W(h)ither the Family and the World? Interpassive Play and Ecomimesis

Robert Pfaller marks an increase in “interpassivity” writ large as part of the contemporary search for play, suggesting that play itself is a parallel to interpassivity.3 Interpassivity refers to the dynamic whereby the normal actions and activities of everyday life move to media: recording a television show replaces watching, as the consumer merely plays at watching by collecting videotapes or DVR files.4 The outsourcing of parenting to a tutor upon which the 1983 film The Family Game is premised establishes the interpassive mechanics of play and gaming as its undergirding theme.

Gaming is important to the film not only because trailers featured the 8-bit sounds of gaming but also because The Family Game forces its viewers into the position of a player of a video game, there simply to enjoy the characters and play rather than find a deeper underlying meaning. Game critic Yoshioka Hiroshi compares it to the world of the 1987 film Hatchaki Sensei’s Tokyo Game, where game and reality can be distinguished:

The film Family Game (1983) by Morita Yoshimitsu eerily predicts the form of our current situation, in which reality and game are fused. In short, the message of this film is that that even family life is no more than a kind of role-playing. As game logic has penetrated even into the most intimate of living spaces, the boundary between the game and reality has disappeared. In other words, it has become difficult to see the programming for this world that generates “games as reality.”5

The notion that our postmodern global reality is simply a game in which humanity has drifted so far from engagement with the brutal realities of the world has become a commonplace. That daily struggles are trivialized through their gamification is the drivel and grist of a particular contemporary pose of critical theory that sleekly seeks to align postwar performances of apolitical stances, abstractions from the reality of game theory, and risk-bundling strategies with the growth and bursting of bubble economies and the postmodern disavowal of meaning. But what has allowed critics to even argue that everything is a game, that life is a game, is not simply the advent and proliferation of game theory, computer modeling, and derivative markets but the prevalence of video games themselves in daily life. This notion that all the world is a game has become such a commonplace saying in our postmodern global reality that it is hard to imagine that it once seemed a critical revelation. The film’s ambiguity does not encourage viewers to take an active role in playing the film, in order to interpret a moral to the story. Rather, the ambiguity itself can be seen as video-game-like insofar as the plot matters less than the play and gags along the journey; in short, we are being told to interpassively outsource or simply give up our interpreting of the film and enjoy. And yet this interpretation misses an actual game at the center of the film.

The obvious specific connection between game and family for Japanese viewers at the time of The Family Game’s release would have been the video game console. In 1983, the year that the film was released, Nintendo first marketed its historic NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) console in Japan as the Famicom (a portmanteau abbreviation of “family computer”) gaming system. From this perspective, the name Famicom attempts to hide the medium’s supposed role in the further atomization of family, begun perhaps with radio and television. Japanese viewers would have been aware that advertising connected family and education with video gaming. And, though no critics of the film discuss the actual video game in it, gaming was touted in the television ads for the film and centered (albeit briefly) within the film itself.6

Critics and audiences of The Family Game frequently note the unusual and visually striking placement of the chairs at the family’s dining table, all in a row on one side.7 This placement gives the dining scenes an unrealistic, staged look, a stark visualization of a disconnected family that never meets eye to eye. But there is also at least one practical, diegetic reason for this, beyond the simple extradiegetic one that it allows for one nearly consistent camera setup during family meals: the family television (shown briefly in the corner of the room, when the camera, for a flash, crosses the dining-table line) is on the camera’s-eye side of the line. That is, the family may be lining up like this at the table to watch TV; and the camera that stands in the place of the TV (the eye that prevents them from seeing each other eye to eye) is watching them. Notably, the Famicom video game system was named in part for its imagined resting place atop the family television set, so that “parents and grandparents could enjoy watching the children play.”8

But more than this, there is a flash of a video game within the film, sandwiched between a scene of Shigeyuki Numata getting beat up by a group of boys in a field on his way home from school and another at home, in which a neighbor discusses intimate details of a family crisis. The six-second scene occurs almost exactly in the middle of the film (fifty-three minutes into the film with about fifty-two minutes remaining). It is also a pivot-shot for the entire film that is bifurcated at that moment between the setup in the first half of the film and the denouement in the second. Though it would be too simplistic to suggest that this scene (which itself contains a division between analog and digital games) provides a template for reading the film as a split between real and virtual family games, the scene’s presence stitches together the first half of the film that sets up the climax and dissolution of the film, suggesting that traditional social interactions may have been replaced by gamic ones, and that both have led to atomization.

In the foreground, three of the boys crowd around a tabletop hockey action game (the Champion Hockey Pola 400 game made in Finland by Bock-Plast), and in the background two boys are playing what appears to be Bandai’s release of the Mattel Intellivision’s NHL Hockey console game.9 Though the boys laugh, there is no clear dialogue; the beeps from the video game saturate the soundscape. Through the juxtaposition of these two forms of hockey, this scene sharply places into comparison two kinds of gaming: tabletop games and video games. In the analog foreground, the boys stare intently at the 3D board where plastic figures swat around a miniature puck. The figures, of course, move because they are connected below the board to metal rods that are manipulated by players. In contrast, the boys in the background stare at a 2D virtual world on the television set that achieves a minimal sense of depth through perspective by angling the ice rink to be smaller at the top of the screen than at the bottom, though a lack of shadows makes this effect fall flat. As such, the scene raises the question of whether, beyond these details of difference, there is a categorical difference between the old and new regimes of gaming.

This hockey scene, then, anticipates what will become explicit, for instance, in the 1987 Japanese television advertisement for an ice hockey game on Famicom’s new “disk system”—a fleeting mise en abyme that suggests a real in which our media remake our world. In the advertisement, a family gathered around the console is surprised when a hockey player, presumably from the digital game they play, crawls out of the television screen and into the living room saying, “Sorry for barging in.” The hockey player then joins the family in playing the game on the console from whence he came. The commercial ends with the hockey player declaring, “It’s more fun than the real thing!,” to which the father responds, “That’s because it’s Nintendo” (Honmono yori omoshiroi desu ne! Nintendo desu kara). This sort of hokey reverse mimesis is clearly intended to suggest that the new system has vastly improved the resolution and realism of Famicom games.10 In other words, it suggests a kind of surface improvement of representation and immediacy, in terms of colors, sounds, action, and resolution. It is essentially a celebration of the increasing amount and variety of information that it was possible to convey in a short time, the media becoming “hotter” to use Marshall McLuhan’s term.11 And yet, the fact the virtual-turned-real hockey player wants to play the digital version of the game rather than the real one suggests that the priorities of our world have been either completely reorganized by games or simply brought to the point of enabling us to joke about the possibility of such desire. Of course, the real reverse mimesis that the ad intends for viewers to complete is the purchasing of Nintendo products, the conversion of passive viewers into active consumers. The ad (like all such ads) interpellates the viewer, in fact, to disconnect from the television and go to the store to buy new media to reconnect to the television in a new way.

This separation of the world of human constructs and the real world is precisely the distinction that the theory of ecomimesis seeks to negotiate. In the course of the development of the concept, ecomimesis has had at least two competing—at times overlapping and at times contradictory—meanings in recent discussions in the fields of, on the one hand, architecture and design and, on the other hand, cultural critique and ecocriticism. Coined by systems ecologist and business strategist Gil Friend in 1996, the term initially referred to Sisyphean efforts to mime the environment in architecture and design, but it gradually evolved into a label for more or less successful attempts to harmonize built construction with the environment.12 Later, for instance, Timothy Morton ecologically repurposes the term to address and critique the ecological writing language of immediacy (characterized by tropes like “even as I write . . .” used since the Romantics) to convey a writer’s harmony with nature.13 According to Morton’s critique, in rhetorically positioning oneself in the midst of nature, such (romantic) writing reveals or instantiates the very gap that it intends to close—the gap between the writing moment that is necessarily out of nature and the ecological/ecocritical one of action that must occur in the world. As such, ecomimesis names a tendency of human creative construction in the world (whether in building and fabrication or in discourse and fabulation) to represent a human fitting-in (immersing in the environment) even as such representations inevitably display the impossibility of the task because concepts of nature have been constructed in contradistinction to those of the human. In short, it is a transcendental tendency toward the impossible goal of completely accounting for ecosystems affected by the tension between world-awareness and world-building.

Alenda Y. Chang makes the persuasive argument that such tension is repeated in video games. She writes:

The concept of ecomimesis can easily extend to encompass photography, film, music, and games. . . . Game texts, unlike conventional texts, demand action—games are “richly designed problem spaces” or “possibility spaces” in which we come face to face with our knowledge of and impact on the environment.14

Though I agree that video games stage the problem of ecomimesis well, I am skeptical of the notion that (inter)action within games allows them to overcome the old romantic problems of reification that Morton outlines. In its efforts to harmonize or eradicate the borders between human individual and nature, of course, ecomimetic writing and gaming end up often muddying, reifying, and demarcating.15

In the idiosyncratic and insular worlds of Murakami Haruki’s early fiction, social and community organizations and ideological state apparatuses such as family, school, police, military, and religious organizations are all but absent, at most relegated to minor roles in the plot. In their place, readers of his Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), for instance, are presented with meditations of lone selves on the spaces in which they dwell, such as the following scene of video game play.

The book is bifurcated between two sections representing two apparently separate worlds. One is a near-future world familiar to sci-fi enthusiasts, in which a technologist is pursued by a mysterious cabal. The other is a psychological world within the protagonist’s head, from which he is unlikely to escape; this is a surreal and dystopic world more familiar perhaps to readers of Kafka than to detective, speculative, or science fiction. But in the end, of course, the worlds are connected. We soon realize the one world is simply the world within the protagonist of the other world’s head. But when we consider the nature of the diegetic links between the two worlds, the primary role of media in the novel becomes clear. What is interesting about the two worlds of the novel’s “double helix structure” is the fact that such media are the rungs of the ladder that connect them.16 A recording of “Danny Boy” by Bing Crosby floats up in both worlds and a unicorn skull that sits atop the television set (in place of a video game console) in the “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” is paralleled by the skulls the reader examines in the library in the “End of the World” world.

The medium of games provides another such point of connection between the two worlds. With games as one of its mise en abymes, the novel depicts game centers of the late 1970s (as well as a variant of chess) to correspond to the plot structure noted for placing the importance of personal relations and decisions on a level with decision-making about the fate of the world.

It was five-twenty-five when I stopped at the library. Since I had more than enough time, I got out of the car and took a stroll down the streets still wet with rain. In that sort of coffee shop which has a service counter, I watched a golf match on television while drinking coffee, then I went to a game center and played a video game. It was a game where you destroy tanks with antitank guns as they cross a river. I was dominating at first, but as the game went on, the number of enemy tanks increased like lemmings, destroying my base. When my position was destroyed, the screen went completely white like the incandescent glow of a nuclear explosion. Then the words “game over—insert coin” appeared. As instructed, I put another hundred-yen coin into the slot. As music rang out, my base reappeared, completely unscathed. It was precisely a battle to be lost. If I didn’t lose, the game would go on forever. And a game without end somehow has no meaning. That’s trouble for a game center and trouble for me. In time, my position was destroyed again and the glowing light reappeared on the screen. Then the words “game over—insert coin” floated to the surface.17

In this passage on video gaming, the connections between the personal and the global are represented insofar as the private individual plays alone in the arcade (game center). Characteristically, the narrator plays alone while waiting to meet his date. The intimate relationship of dating is directly connected to the narrator’s decision to kill time in public and semipublic spaces for cultural consumption (the library, the coffee shop, and the game center), as well as to the game’s featured denouement at the geostrategic level of nuclear annihilation. Indeed, the game center locates gaming in a middle ground perhaps between the private domestic sphere of the home and the public space of the library, but one largely devoid of human contact. In the arcade, the player is out in the world, but only nominally. But rather than having the game itself affect the “real” of the diegetic world, Murakami limits the global damage of nuclear war to the world of the game, leaving readers to make any allegoric connections to the novel as a whole.

Alone in public, staring at a screen, and deciding the fate of the world in the machine, the narrator contemplates the meaning of all games. The necessary and inevitable failure of the protagonist to have his game avatar survive is at once both tantamount to ending the world in which his avatar dwells and to ending what is putatively only a game in his world (the novel world).18 The narrator will invert this kind of game ending in his final choice of the novel to stay in the psychic space of the “End of the World” rather than going back to the “Hard-Boiled Wonderland.” This final decision is effectively opting to continue forever playing the game of the rule-bound, fantasy world that is both personal and private (because in his head) and to give up the messier but social hard-boiled world. If the novel’s ending is unsatisfying for some readers, it is because of the observation that the narrator makes here. An eternal game has no meaning; or, conversely, there must be an end for the game to exist as a game. Rather than allowing the world to die at the end of the gamelike novel, the narrator chooses the gamelike world of the narrator’s unconscious (the static end of the world), remaining perpetually in what seems to be an endless game.19

Recent theories about the sekai-kei genre help clarify this broad abstract issue about the gamification of the world even as some of them point to Murakami as an early example while relying on an obscure essay by Betsuyaku (a.k.a. Betchaku) Minoru to explain the structure of the genre. In his 1986 essay collection Tange Sazen Riding a Horse, Betsuyaku considers several media and their corresponding sociostructural forms. Beyond the 1920s serial fiction and samurai films featuring the famous one-eyed character of the title, the media discussed in the book range from stage through newspapers, novels, and photographs, to word processors and television. But it is particularly the collection’s first essay, titled “The Loss of a Middle Ground,” that became an important basis for later theorizers of sekai-kei. The essay uses the aesthetics of sports television as its primary example. Focusing on the framing of shots in a live televised baseball game, Betsuyaku muses about a perceived overuse of the close-up and lack of mid-shots. He writes that if watching a baseball game in the ballpark or stadium is like reading a detective novel, the “near view” or close-up presented on broadcast television makes the game more similar to the psychological portrayals of an I-novel. This essay introduces an idea that he goes on to elaborate in subsequent rethinkings of the idea of close-up, mid-shot, and long shot. Ignoring the sociality of, say, watching a baseball game in an izayakaya restaurant, he argues that the middle ground of social interpersonal connections through community is losing ground to a myopic view that raises and distorts the importance of the individual directly against the background (which he connects to belief in mystical divination) with no mediation in between.20

According to critic Kasai Kiyoshi, the sekai-kei form has a layered structure (like Murakami’s book) with inner and outer worlds. As Kasai presents it, path-blazing sekai-kei in the mid- to late 1990s depicted bifurcated worlds—both a real, everyday, individual interior and an extraordinary, fantastic exterior with a global reach. Kasai writes, “Creative work that continues to describe the pure love of the powerless boy and fighting girl is the world’s real reflection of the simple fact that the everyday is Armageddon and the Armageddon is everyday.”21 This view presents a three-venue understanding of the sekai-kei form; first, a personal everyday (micro level); second, the intermediating social arena (mid-level); and last, the world Armageddon (macro level). Drawing on Betsuyaku’s schema, critics Azuma Hiroki, Maejima Satoshi, and Saitō Tamaki reconceive this subcultural form to discuss a middle or intermediary layer lacking in the structure of the genre.22 The three areas (personal, social, and global) in the genre of sekai-kei correspond to Betsuyaku’s terminology of foreground (close-up), middle ground (medium shot, middle view), and background (backdrop, landscape) or Jacques Lacan’s schema of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real.

The importance of the meta level of sekai-kei cultural products as the middle-level mediators (symbolic) is clear even without this psychoanalytic close reading. The works themselves continually provide their own intrastory critique on media and its meta levels by using media not just as background elements setting the scene but as integral drivers of the plot. This turn toward addressing mediation within the stories themselves enacts a return of the social middle ground supposedly lost within the genre. Though school, family, police, government, and press have weakened or vanished in the stories, they are replaced by intervening technological connections between individuals and their environment through gadgets. The fantasy of sekai-kei is the fantasy of ecomimesis—the notion that one could live without a middle level of society or media directly in the world. This fantasy is always revealed as such by the fact that characters live in hypermediated worlds. In other words, disconnect from traditional mid-level social organizations spurs creation of a bypass or is enabled through mediated connections. This supplementary function of media within the genre replicates a function that the genre itself serves for its consumers and in a sense reifies the purportedly vanished middle ground. The market success of the sekai-kei genre in so many media (novels, light novels, manga, anime, films, and video games) attests to the return of the social at both the mediated and meta levels. If sekai-kei is the genre for a lost generation of people who feel disconnected from government, work, school, and family, it is precisely through this mass genre that they are able to socially reconnect with an entire community or society of fans. In short, the massively popular genre itself has replaced absent social relations represented in the works with mediation, information, communication, and infrastructure.

In recent years, a number of media theorists have begun to question the sociological politics of this divorce from the immediate social situation around the fantasy of direct connection to the global. Critic Uno Tsunehiro calls the entire sekai-kei genre “decisionist,” after Carl Schmitt’s notion that decisions by a citizenry tend to be left to the authorities during states of exception like 3.11, insinuating that Miyadai Shinji’s “laying back” itself assumes a sort of reactionary complicity with the status quo and that the status quo cannot be changed during a state of exception.23 This decisionism names the interpassivity of generations of game players who, feeling disenfranchised from the activities of world politics, seem to have retreated to the seemingly hermetic virtual digital realms of games, thus in effect allowing traditional mid-level actors to continue on as though nothing has changed.

Gaming the Frames of Human Relations: Giving Up on Media, Forgetting the World

The remainder of this chapter considers family life and the end of the world from the vantage point of a single, simple, visual novel game from more recent sekai-kei genre history. The game Steins;Gate, which debuted in 2009, foregrounds family without direct representation of a putatively traditional nuclear family. Like most Japanese visual novel games, Steins;Gate is a kind of choose-your-own-adventure story that involves remarkably little “play” and a lot of reading (about ten times as many words as Sōseki Natsume’s famed novel Kokoro). In the game’s multiple narratives, preventing the untimely end of the world is within the control of a small group of friends who become a kind of surrogate new family. The gameplay (such as it is) also revolves around the depiction of a newer medium than video games—the smartphone.

Developed as an “imaginable science” (sōtei kagaku) adventure game, Steins;Gate was promoted as “ninety-nine percent science and one percent fantasy.”24 The game’s developers took extra care at the level of setting to ground the game world in reality through an obsessive focus on detail. For instance, the setting of the game in Tokyo’s “Electric Town” Akihabara is by no means unique, but the level of detail to which real locations and addresses are explicitly and meticulously reproduced within the game world was of special importance to both game producers and fans alike. More important, because it self-consciously remediates devices and engages in gaming theory, Steins;Gate is particularly useful for understanding how video games function to create a new real. This particular game represents just a snapshot in gaming history, but, as a node in that timeline, it helps us understand what came before and what might come later. There is nothing particularly new or unique about the game, but it exemplifies the evolution of sekai-kei and the dating sim game form as they transformed over the first decade of the 2000s.

The marketing of the game as being close to reality is not entirely a ploy designed to intrigue customers; it became an important part of the ways in which people engaged with it, even beyond the level of play. This is evident not simply from the details of representationally mimetic mise-en-scène within the game but also from the metagame materials that facilitated connections between fantasy and reality. For instance, in the “Akihabara Guide” section of the Steins;Gate Official Resources Collection book, game producers included a map of the real-world locations of game-world events. Fans of the game made so-called pilgrimages to sacred sites (seichi junrei) from the game. Some discovered other real sites thinly veiled by the fictional world of the game and posted their findings and evidence on various fan blogs and social media platforms across the web.25

The marketing of the game for a time transformed the world directly through a kind of reverse mimesis. The Radio Assembly Hall (Rajio kaikan, or Rajikan), where the game starts and, in some senses, ends, has been a home to Tokyo’s electronics industry and gadget hobbyists since it opened in 1950. It also became an important site for the real-world advertising of the game. The game world was hyped in the fall of 2011 (a few months after the anime version of it debuted) when marketers built a physical, life-size mock-up of the futuristic satellite-cum-time-machine, seemingly having crashed into the top floor of the Rajikan building, as it does in the game and anime. The building instantly became a site for both otaku game fans and passersby to consider anew.26

In addition, key images and plot points that seem far-fetched are actually echoes of factual elements of the real world. For instance, the international cabal SERN behind time travel research in the game is based on the real-life CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), which has been deeply engaged in dark matter research. The use of basic household technologies, such as a modified microwave oven, in the creation of the “future gadgets” (mirai gajetto) that the lab produces makes the inventions seem almost realizable. The Divergence Meter (a device that measures the divergence of a particular alternative timeline from the events of the original timeline) is built from Nixie tubes, a popular pre-digital-era device for the display of numbers that had recently been revived by electronics enthusiasts with a penchant for retro style. In one subplot, the protagonist Okabe Rintarō (hereafter Rintarō) searches for an old computer, the IBN 5100. This fictional computer is loosely modeled on the real-world IBM 5100, which was also featured in a real-world net-based time travel hoax referenced in the Steins;Gate narrative. The computer is depicted in both the game and the hoax as a combination of a Rosetta stone and a time machine because, as a computer with both APL and BASIC languages, the IBM 5100 served as a threshold medium allowing contemporary computers to access older ones through translation or code transcription. Whether or not such meshing of game world and real world amounts to the advertised “ninety-nine percent,” the grounding of the game’s look and tone in reality, even as many of the ideas, images, and scenarios stray far beyond it, is a fundamental characteristic of the game.

Beyond the setting, the game uses visual and textual frames that integrate contemporary reality within the world of the game to present multiple and varied mise en abymes. In fact, as we shall see, the only significant interaction or gaming comes in how players choose to interact with Rintarō’s cell phone, which serves both as a medium for emails and bulletin boards within the game world and as a frame that encompasses the entire game world itself. Cell phone icons indicating battery strength and connectivity (see Figure 20) give a sense of this layered visualization of the game world. For a visual novel game that was originally intended to be played on a cell phone, the use of the most ubiquitous portable gadget of contemporary life as the primary mise-en-scène is significant not only for the narrative play and functionality within the diegesis but also for its impact on the user in the real world.27 These frames provide windows into different aspects of and information about the game, but at another level, they produce a kind of coordinated cognitive dissonance, one purposefully tuned to promote neither confusion between game and reality nor an immersion in a game reality but rather continual comparison between the two, a toggling back and forth. This stereomimesis (see chapter 2) cultivates an aesthetic akin to what Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter label hypermediacy—namely, the overt inclusion of gaps of mediated, overlapping realms so as to render the mediation opaque.28

The narrative of Steins;Gate features a bizarre series of events and murders that occur within a group of friendly tinkerers and gadgeteers in the electronics shopping district of Tokyo as they discover a way to send email messages to the past via “d-mail” (short for “DeLorean mail”) and later to “time slip” between alternative timelines. The time machine is not the sleek 1980s stainless steel DeLorean sports car used as a time travel machine in the film Back to the Future but rather a modified regular smartphone. The point of view is almost entirely from the vantage of Okabe Rintarō, the over-the-top persona who envisions himself as a mad scientist but is actually neither mad nor much of a scientist. An eighteen-year-old student at Tokyo Denki University, Rintarō surrounds himself with a cohort of friends in his invention laboratory. Shiina Mayuri (sometimes called Mayushii) is a cute, performatively childish junior member of the lab who seems to be more of a mascot than a participant. Hashida Itaru (a.k.a. Daru) is an overweight computer otaku who enjoys hacking, hanging out at maid cafés, and eating fast food.

Each of the game’s various story lines closely relates to one of the main characters with whom Rintarō is in some way in love. Each of the potential love interests represents a specific plotline and a given playthrough and contains an ending corresponding to the character. This information can be drawn from both various playthroughs and discussion boards and the structure of the data of the game. These potential couplings are part of the core structure of the game, even encoded in the game files: at the end of each chapter, there is a text file that is stored within the chapter folder but that is normally invisible to players (unless they hack into the code). These files mark the end of the chapter, but in so doing, they also highlight the game producer’s view of the chapter’s primary goal. For instance, at the end of the Suzuha story, the file reads in abbreviated English “END_SUZ”; likewise, the file ending the Feirisu story reads “END_FEI”; the Ruka chapter ends with “END_RUK”; Mayuri ends “END_MAY”; the first and fake Kurisu ending reads “END_CRS. . . . END_FAKE”; and the true ending tells readers of the code with “END_TRUE.” So this seemingly surface organization of the plot is also deeply embedded into the very DNA of the game itself. And the deep structure tells us that, despite the title’s runaway success in the media mix, it is at base a dating sim game, a popular and long-standing genre with questionable ethical values.

The Never-Ending (Meta)game

On the difference between traditional literature and metagame, Azuma Hiroki writes:

In modern naturalist literature, it was imagined that the reader emotionally transferred themselves into the character, the character totally lived in the story, and the story reflects reality. On the contrary, in postmodern literature, at least in some of its works, it is impossible to secure the relationship between the story and reality, so the character’s life diverges to a meta/artificial environment or database. Correspondingly, the place of empathy of the reader also moves from the character to the player, in other words from the subject of the story to the subject of the meta story.58

Steins;Gate attempts to remediate this postmodern shift by including the character of the player within the story. Such efforts make the game more interesting at the metalevel as well. For instance, fans continually post new timeline maps and trees that explain or complicate the story. But it is the practice of jikkyō purei (video playthroughs with commentary) that shows the impact of the game’s interpassivity—namely, shifting interactivity almost entirely to the realm outside of the game. In a sense, Steins;Gate represents the ultimate instance of remediation and media convergence because it internalizes both the structure of gaming (something many games such as Chaos;Head and Magical Girl Madoka Magica did before it) and the intended platform (the smartphone).59 So, Steins;Gate remediates its own gamelike mediation. But such attempts will always fail to be complete because there is always another frame outside of the frames of the object of inquiry. Today we can find that frame in online fan interaction.

Bolter and Grusin propose “hypermediacy” (as opposed to transparent media) as that which multiplies frames of mediation revealing mediation itself. For them, hypermediacy foregrounds mediation, making it visible or opaque. In contrast to traditional computer programming, which “employs erasure or effacement,” hypermediacy might reveal the code that constructs the user interface within the interface.60 The traditional mode of transparent programming, such that the program can remain hidden below the surface, is the computing form of representational mimesis, which traditionally (whether in realist novels or painting) seeks to make the subjectivity or hand of the artist into a clear window that is hardly noticed. In Bolter and Grusin’s analysis of games employing the aesthetics of hypermedia, cinematic virtual reality games like Doom and Myst in their multiple remediations of other media turn “out to be an allegory about the remediation of the book [and film] in an age of digital graphics.”61 Similarly, Steins;Gate turns out to be an allegory about the remediation of video games and anime in the age of internet connectivity (BBS and social media) and smartphone gaming. Hypermedia games that gesture to the code or interface like Steins;Gate (and Doki Doki Literature Club!) achieve a degree of hyperrealism when all such reality is revealed to be always already mediated. Whether or not code is revealed in the game itself, the place where the programmers recede from view and cede control over the game is the metagame, where new creators or fans take over where the program, as well as programmers and marketers, necessarily leaves off.

The play with the frame of the media that both marketers and fans enact in the real world is precisely what constitutes the play such as it is in this minimal-decision, forking narrative. Beyond the embodied reverse mimesis of the carpal tunnel syndrome or “thumb twitching” that comes from excessive typical game-playing, the drama of Steins;Gate on the surface tries to intervene in our mediascapes to inspire us to put down the tech gadget in our hands, to step away from our computers and phones.62 But as it does so, the game depends on our fetish and the fact that the only way to access the message is to first give over to media, dwelling in the game environment for thirty hours. In video gaming, mimesis might be found in the marketing of new technology to better represent gaming worlds, in legalistic concerns over copying of the games, or in the moral panics around copycat behaviors in real life. But there is also another path—that of reverse mimesis most obviously present in playthroughs.

Real-world copying behaviors take on a number of local guises. Piracy was but one avenue of copying that became a problem in the vibrant gaming culture of the 1990s and early 2000s, yet legal copying of games by corporations and fans had been an integral part of the early history of gaming in Japan. In the pre-Famicom world of 1970s gaming, Japanese corporations bought rights from American companies to clone games and market them in Japan. And since the advent of home computing, fans have been trying to modify, personalize, and extract pieces from the most popular games.63 But rather than the digital duplication of games themselves, it is the marketing extension enabled by broadband video sharing over social media that reveals the most obvious copying issues that help to elaborate how games exist in the world today.

Marketing and advertising are keys to understanding mimicry in tandem with the discourses of moral panic around how gaming affects players. While cultural products like Family Game and Steins;Gate depict media as harmful, advertisements of video games are created for the very purpose of giving the products a positive image.64 Taking seriously the proposition that advertising plays a decisive role in the consumption and understanding of new media by early adopters, we should recognize alternative realities of the game world not only through modeling consumer behavior depicted in the 1980s and early 1990s Japanese video game advertisements but also through the affective adulation around gaming on social media in the first decade of the 2000s.

Demonstrating a pronounced attention to the creation of new worlds and to capturing a realistic, live-action sports gaming experience in a home gaming environment, television commercials for early gaming consoles focused on the ways in which the games could change people, families, homes, and, ultimately, their realities outside of the games they play.65 Almost invariably, Japanese commercials for new video game systems in the 1980s and early 1990s depicted not the latest graphics on the game screens, not merely the console box holding the game cartridge, but also the place in the home where the console would live, sometimes connected to the television in a living room or, for computer games, on top of a desk in a lucky teenager’s bedroom. Typically, the scene also includes the players (as in the hockey commercial previously mentioned), usually more than one person in the case of console games and one person watching another play in the case of computer games. Often an entire family is shown gathered closely around the machine. For example, a 1979 television advertisement for the early Nintendo console Color TV-Game Block Breaker (Karā Terebi-Gēmu Burokku Kuzushi, a Breakout copy) has a silent but smiling family of four (father, mother, older daughter, and younger son) crowded around a television set as the young boy plays Block Fighter (Burokku Faitā). Sometimes two boys play the games, or occasionally a boy and a girl. If a parent participates, it is inevitably the father. Mothers, when they are represented at all, tend to be passive observers, lingering in the background with expressions of satisfaction and awe.

Family Game presents video games as a symptom of social decay, the only interaction left that is not potentially violent in the real world. Advertisements, in contrast, present them as an undeteriorated middle ground, a tool for reuniting the family. Even as they oversell the games in terms of representationality, print ads are especially savvy about the metagame world. A 1990 advertisement for Super Famicom made its appeal not only on the basis of representation but with the claim that it provided important access to two alternative fantastic worlds. It did this by toggling between two characters, Link and Mario.66

With the title “For Your Review” (“Osarai”), the advertisement has a defensively postured Link with shield in hand and sword drawn, floating on a plain, flat, yellow background beside a happy Mario flashing the peace sign. The text next to a small image of a Super NES console begins by emphasizing such higher resolution factors as the 16-bit upgrade, the 32,768 color possibilities, and the eight-channel sound system but ends with the hard sell in red lettering: “But actually what we think is the most important thing is the fact that it can do ‘Zelda’ and ‘Mario,’ an often neglected truth. This, at base, is the Super Famicom’s biggest specialty!” Resolution, speed, and fidelity may be all well and good, but the reality is that this was the only box that played games with both Mario and Link. By 1994, this had become a standard method of advertising. For instance, a television commercial for Wario’s Woods (Wario no mori) features all the Nintendo characters animated and living within the plastic console. Representational reality was thus replaced by meta-gamelike realism or fidelity to the character-led market, which is, of course, now manifest within the gaming world in games such as the Super Smash Bros. series that allow characters from different games to be played against one another.

As important as such TV, print, and web advertisements may be, in recent years, a major form of new media marketing has developed in the form of online metagame cultures of fan-created videos. Several subgenres of this category of unauthorized or quasi-authorized advertising have proliferated for all varieties of new media products in recent years. Straight-up reviews, featuring a reviewer talking directly into the camera about a product and occasionally showing off its functions, are aimed primarily at giving information and criticism providing context and detailed comparisons with other games. Unboxing videos, sharing the exciting moment of taking a new product out of its package, elevate the status of the latest gadget or software to a fetishistic ritual and enmesh the packaging of the product into the new media worship. But in the Japanese gaming world (and, indeed, the international one as well) nothing quite equals the power to ignite desire for video game goods like playthrough videos.

Despite its affective performance, the phenomenon of jikkyō purei (on-the-spot playthroughs with fan narration, hereafter “real play”) is widespread and often commented on but seldom made an object of inquiry into the world of gaming. Significantly, the term jikkyō (“real situation” or “on-the-spot”) here evokes another form of vicarious play, one routed through journalists in the world of broadcast television sports in which live commentary is known as jikkyō hōsō (on-the-spot broadcasting) or jikkyō chūkei (on-the-spot relay). The player-cum-MC is removed from the game through their running commentary on the feel of the action, the visuals of the game, the affective impression it makes, and their comparison to other games. Like the romantic nature writers of Timothy Morton’s critique, who purport to be in nature at the moment they must be writing, the real-play hosts perform for the audience instead of immersing themselves in the game. Real play on YouTube or Niko Niko dōga is not about how real the game world is; it is about connecting to the experience of play in the way a sports commentator connects the audience at home to audiences in the stands. The quality of the playthrough is assessed based on how “real” the video of the play is to an actual experience of playing through the game. This is why comments submitted by viewers of a particular video often mention they feel as though they have played the game themselves. In fact, stated reasons for buying the game appear, then, to come from commenters who sense a gap in the system, a failure of the reality of the playthrough, and the necessity of having to experience it for themselves. If real play is the display of ownership and experience, it is also a marketing of the pride of ownership and experience, a show of what viewers may not possess physically or have yet to experience or have experienced thus far only alone.

Here interpassivity is at play, but not wholly. Viewers of the video watch another person play, but they interact and communicate with the poster of the video and with other viewers through comments. If it were completely and satisfactorily interpassive, no one would buy the game after watching because the experience of the video would be enough. And, therefore, corporations would be stricter about enforcing copyright control over the violations of posting playthroughs. But this is not the case. Real play is allowed precisely because marketers implicitly understand Morton’s ecomimetical critique. In the end, “real play” is ultimately frustrating, marking a failure of interpassivity and ecomimesis.

Indeed, as the legal status of playthroughs suggests, the marketing success of a game depends on real play. On the one hand, as legal scholar and lawyer Fujita Akiko affirms, real play is an infringement on copyright via the stipulations protecting the “film production” (eiga no chosakubutsu) provision (Statute 21) of the Japanese Copyright Law. On the other hand, game corporations for the most part seem happy to have free advertising building the depth (passion) and breadth (size) of their fan base.67 The promotion and marketing of games apparently outweighs the cost to the corporation of images from the game (and sometimes video of the entire game) circulating freely; therefore, the game producers tend not to pursue copyright infringement. Clearly, the problem surrounding how the medium alters the real is not wholly contained within this legal discourse.

Of course, most real playthroughs are fun fan interactions that add metagame depth to games that may already incorporate metagame depth within themselves. For instance, one playthrough of Steins;Gate features interesting fan commentary on a side point of the game. When the entry for “1.21 jigowatts” is displayed in the playthrough video of the “tips list,” one commenter calls it “a translation error.” The text on the bulletin board within the game features a “tips list” page that mentions that the original script for the Japanese subtitles for the film Back to the Future misspelled gigawatt as jigowatt and this error was transcribed uncorrected into the game world. Then another commenter responds, citing a 2008 New York Times blog on the mistake as a mispronunciation within the film of Back to the Future.68 Such layering of the player experience with additional fan commentary is natural to the Niko Niko dōga website where the clip was posted (a video platform that allows users to comment directly on a particular moment in the video’s playback). Occasionally, such commentary is more substantive, rising to the level of a budding game criticism. On the previously mentioned scene in which Rintarō seems to stare into the Alpacaman 2 monitor and, hence, at the player, one commenter recognizes the gesture to the metagame, commenting, “This is a gamelike game” (gēmu mitai X gēmu desu).69 This sort of interaction helps viewers understand the game and confirm their experience of a game already played.

Of course, there are more direct and clear ways in which such videos affect viewers—for instance, those relating to consumption. Another video playthrough of Steins;Gate suggests the marketing value of the genre. After a nearly five-hour playthrough of the demo version video, there are several comments from different viewers about purchasing the game:

14:56  I’ve decided to buy it. [Ore wa kau koto ni shita.]

15:16  I’ve watched the entire thing from the start [Saisho kara mita ze]

15:38  I bought the computer version

15:42  This makes me think I am glad to have been born in Japan

15:46  The voices are great!

16:05  Hey, the PC version is coming out July 30!!!70

This brief excerpt from over 250 responses to the video gives a sense of the variety and joy that watchers of such videos display. It is as much a joy about the content of the game as about the ability to purchase and play the game themselves. This brief dialogue displays something like the contentless communication described by Azuma, wherein isolated participants can feel community, but, rather than formed around an empty topic, it is formed around consumption and accumulation of frivolous goods.71

Not all real play in this marketing vein is fan-produced. A ten-minute video features both the star Imai Asami (the voice actress who plays the role of Makise Kurisu in the game and anime) in cosplay as Makise and the script director Matsubara Tatsuya. The minor celebrities play Steins;Gate on Xbox. This playthrough video garnered over 16,000 views and 208 comments on Niko Niko dōga. While most comments deal with the appeal of Imai (commenting on her voice and appearance), some are simply about the game. Such anonymous participation in the viewing of the video on Niko Niko dōga visualizes the sociality transformed not only by Steins;Gate but by the world into which the game has been released, a world/community that, for instance, included the (then still new) website with the branded name “Niconico douga.”72 Such playthrough videos by both players and producers have the effect of socially reorganizing human interactions around the media even when, at base, their undisguised purpose is only to sell and buy games. To limit the discussion of marketing solely to the obvious capitalist concerns ignores the willing participation and the amount of time and effort spent by players/consumers in not playing or consuming but dwelling in these mediascapes.

Reverse mimesis is not simply about purchasing goods or making SG001 orange phones, as the 5bp corporation did for a promotional event for Steins;Gate: Linear Bounded Phenogram, but about us behaving differently. If the message of the game of Steins;Gate fails to get us to leave our devices, it is because it overestimates the kind of behavioral change it might evoke in players and the degree to which such change is controllable or predictable at the level of content. But we might best see player/consumer metagame community formation as reverse mimesis: games are not only gamed or tricked out to make us addicted to gaming (and this serves the profit motive of makers) but also set up to require and anticipate this real-world interaction of fans.

This metagame real-play experience around Steins;Gate reveals that the sekai-kei genre itself replaces the loss of mediation between individual and world that makes up its content. Today the near and distant seem suddenly reconnected through the network of distant and near views; but the internet is precisely the mid-level medium that can both connect us to the global world reality and alienate us from our local mid-level cultural realities. Similarly, the sekai-kei genre (that depicts a world without effective mid-level actors) itself becomes the cultural mediation between nerdy otaku selves and the world, a way of connecting and creating a community otherwise deemed lacking. Sekai-kei is a medium in this sense documenting a culture in which traditional connections of family, school, and religion have been deemed inadequate for connecting people and drawing together community. But even as it marks this symptom, sekai-kei becomes a genre that remakes such community into a mass of fans consuming similar materials. Real play proves this. In other words, we should not be surprised to find that the genre and the media in which such play is consumed often coalesce.73

Not all online interaction is productive at forming communities or families of chosen affiliation and not all communities thus formed are productive. Bullying, trolling, and other online mob behaviors have solidified the rising nationalism in Japan since before the disasters of 2011. And to some degree, shared gaming sociality has been as much a part of rebuilding as it has contributed to complicity with ongoing inequalities.

Nintendo’s Jishin DS 72 jikan (2009), a disaster-education game designed to emphasize survival in the first seventy-two hours after an earthquake, tries to educate on the surface, but its overt function to educate, like the ending of Steins;Gate, rings false. Indeed, its sales have not been impressive, and the final product was not much different from the nongame smartphone apps like Tokyo Disaster Preparedness (localized in Japanese, English, Korean, and Chinese), which was promoted by the Tokyo metropolitan government in the aftermath of Fukushima.74 Though this app may have raised communal awareness, it did not reshape social bonds.

But the Fukushima Game Jam that sought to game the building of games by competing teams of game designers and programmers in the wake of the disaster suggests a different possibility for community building. Hosted in various venues from Minamisōma, Kōriyama, Nagoya, and Fukuoka to Taiwan, Colombia, and Chile annually from 2011, the event promotes video games in order to support, “restore, and revive” the 3.11-affected region. The labor of the game-building is itself gamified: multiple teams each composed of seven people for the thirty-hour competition give each prototype game produced the equivalent of one man-month of work invested in it. The initial goal of bringing game-building to the devasted region where there had been no game developers worked at the local, national, regional, and global levels. Starting with a session that brought students together with Tokyo game producers and designers, the initial idea was to help build careers in game production as well as continued awareness of the suffering region. But with the excitement around the professionally produced livestreaming of the events, the Fukushima Game Jam has grown over the years. This sort of gaming the construction not only of games but also of community and economy in the wake of adversity marks the degree to which gaming now structures reality.75

And such gamic reality is more widespread and totalizing than the Fukushima Game Jam alone might suggest. With broad digitalization, game theory and related probabilistic thinking began to occupy a growing and significant role in military strategy, financial speculation, and infrastructure development under the theory that regression analysis of complex problems would lead to unprecedented new efficiencies. And, indeed, to some it seemed that Japan’s rapid economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s was due in part to investments made using the new math of risk analysis.76 By the 1990s, a reversal of understanding began to place partial responsibility on the algorithms for everything from the bursting of the real-estate-speculation bubble to the decisions based on risk-assessment models to build nuclear facilities in the historic paths of tsunamis. More recent and more global financial bubble bursts have brought the ends of the binary thinking that computerized algorithmic thinking would either save or destroy economies. The notion that computers are simply mere tools in our daily lives cannot cover the myriad ways in which computers and computational programs inescapably have gamed daily life.77

This gamification of real life raises a number of questions: What if we considered the idea that games are realms or worlds shut off from the real world to be a damaging lie from the beginning? In other words, what if we take seriously the game world as part of our world from the outset? What if we (following Morton’s identification of the nature versus human romantic myth) ultimately refuse such facile distinction between media and its environment? The wager would be that (through overt recognition that there is no difference between in-game and out-of-game) such a refusal of distinctions could allow us to act more ethically. Perhaps we will never be able to fully recognize that the identity shifting that the games allow us through role-playing is no different from other forms of identity transformation we play between work, family, and friends, that no individual has an individual role to play in society, that our roles are always played in layers, not multiple personalities but intersectional ones. The fantasy of so many games is that the roles played there do not matter because they are fantasy, but the reality is that they matter precisely because they are actual (real) fantasies manifest in presumably harmless forms. But there is no such thing as a harm-free or ineffectual fantasy.

If this seems far blown and beyond the realm of the video game, it will help to remember that a player must be able to quit a game for it to be a game. Indeed, game historian Yoshioka Hiroshi writes:

You can always quit a game. That is the difference between a game and reality. However, precisely because you can always quit, you somehow really cannot quit. Lately, it seems that the dynamic relationship that captured such tension between the game and the reality has become a thing of the past. This is because, I think, the relationship between the game and reality is gradually taking another form. To put it simply, reality itself is gameified. Even without playing games, gaming logic [gēmu teki na ronri] is present in our social life today. Everything from corporate activities to university research and education, every activity such as quantification of capabilities and performance, mission evaluation of the level of configurations and achievement, to visualization of ranking and so on has been spoken about through gaming metaphors [gēmu teki na hiyu]. We cannot escape from the game.78

The idea that gaming has become the real is a remarkably Lacanian statement about gaming. For Lacan, the real is seen as the infinite ever-present environment or world in which we dwell, distinguished from finite realities. The real may encompass all finite realities, including everything as vast as the sum of the experiences of all individuals. But the infinitude of the real seemingly renders all realities of equal significance or triviality. If games make up part of the real, gaming is now also a characteristic of the real: the real, of course, is that which we cannot wake from, turn off, or hit a reset button on. In this regard, Uno writes that games are the basis of postmodern life and cannot be avoided.79 The game of the real never ends, and all other finite realities must dwell within this gaming. Players cannot lose because the end is always deferred, or, rather, we continually lose because the game world from which we cannot escape is rigged against us.

For example, the finance speculation that bubbled real estate economies based on models of bundled risk probabilities abstracted not just from labor and material conditions but from the data about those factors. Such algorithmic decision-making assumes away the complexities of the real by carving it into computable realities, transforming the real into a mediated reality or game not because it creates and sets rules for a game but because the algorithms it puts into practice ignore the enigma of the human. So we realize (always one crisis too late) how the minimal risk assessed was either higher than expected or simply one we were not ever willing to wager at any cost.

This is why the experimental video game Credit Game was developed by Kuwakubo Ryōta—in order to stage playing the market without risk in a Japan still reeling from the credit, housing, and land bubble economy of the 1980s. The 2001 exhibition of the game was touted as a virtual delight at its core, putting into direct relation this big world gaming and the metagame of the discourse of virtuality around video games:

Day trading can even be considered the most exciting and action-packed network-based game around. Real-life day trading is, of course, full of risks. This game allows players to explore the exciting and fun aspects of day trading—a world virtually unknown in Japan—without incurring any of the risks involved in the “real game.”80

On the one hand, the game might be read representationally as a smaller, twisted, virtual version of the bigger reality, but on the other hand, the game gives a real-world instance to learn about risk, potentially teaching would-be investors to keep from engaging in frivolous unsafe market behavior. Credit Game does not prove that games have become real or that the real has been gamified; rather, the gamelike real is now—after successive gaming miscalculations and the birth of the situation in which a game such as Credit Game is even possible—more visible.