Tara Tai’s world is full of unlikely bedfellows. The Harvard Business School graduate works a desk job for Google by day and moonlights as a rom-com writer. In their fiction, Tai’s two worlds collide — the starchy straight-and-white world of tech bros, and the other, their queer and creative inner world.
OK, it’s not that straightforward. But one of the things Tai says about the romance genre is that things can be a little unrealistic; characters can be uncomplicated.
“It’s like broad strokes,” Tai, the 36-year-old Boston writer tells Boulder Weekly. “It’s a big painting and it’s bold colors. That’s the great thing about romance.”
Tai really is a Harvard Business School graduate, and they do work for Google. They also recently published their debut novel with Penguin Random House, a zippy rom-com called Single Player set at a fictional game developer in Boulder.
The reality of bringing the novel into the world was a little more complicated.
After graduating, Tai spent time in China researching a historical novel based on dinnertime stories they’d grown up hearing — stories about how their grandmother “walked however many kilometers to escape Communist rule and hitched a ride to Taiwan and left behind siblings that took the political fall for her defection,” Tai says. “It probably wasn’t as dramatic as all that. But we grew up hearing these stories. So I was interested in going back to meet these great aunts and great uncles.”
Tai used the material to write a novel about food and cultural authenticity, and quickly followed that up with another about a tech worker moving to China. Neither was picked up by a publisher, so they shelved book writing for a while.
Then, in 2022, after spending much of the pandemic playing adventure games like The Last of Us and God of War, tactical RPGs like Fire Emblem and “choices-matter” narrative RPGs like Dragon Age, the idea for Single Player started to emerge.
Tai was intrigued by the immersive quality of games and wanted to write a character who uses the same laddered structures to navigate their own life. If you click A, B happens; if you click C, D happens.
Sticky conversations
The chapters of Single Player alternate between two main characters, Cat and Andi. Cat is the bright-eyed new hire at Heartrender Studios, a chronic gamer with a soft spot for romantic subplots. Cat is assigned to assist Andi, a nonbinary game writer with a chip on their shoulder, determined to keep, as Andi puts it, “frilly things like lust and romantic love” out of their game. You can probably guess what happens next.
At least, if you’re a romance reader. The genre operates by a certain set of agreed-upon conventions: character tropes, plot patterns and the absolutely obligatory happily-ever-after.
That’s not unlike the realm of video games. The rules may be a little looser when it comes to storylines and plot development, but players are still limited to a world someone else created — a world with its own bylaws, characters and finite decisions.
While strict boundaries can create a fun, choose-your-own-adventure experience in both video games and book writing, they can also have dark side-effects applied outside of their fictional containers. Both realms have spent the past decade-plus in their own, respectively sticky conversations about identity and inclusion.
In May 2024, the Romance Writers of America, once the premier romance association, filed for bankruptcy. Membership has plummeted to about 2,000 members from around 10,000 at its peak, despite a proliferation of romance-focused bookshops and a growing fanbase.
The association has been ravaged by scandals of exclusion since 2005, when a small faction pushed to define romance as strictly between “one man and one woman,” according to reporting by the New York Times. The association has since apologized for the incident, but continued to fumble through the subsequent decades.
In 2019, the association banned a Chinese American author for calling out ugly stereotypes in a popular novel; in 2021 they presented an award to a Western romance whose protagonist finds love after slaughtering a band of Lakota. The 2024 bankruptcy filing cited “disputes concerning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) issues” among the reasons for the drop in membership.
‘A love letter to gaming’
Then there’s the gaming world. It would be hard to talk about the industry’s deep-seated misogyny without mentioning Gamergate.
In short, Gamergate sprung from the success of an arty, non-traditional game called Depression Quest written by an independent designer named Zoë Quinn. In 2014, Quinn’s ex-boyfriend wrote a series of slanderous blog posts claiming that Quinn cheated on him with several men in the gaming industry, kicking off a nauseating torrent of backlash — including, but not limited to, death threats, doxxing and nude photo leaks of Quinn. It was neither the first nor last incident of blatant misogyny in gaming culture, but it was the first time this very vocal, very online slice of a far-right culture made it into mainstream media.
“I was certainly thinking about Gamergate when I wrote Single Player, but a lot of the controversies I obliquely reference happened more recently,” Tai says. They rattle off heated criticisms of the 2020 game The Last of Us Part II, a trans character’s storyline in the October 2024 release Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the presence of a nonbinary voice actor in the forthcoming Ghost of Yotei.
In Tai’s version, Andi appears on stage at a gaming conference in Las Vegas to give a talk about a gritty game called Aftermath. The crowd is shocked when Andi, with their gender-neutral name and generally low profile, walks onto the stage and announces their pronouns: she/they. The Reddit boards light up and the rumors swirl; Andi is doxxed, threatened and forced to move to Boulder
In real life, Tai fell in love with the town while visiting friends a couple years ago, and liked the idea of setting the book in a place with an emerging gaming scene where the characters are “able to escape to the mountains on a weekend,” Tai says, nodding to a scene that made it into the book.
Of course, Tai isn’t tackling these issues head-on in Single Player, but they’re not not tackling them either. In industries with sometimes violent exclusions, the simple act of inclusion can be illuminating.
Though the novel has been generally well-received by readers, Tai’s first love is the gaming community.
“I am more of a gamer than a rom-com reader, so I was much more concerned with how a gamer would react to the words I was putting on the page than how a romance reader would react,” Tai says. “That was probably a bad move because it’s romance readers that are more likely to pick up my book. But I’m not trying to write a love letter to romances. I’m trying to write a love letter to gaming.”
ON THE PAGE: Single Player: A Reading with Tara Tai. 7-8 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 21, Trident Booksellers & Cafe, 940 Pearl St. Free