inspired You To Create Super Seducer?

“I like new challenges and pushing myself to do better. On top of that, I’ve always enjoyed playing games. I had a Sega Master System, and every Sega console through to Dreamcast and then switched to PlayStation. I still play games pretty much every day.

I had an idea in mind for a game, but, obviously, I didn’t have the skills or the connection to make it. Then, I was approached by a development team and by combining that with my connections in video creation I had everything I need to make the Super Seducer.”

What Genre Of Game Would You Classify Super Seducer As?

“In the first few days of Super Seducer‘s release, it was tagged ‘Psychological Horror’, I thought that was great.

Dating Simulator, Education, and Humour would be three solid descriptions of the game. The humour is a big part of it. That’s what all the YouTube and Twitch guys play it for. I didn’t want Super Seducer to be a dry and serious learning experience, games are supposed to be fun.”

The Psychological Horror tag and the Dating Simulator tag seem to appear together an awful lot on Steam. Kinda makes me worry ever so slightly about the fetishes the future generations will have.

What Do You Think Of Gaming As A Medium?

“I think it’s great! The interactivity means that games are a lot more engaging than seminars. That means you are more likely to remember what you learn. One of the things we had in mind is that most games focus on the fun but they don’t teach you anything useful. We wanted to tick the boxes of both being fun and also teaching something with Super Seducer.”

I must say, I love this point Richard brings up. The interactivity of games in the field of education is something I love to preach about. Being able to engage with the content makes it so much easier to learn.

Do You Think Super Seducer Will Make An Impact On The Lives Of Young Men?

“Yes, I really do. My book The Natural has been out in various forms in multiple countries since 2007. Since then, I have received hundreds of messages from guys who have gone from suicidal and lonely to happy and confident. I even get messages from those who have gotten married. We have enough evidence by now to show that it’s a fact that the advice provided will help some shy guys in their interactions with women.

The best thing is that it’s really the shy good guys that I want to help. I have no interest in asshole playboys who just want to use and hurt women. Fortunately, they don’t look to me for advice”

Considering I have met guys so awkward they have offered me their blood before (true story), I can believe that even seemingly obvious advice can help. Some of the options in Super Seducer appear obvious, but that may not be true for the average incel. There are many factors that can be added on top of shyness. A common story I hear now that we are in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement is fear of mild autism interfering. This became especially prominent after Aziz Ansari was targetted by #MeToo for a seemingly consensual encounter. He was found guilty by public opinion of not ‘reading the non-verbal cues’ of the women involved and abusing his status. The idea of not understanding non-verbal cues equating to rape is obviously something to cause anyone on the autism spectrum worry.

Is The Advice In Super Seducer Applicable For Lesbians?

“A lot of the elements in Super Seducer apply to any kind of human interaction. Conversational skills and being seductive are perks for anyone. With that in mind, I think that there would be a lot of overlap in the game for lesbians.”

How Did You Decide On The In-Game Choices?

“When we came up with the levels for Super Seducer, we looked at the most common questions guys ask in terms of where they meet women. The only one that we didn’t include was Tinder since we couldn’t think of a way to make it visually interesting. When it came to the actual choices we added in the most common mistakes that guys make. We just tried to answer the most common questions I get asked.”

Do You Want To Design More Games In Future?

“Super Seducer 2 is in the planning stages. We had a low filming budget for the first game and wasted a lot of money re-doing some coding work. Originally, the game had powerups, a tutorial, and all kinds of things the playtests revealed to be lame. In Super Seducer 2 we will be able to up the budget by 5x and bring in some good actors. We’ll be able to do more interesting things with multi-branching levels”

How Did You Feel When The Super Seducer Kickstarter Was Banned?

“This was tough because I genuinely expected the reception for the game to be more positive. I was disappointed in Kickstarter. We invested lots of time and some money in the campaign.”

Perhaps the original Kickstarter foreshadowed the hurdles Super Seducer is facing right now. In an earlier press release, Richard went into greater detail about the incident.

“We followed Kickstarter’s rules very carefully so we believe we have been suspended due to “inappropriate content” which is totally out of line. In the creation of the game, we made sure to create something that will be positive for both men and women. Players are rewarded for the right behaviour and shown how to give women what they want – a respectful and interesting interaction.

The production team included a female director, female actresses, and female staff on the programming side, all of whom love the project. Typical comments from females involved are that they wish guys would play this game to know better how to behave”.

Kickstarter, of course, refused to comment on why Super Seducer was banned. That is their usual policy. It’s a method used to escape being sued for discrimination and is present on a diverse range of platforms. Even places as benign as Quora. After pawing over Kickstarter’s Terms and Conditions and couldn’t find anything Super Seducer had infringed upon. The best I could think of was pornographic, but that’s a stretch and was even more of a stretch back then before the game’s full release.

It’s interesting, since most Kickstarters do not reach their goal Super Seducer’s success and huge amounts of buzz should have insulated it from being banned. Much more sexually explicit games have been funded on Kickstarter such as Escape From Pleasure Planet. Though, that game was not marketed toward heterosexual men.

Did You Predict The Backlash Against Super Seducer?

“Not so much actually. I’ve seen sexy women in games all my life. There are too many examples to mention. Given that this was a game about attracting women and is aimed at guys I thought I had more reason to include them than an action game. We made some decisions during the creative process without too much thought of any backlash. For example, having beautiful girls in sexy lingerie.

As #MeToo developed we were a bit more worried. The first big exposure we got was the Dunkey video. The comments were pretty positive. Starting with the Vice article though, there was a torrent of negative press. This was a pretty stressful period, but we calmed down when actual user reviews started coming in and sales were good.”

Motherboard/Vice actually created a multitude of hit pieces in retaliation to Super Seducer. Some of them are worth reading in their god awfulness alone. Here’s a collection of my archived favourites:

Which again, quotes lines that result in fail states without telling its readers that important fact. All to push the spicy idea that Super Seducer is a misogyny simulator. Though the kicker for me was Emanuel using Bayonetta as an example ‘Game’s You’re Ashamed To Play‘ which is both hilarious and a sad reminder of the fear sexy women invoke in some poor guys.

Claims one of the few articles actually written by a woman about Super Seducer. Yet, the author also goes for the low hanging fruit and compares it to a ‘Street Harassment Simulator’. Apparently, the once innocent act of talking to someone in the street like our forefathers is now harassment. Perhaps accidentally, the author admits that the characters react authentically to the negative choices she makes. Though my favourite quote has to be “This man might murder me in this secluded area if I reject him.” oh to live in the Junjian horrorscape where that’s something worth considering.

Motherboard also put pressure on Sony with the above claims and also on Valve. Valve did not cave to the pressure, but Sony will no longer sell Super Seducer. The question for me is why does Motherboard have such an interest in bringing down Super Seducer. Given their history, I sincerely doubt it is out of any affection for women. Then again, given Motherboard’s general attitude toward men and masculinity, perhaps this development is not surprising.

How Do You Feel About The Pressure To Censor Super Seducer?

“I hate it. It’s all very unfair. I’m not a minority but it’s obviously discrimination.

Vice and The Guardian both had writers putting pressure on Sony and Valve to cancel my game. Neither of them had played Super Seducer and so it was just a personal attack on me and my team. It doesn’t feel good to know that those articles will be on Google forever. They ended up being widely quoted so the awful journalists behind them probably got pats on the back for all the views.”

What Mistakes Did You Make While Developing Super Seducer?

“We spent around $175k on Super Seducer. We re-did a lot of the coding because we kept changing the mechanics. That pushed us over budget. We also had a nightmare with localization. Everything was done sub-optimally there due to the bad organisation of the 1000ish video files.

In early screenshots, you’ll see that the game had lives, and all that traditional game stuff. This all took time and money only to be thrown out. We also ditched early options for music and art. The filming process was on a shoe-string budget and was rushed through while we were uncertain of how successful Super Seducer would be.

For the sequel, we’ll set the budget to $100k and have five times the budget for filming and still come in so cheap by doing everything else smarter. We can also see that some countries like Turkey, are doing pretty well for sales, but we didn’t translate the game into those languages. So we’ll make an effort to have that from day 1 in the sequel.”

Can You Tell Us About The DMCA Strike Against IAmPattyJack

“The DMCA thing obviously was a mistake and there is no good reason to do that. At the time we had a lot of worries (Vice article and the PS4 situation) and that was just a final annoyance.

This guy makes hit job videos on indie publishers. The game was made by a handful of people, it’s not a big budget game with hundreds of people working on it. Knowing that he then still had a bad attitude and was provocative. If you are going to make videos saying “…is the worst game ever” you should expect some fallout, especially from small developers who don’t want a clickbaity YouTube title turning people off the game. But yes it was not the right thing to do and I learned my lesson.”

Ironically, the DMCA strike is probably the best thing that will ever happen to the channel. Examining the statistics shows a huge influx of views and subscribers due to this exposure. We can wrap this up to support in free speech rather than the content. The unfortunate thing about free speech is it means defending people who leave a bad taste in your mouth. As you can probably tell, I’m not particularly fond of this style of ‘kick’em while their down’ content. Yet, I see the importance of letting criticism be heard. So in the same way controversial people like Milo Yiannopoulos should be allowed to speak or even nazis, so should IAmPattyJack.

Have You Managed To Smooth Things Out With IAmPattyJack?

“No, not at all. He left a negative review of the game at release time to try and hurt its chances, so he was obviously still angry even though he got his video back, more subscribers, 100x the views.”

Do You Think Super Seducer Is Sexist?

“I don’t consider men learning dating skills to be sexist. I don’t agree with any of the points attacking the mechanics, or that there is a ‘right way’ to seduce all women, or even that there is no option to ‘leave her alone’. The fact is that based on all my experiences there are generally good and bad ways to behave and react in most dating situations. They may not be universal, but they are a good base.

It never occurred to me to have an option to ‘leave her alone’ since we chose the scenarios that were possible to ‘win’. I mention in the feedback that sometimes it just isn’t going to happen and you need to respect that. We have 520 choices in the game and I feel like people honed in on literally 2 of them to make global points about the game.

Having said that, we will take some points on board for the sequel. I guess we’ll ditch the sexy women on the bed for a start.”

I personally got a kick out of the criticism for the game not having a ‘Leave her alone’ button. What better way to learn how to date women than to run for the hills when one approaches for fear of losing a grip on that V-card World of Warcraft so carefully preserved? In all seriousness, I wonder if any actual gamers were offended by the sexy women. The attacks against sexy women in gaming are old news, but I would be surprised to hear such a complaint coming from gamers. That said, Super Seducer exists in a female dominated genre of games Dating Simulators and is one of the only dating sims targetted at straight men. It’s also a much more sincere attempt at trying to teach when compared to the hilarious Hatoful Boyfriend or Dream Daddy.

I wonder if the real problem these outlets have is the target demographic of Super Seducer. Could all this kicking and screaming come down to Richard injecting the wrong kind of diversity into a gaming genre? Let’s face it, if this were a game with the genders reversed it would be unremarkable. The main problems cited, again and again, are things that appeal to the male sexuality and humour.

What Have You Learned From Creating Super Seducer?

“I learned things about being the front man for a game, and it’s pretty brutal. I have been in the public for many years, but the difference was that people found me. Those people all wanted dating tips so they were a friendly and positive audience. Super Seducer, however, was seen by a wide swath of gamers, so the criticism was a lot harsher.

We learned a lot while making the game too. I like to think I am very good at learning from my mistakes. I’m really confident that the sequel will iron out lots of the things we got wrong and also have a smoother production process. From simple things like not having 10 back-to-back filming days to making sure we have the right talent onboard. We should be able to improve in every single area”

How Has Super Seducer‘s Development Affected Your Life Outside Of Gaming?

“Aside from the stress of the process, not much. I live a very quiet life for many years, so having thousands of people talking about the game and lots of negative articles is distracting. I needed a lot of massages and a little whiskey to chill out during the launch period.

From the Vice article to the Sony news, and then finally the horrible Guardian piece was tough. Fortunately, now it’s all pretty chill and we (the wife and I) are back to our normal happy life”

Can You Tell Us About Harper Collins Not Taking Your Follow-Up Book?

“Yeah, this is interesting. I have a literary agent in New York who was very confident about pitching my second book. Initially, it was called ‘Magnetic‘ and was basically taking all of the cool stuff we teach in dating but applying it more generally to men and women in all areas of life. Kind of like an updated and better version of ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People‘.

My agent expected offers of advances in the region of $250k! Harper Collins and all the other big publishers turned it down. They didn’t even make an offer at all. My first book has been translated into 7 languages and sold around 170,000 copies. Business-wise it was a no-brainer. They gave a fake reason that the book was too far from my dating wheelhouse. So I reworked it and wrote a new book called ‘Soulmate Sequence‘ which is a dating book for men and women. Everyone rejected it. It’s really good so I plan to self-publish it and include it in a DLC with Super Seducer 2.”

Why Do You Think The Dating Simulator Genre Is Dominated By Women?

“I knew nothing about the Dating Simulator market before this. Apparently, we are not allowed to note any differences between men and women anymore, but it makes sense that a game that is focused on human interaction vs killing would appeal to women, generally speaking. We will have some levels from a woman’s perspective in the sequel, so if they prove popular maybe we’ll make an entire game from a woman’s point of view.”

What Do You Think Of The Media’s Treatment Of You?

“The Media has really changed. For 10 years I literally haven’t had a word of negative publicity. I was on all the major TV networks in the UK. There has been a big change due to #MeToo but also because of the negative press that some Pick Up Artists (PUA) have generated.

The funny thing is that what I teach now is way more wholesome. I’m 37, married… I just don’t really fit the villain profile. The articles I read paint me as the devil incarnate. As if I’m 100% bad and what I teach is 100% awful. The main thing I have noticed is the total lack of objectivity. Are you telling me that in 10 scenarios and over 500 choices… there is nothing wholesome or anything that could be called good advice?

Like I said, it’s very strange since these same people were coming to our events, making documentaries, and lauding the results just a few years ago.”

What Advice Would You Give Developers Who Come Under Fire Like You Have?

“I’d say try and focus on the intended outcome and remember who the important audience is. Try not to react to the critics. Everything in the release was noise, from minor YouTube guys dissing the game to all of the press. If I had listened to them and made a game that they would have liked, it would have been the most boring game ever. What really matters at the end of the day is:

1. The financial result

2. The reception from actual customers and players. A good reaction from critics would have been nice, but I doubt a few high score reviews would have affected sales by much. They are definitely less important than Let’s Play videos from big YouTubers.”

What Advice Would You Give Gamers Looking To Date Other Gamers?

“I don’t really think there is much of a difference from regular dating advice. It’s good when there is a commonality. If you can strike up a conversation based on that commonality, then transition to other stuff in their life, then try and find something that you can do together and a reason for meeting up… That’s a pretty good 1-2-3 process.”

In Conclusion

There you have it! Remember to check out Super Seducer on Steam or watch us play it live on Twitch and later on Youtube

If you like what you see and want to support what we do then be sure to check out our Patreon.