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Paper short abstract:

This paper reformulates Japanese video games centered on establishing, developing and fulfilling intimacy with fictional characters as 'character intimacy games'. By this descriptor, the paper formulates a theory of videogames centered on developing parasocial phenomena as fulcrum of game traversal.

Paper long abstract:

In Japan, video games centered on developing imagined intimate relationships with anime-manga characters, chiefly known in the Anglosphere under the descriptor of 'visual novels', are predominantly collocated within the domain of Japanese pop culture and anime-manga media. This collocation within the existing umbrella of Japanese studies, obscures gamic dimension of said titles, in favor of collocation within the cognate domain of anime-manga media. Re-focusing on the gamic aspects of visual novels and similar games, on the other hand, opens the way for discussing how the inherently fuzzy and unstructured concept of intimacy - both a euphemism for sexual intercourse and a marker of both emotional and physical closeness - may be gamified and transformed into a framework for a distinct typology of video games, of which Japanese visual novels may be only one example.

While most of such video games do not offer significant possibilities for player interaction, limiting themselves to offering a branching plotline and multiple character-centered endings to the game, approaches to how such games are in fact gamifying parasocial phenomena. The term refers to one-sided media reception where one perceives mediated interaction with a character as no longer or only partially mediated, and the interaction becomes akin to one with an actual human being. Approaches in this sense within the domain of Japan-focused game studies have only just begun and have yet to integrate the decade-long experience of communication studies in approaching parasocial phenomena (cf. Liebers and Schramm 2019).

This paper reframes games centered around establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate relationships with fictional characters as 'Character Intimacy Games', games where traversal is dependent and in function of players being capable of developing parasocial phenomena in response to in-game characters, and to proceed within the game based on parasocial feedback with and towards fictional characters.

References

Liebers, Nicole, and Holger Schramm. 2019. "Parasocial Interactions and Relationships with Media Characters - An Inventory of 60 Years of Research." Communication Research Trends 38 (2): 4-31.