I reckon it’s time I got back to talking about Japan. To that end, today’s title is a t-shirt slogan I saw in a hip-aching second-hand clothing store in Daimyo today. I really need to start carrying my camera around more: I also hit up ‘Mandarake’, which is five floors of grimy photogenic second-hand otaku tat, cosplay uniforms, improbable, marshmallow-pink figurines and porn. And hundreds of stills, sketches and animation cells from unidentifiable animes, which I bought with a vengeance.
Webkare, Japanese for internet boyfriend, is a combination online game-social networking site-dirty playing card collection, aimed at lonely female teenagers, which became an overnight sensation after its launch. The ‘game’ aspect is a boyfriend sim in the tradition of Japanese dating sims going back to terribly pixelated stuff on mid-nineties games consoles.
What’s notable about this is not that it’s a dating sim for girls- such things have existed for a decade, of sorts. What’s interesting is that it’s the first time a dating sim of any kind has been combined with social networking, community or anything of the kind. Those unfamiliar with the ‘simulated dating’ genre in general would be prone to think of it as the most profoundly solitary activity in the generally solipsistic field of computerised gaming. These are, after all, a species of the ‘visual novel’ genre which, with the curious exception of the Phoenix Wright series, are virtually unheard of outside Japan.
‘Visual Novels’, as the name suggests, are generally interactive only in the barest possible way. In a dating sim, for example, your behaviour and your selection of various conversational gambits (usually from a choice of three) leads to varied successes within a localised harem of vacant, coiffed members of the opposite sex. And novices at these games will have to take my word for it: you have to work pretty hard at mis-navigating those conversation options if you don’t want to end up in an unlikely pre-programmed sexual encounter with at least two or three dead-eyed moe muffins during the course of a game.
Well, all right. But Webkare combines virtual dating with social networking. Asiajin has a summation of the details I can’t hope to top:
On the service, you will spend a virtual school life with 4 young boys, while communicating other users.
Like as other social networking services, you have “Purofu” (my profile), “Mini-Rogu” (microblog), “Oekaki” (Drawing bbs), direct message. As an original feature, it provides “Pro-Peta”, user created icons which shows paster’s attributes and interests, to show others your liking anime/cereblities/fashion/etc.,
It is explained that the system initially has 150 audio phrases for each boy recorded by voice actors. Conversation between you and your future boyfriends can be recorded on your “Album” page.
I swear.
It actually makes a lot of sense. As an online version of an extremely linear type of game, Webkare represents the next evolution of sim dating. The boys in question, their personality and their conversation patterns, can be updated regularly, according to tracked habits of use. Like any other MMORPG the gaming experience is essentially single-player, and nuances can be constantly added, conversation trees given new branches. Relationship crises can occur and be resolved with the release of new updates. Development can be a continual, nuanced, emotional process. The user is signing up for a soap, of which they are at the centre; a drama which, like any MMO, will eternally postpone its climax or endgame to keep subscription coming in.
Particularly interesting is the fact that the system has 150 audio phrases recorded for each bishi. Now, I’m not certain, but the resonance of the number 150 with the number of Pokemon in the original Game Boy game is too strong to ignore. I reckon that audio phrases for the lads will be a currency of sorts, traded among the people using the service.
You have to sign yourself up to one boy when you register: perhaps there will be 150 unique codes to be traded among everyone, and which release a different phrase from every boy. Or, perhaps, the system encourages users with the same boyfriend to trade audio files, or tips on how to get them, among themselves. After all, once you’ve signed up for the system, wouldn’t you want to really know your beau? Know all his 150 moods? To catch ‘em all?
But then, this would mean the system is dependent on the interactions of users who share the same virtual boyfriend, who are working through the same emotional vocabulary. This could problematic to say the least, if the feelings of potential buyers of second-hand Realdoll users are anything to go by.
From Danny Choo:
First off is the price tag problem which is easily solved. Doll Mate
(NSFW) is an online dealer that specializes in selling second hand dolls – you can pick up a Candy Girl… for a laughable 200,000 yen. If you can forgive her for being with another man...
I’m being unfair. Danny Choo has nothing if not a sense of humour about his unasked-for role as interpreter of bad Japanese Weirdness to the rest of the world. Koko o Sawatte, I always say.
How exactly will social-networking interactions on Webkare work, I wonder? Will the girlfriends of the surly, intellectual sterotype form a group to support one another through his bad moods? Will those chasing the long haired surfer-type trade insults on why he didn’t show for the big date? Surely these games are designed to make the user feel like they are at the centre of the characters’ world?
What kind of experience will it be to have a whole population, far more than a virtual high school could contain, all wanting to dish about their hot date with the same guy? Collaboration seems to be the key to winning the heart of the chosen boy, but how exactly will this work?
Somehow, I think both marketers and social-networking experts would agree that this system could only have been pioneered with a sim aimed at girls. The results would be too extreme, too little community-oriented, in a collaborative dating sim for boys. Boys tend to want to be the seducer, not the wing-man. Nonetheless, success (or otherwise) of Web-kare should be nothing less than instructive to anyone hoping to combine social networking with gaming or any other object of obsession. Like, say, Shibuya fashion.
fame is chiefly a matter of
dyeing at the right time
