Untitled Gacha Essay

I don’t need to tell you that microtransactions in video games are bad.

I know my audience, and, knowing what I know of my audience, I know y’all probably already know this. You’ve heard basically everything that Stephanie Sterling has said in the past decade or so about this. If not directly from her, then, regurgitated or differently iterated by another YouTuber or blog haver or journalist, in some form.

But, just for fun, I’ll rag on them anyway.

Microtransactions, and gacha systems, or lootboxes, whatever you wanna call them, necessarily rely on surgically deployed psychological manipulation, designed to entice players of nominally free-to-play video games to buy tokens for slot machines dispensing limited-time content. Or, to grind and wait for days or months or years, for that content to be slowly doled out. Preying on children, the technologically illiterate, and the mentally ill or impulsive, to shore up those quarterly reports so that the executives at the top can continue to have more money than god.

We all know this.

Certainly, I knew this. I still know it. I especially know it now.

Now that I’ve fallen for it.

[clip of me pulling in one of these games maybe]

Okay. So. Uh. Hi. I’ve been away. Me. Audrey. Uh. I’m pretty sure I’m the host of this brain now? I mean, everyone else has barely fronted in months, so, yeah. A lot happened. But we’re alive.

Yeah.

I guess.

Anyway, I gotta level with y’all.

I am already a catastrophically disastrous human being. I am abysmal at managing my time, my brain, and my alternate personalities. I most certainly have a host of undiagnosed mental problems. I’m impulsive, obsessive, and also kind of an idiot who craves constant stimulation. So.

[pause]

[sigh]

So, it might disappoint you to hear that the primary reason for the delay in making and releasing this new video, is in fact, the very topic of the video. These fucking games. I’ve been playing them. Having an experience with them, certainly.

I haven’t been openly talking about that experience very much, primarily because I see a lot of hostility for the people who play them. Granted, this has always been kind of a thing in the broader gaming community. The whole elitist tack that quote-end-quote “hardcore gamers” take towards so-called “casual gamers”, that those people aren’t playing the “real” games and are thus in some way inferior. As the landscape has shifted and the amorphous category of “casual games” has become the domain of mobile platforms, and the iOS and Android app stores have gained notorious reputations as cesspits for shovelware drivel, this general sentiment amongst PC and console gamers has shifted its target to mobile gamers generally.

But, more specifically, within our circles of the internet, I’ve seen a fair number of people being openly hostile towards the sorts who play games that have gacha systems for acquiring characters and items. And, typically, the ability to buy the currency with which one rolls that gacha with real money. Which, y’know, has the potential to spark gambling addiction.

So you’d probably think it’s a good idea not to play them, and you’d probably be right, but,

Have you heard of Genshin Impact?

So yeah, these games have a lot of cultural cache, and a lot of people who like them, and it’s only natural, for me, the media curiosity haver, to be curious about what exactly it is about them that’s captivating people so much. So, eventually, after avoiding these games so studiously for so long and occasionally quietly ridiculing those who became addicted to them, I fell into the gachas, and the conclusions I drew from experiencing them directly surprised me.

I’m now going to talk about what that experience has been like, the ways in which I both have and have not enjoyed it, and why I think that the kneejerk reaction of moral outrage to their players from people who don’t engage with them is, to put it generously, quite misguided.

The terms “gacha game”, “mobile game”, “live service”, etc, are kind of used pretty interchangeably in discourse without much regard for the nuance of their specific meanings, and the variety of experiences that the games given these labels tend to offer. As such, just so that it's clear what the scope of this video is, I want to first go over the specific games that I played in advance of making this video. What they are, what their common traits are, and the terminology that I'm going to be using to refer to them and the elements within them.

The games I played included: Bang Dream: Girls Band Party!, D4DJ, Project Sekai (or Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage as it’s officially named in English), Zenless Zone Zero, Blue Archive, and Honkai Star Rail.

Briefly, I touched the English release of the Assault Lily game that no one promoted or talked about, at all. It has a godawful English translation, and I put it down after about an afternoon.

What’s common between all of these titles are daily login rewards and quests that reset each day and can only be completed with energy that is depleted when you do certain gameplay tasks and refills with either time or items, thus enforcing time-based incremental level progression, and serialized narratives whose pieces are doled out alongside gameplay events that encourage doing various limited time quests in exchange for rewards.

These events are usually accompanied by banners, that is to say, limited time gachas which advertise one specific character or another which you may or may not get depending on your luck of the draw, and that character may or may not be included in the permanent gacha pool after that banner is over. Each character usually gives you special gameplay benefits which may or may not be bespoke and unique to that character, as well as extra bits of story attached to them, and also extra experience points in the event that they’re attached to, which gives you more rewards.

Rather than multiplayer focused online games like Overwatch or Fortnite, whose primary modes revolve around engaging with other players pretty much all the time, these are almost entirely functionally single player experiences that just phone the servers to get updates and track your progress. There are varying degrees of light social mechanics, custom profiles where you can show off what you’ve got, or modes that you can play with or against friends or other random players online. But they’re secondary to the individual experience, and ultimately the focus is on building your own account in relative isolation, as you make formalized progress in reading the narrative and fulfilling gameplay achievements, and cultivate emotional relationships with the characters featured in the game.

So, yeah, that’s the gameplay loop, described about as impartially as I can manage. It's worth noting that I am primarily discussing my own experiences with these specific games, anything I say is mostly specific to them and the games like them. Some of what I say may very well not apply to other games that use similar models of content updating or online play or monetization, but do so to different ends for different types of games made with different audiences in mind. Both because those elements might function very differently in another game, and also because they might very well have a different social impact on players depending on their target audience and the individual player in question.

>

And, finally, as for how I’m going to refer to these games: I’m going to be using the Japanese term “soshage” (ソシャゲ), a portmanteau of the English loanwords “social” and “game”, because that’s reportedly what the Japanese playerbase calls these. So, yeah. When I say “soshage”, I’m broadly referring to the games themselves, and when I say “gacha” I’m primarily referring to the gachapon system of acquiring characters and items. I’m not saying this is the only way these words can be used by anyone, it’s just, the way I’m using them for the purposes of this video. Hopefully in time it’ll become clear why I’m drawing this distinction in language.

Anyway.

My first acquaintanceship with the specter of microtransactions and predatory monetization of video games in general, was, as mentioned earlier, Stephanie Sterling repeatedly protesting the practice on her show. Most of the games she talked about were games that I had never played, never heard of, and never had any interest in playing. So, as an outside observer to all this at the time, it was easy to just kind of go “wow, that sucks, good thing I’m not one of those people”.

This was back between around, 2015 and 2018 or so, and since then until recently I pretty much maintained this attitude. Those games sure suck, huh? Good thing I’m not playing them.

I knew, intellectually, what these games often do to people, and that it could do the same to me, in theory. But it felt like a very faraway hypothetical.

“If I ever did play these games, WHICH I WOULDN’T, ever!”

The same way you learn about smoking and drinking as a kid and are told what the negative impacts are, and you’re like, “wow, drugs sound bad, I would NEVER do drugs.” Yeah, sure kid, good for you, but like, you’re a baby, and you basically don’t know anything.

Anyway, then I got into anime. And the cultural significance of soshage soon became pretty much impossible to ignore. Basically every major Japanese media franchise in the modern day has, or has had, some attached mobile game or another. A lot of modern anime are sourced from mobile games that themselves aren’t based in anything in particular. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a ton of anime sourced from manga and light novels. But increasingly, these days, the oft-ignored cry of “read the manga” within the anime community has slowly become “play the game”.

Except of course, in a lot of cases the game doesn’t have an English version and isn’t available on your local app store, so how the fuck are you supposed to play it. And also, if you’re susceptible to the psychological manipulation tactics that these games pull, it might not be a good idea for you personally to play it. You can watch recordings of it on YouTube, which sometimes have unofficial English subtitles of varying quality, but this is also kind of a suboptimal experience and a lot of the time the people uploading these things have no sense of how to order their playlists in a manner that feels accessible to outsiders.

So this is all massively inconvenient, and you probably won’t do that. Unless you’re like, really burning to find out what the fuck is up with this one girl, who appeared in the anime adaptation for like two scenes and then never appeared again because the pacing of the anime is shit and they expect you to have played the game or be enticed to play the game rather than expecting the anime to just… tell you what her deal is. What, were you expecting a complete story out of that super popular mass media? That’s so 2004. Don’t you know that everything needs to be a connected universe these days? We’re in the cross-promotion age now, baby!

So, yeah, this media franchising strategy is just pretty ubiquitous in general in both American and Japanese media, although it manifests in different ways on the Eastern side of things, so.

yeah, uh.

>

For about six years, I contented myself with the incomplete versions of events. Wallowing in the sea of manga and game adaptations and spinoffs, I got used to anime with bad, undercooked endings. I got used to my favorite anime leaving character arcs on the table. Characters or pairs or groups in a sprawling franchise with a single episode of focus, feeling almost like a half-hour trailer for something more, before they pretty much disappear from the show altogether. I got used to fanart and doujinshi of characters who’d barely appeared in the anime, based off of stories from the franchise’s relative fringes that I’d never experienced, or only experienced a compromised version of.

Being an anime fan, it turns out, often means getting used to all this. Watching a new interesting show with a story you want to see unfold, and having that story die on the vine as all around clamor for a season two. Sometimes it never comes. Sometimes the source material ends abruptly, or goes on a very long hiatus. Will the manga or light novel or whatever be translated? You’ll probably never know. Just have to hope it gets a fan translation, or @ your local licensors on Twixter about it, I guess.

Anyway, at some point back in 2022 or so, I stopped watching seasonal anime quite so much. And slowly, I started reading the source materials more. And also reading manga that didn’t have anime. Yet. Or weren’t licensed for official English publication. Yet. So, I guess we just, started doing more broad otaku, things. At some point last year, we picked Bang Dream back up; having dropped it around 2 years or so previously because of being burnt out on idol anime. At some point in this timeline (specifically November 2023) we started playing the game. And then the game consumed our life for about five months.

The whole story of how and why we got into the game is something for a different video, but, our primary motive for playing it had to do with uh. One specific ship. Incidentally the most popular ship, but also, one whose popularity mostly hinges on a storyline that’s really only properly available within the game. We got really into this ship based on all the fanart and doujinshi of them, despite not knowing who they were exactly, because um—

[technical support beep]

And then eventually, I decided we just needed to know their full story. We’d had enough of being fans of yuri fanart of Sayo and Hina bandori girls band party. We needed to know exactly who they were. Our body demanded it.

>

Our girlfriend, watching us closely at the time, said,

“Don’t get addicted to gacha because of the sisters who fuck.”

To which I said, something, to the effect of,

“don’t worry! we won’t! it’ll be fine!”

We got addicted to gacha because of the sisters who fuck.

As it turns out, Bang Dream is good.

It’s not very good as a game, mind you. It’s good enough, but the rhythm game segments are clumsy and clearly dated and extremely finicky. It’s sometimes kind of a pain to navigate the menus, and the music in the overworld and story stuff is thin and annoyingly repetitive, which doesn’t help the unremarkable visual presentation of the story segments. Further not helping matters, the English version has lately been fraught with development issues. So, like, I don’t really recommend playing it.

But as a media franchise? It’s great. It’s got everything I love about idol anime in it. A loveable cast of cute girl characters with fun quirks and high-energy drama. It’s got all the charm of Love Live, but where Love Live’s groups feel mostly interchangeable, with almost every anime installment feeling mostly more like a standalone remix of the same story rather than a new story proper, Bang Dream offers a lot more variety. The wacky hijinks of Kokoro and her merry band of cheerbringers with their shared single brain cell, the genuinely compelling drama of Roselia’s members all trying to live up to the high expectations they set for themselves, the motley group of joined-at-the-hip childhood friends bonding over music in Afterglow— and of course, the angsty homoerotically colored relationship discord of MyGO. There’s a lot of really good stuff here, and it all feels distinctly flavored in a way that Love Live just doesn’t.

So, yeah, I got really into it. Into the story, and into the girls, and then, slowly, into pulling for the girls and grinding to increase their stats and collect more of their cards. And the more I played, the more I realized that uh-

I liked it.

I like playing this type of game.

And uh. I think I have to explain why, so.

Tangent time!

ahem

Here’s a really interesting question that I think is gonna piss everyone off and possibly get someone to want to put out a hit on me.

Is Animal Crossing: New Horizons a soshage?

[hi. okay. um. So, couple things. While I was working on this… or rather, procrastinating on this amidst our seemingly never-ending mental breakdown, and then losing our youtube monetization… it was announced that Project Sekai is getting some kind of Animal Crossing like game mode, which, I find incredibly bizarre, but also throws a wrench in this bit because this was all written before that came out in that announcement… so, now I’m like… well- hahahahaha. My comparison is now slightly less clever. Anyway, then I realized this is actually convenient for me, because I can use footage of the Animal Crossing ripoff instead of risking a takedown by Nintendo.

and yeah I guess Animal Crossing Pocket Camp exists… existed or still exists but is never talked about? whatever. ignore that. anyway. back on topic]

You might be saying right now, “what the fuck, of course not, it doesn’t have a gacha, it’s not on a phone, it’s completely different!” And, like, yeah, maybe. I guess. New Horizons certainly doesn’t have the criminally predatory monetization and limited time content schemes of any of the games that I named a bit ago. There’s also no gacha system, and no formalized incentive to collect as many characters as you can, or anything. The villagers are all fairly interchangeable outside of their character designs, species, house decorations, and preset personality dialogues, so it’s less about what characters you most like and more about what dolls you’d prefer to play with. There are some people who are incredibly particular about the dolls they play with, yes, to the point that a player-driven trading economy has emerged, and the extreme lengths they go to in trying to get their favorites can be said to resemble the habits of the most extreme gacha addicts, but the game doesn’t systematically push people into this mindset the way that a typical soshage does.

But, there is daily incremental progression, and seasonal content, and regular content updates delivered through the internet, and daily tasks and so on, which all pretty closely resembles the gameplay loop I described back at the start of this video. None of this is a perfect comparison, for sure, but my point is just this: Animal Crossing: New Horizons is fun, to the people who find it fun, primarily because of a core progression loop that’s fun in the same way that many soshage are fun— or at least, the same way I personally found them fun.

If you look back at how people were engaging with New Horizons in its prime, you see a lot of people talking about how they played it— collecting items, doing daily quests, and slowly shaping the land into something they liked with limited resources that they slowly farmed on a daily basis. Finding this loop relaxing, finding that it offered them some sense of meaning and accomplishment and grounding in the midst of one of the biggest world crises in recent history.

We know this, because, like, we were there. Playing it right there alongside everyone. Gaining a special kind of enjoyment and novelty out of its specially sculpted simulacrum of a world that grows and shifts and changes with the time passing as we checked in on it every day to see if our flowers had yet bloomed.

And the thing that’s kind of neat about the soshage we played before making this video is that they offer this same experience, this same style of progression, the nurturing of the flowers and watching them bloom, but, like, with a high-energy serialized anime narrative instead of, Animal Crossing’s simulation of a peaceful country life.

And I liked it! I enjoy this a lot, it turns out! I enjoyed the slow burn of gathering resources, upgrading items and abilities, raising my level, nurturing my collection of characters and watching them grow a little bit with every day’s little efforts. I enjoyed the rationing of resources, the budgeting gacha currencies between banners, planning to upgrade or collect certain characters in advance of upcoming events. Sure, I enjoyed the gacha for the reason you’re supposed to enjoy it, the reason our lizard brains are wired to enjoy it; the superficial pleasure of the pretty lights and the special multicolored sparkles when you pull a rare card, the dopamine rush that you’re manipulated into playing the rest of the game to chase. But I also enjoyed the chase itself.

There’s a certain satisfaction to be gained from it all, to see the culmination of your long-term commitment to the grind gradually emerge. And this enjoyment, I found, carried over to the other games I eventually tried. I genuinely believe that this isn’t really an experience you can get in any other type of game. Animal Crossing offers only one particular variation on this sort of experience, and even then, you can bypass the intended pace of the game’s progression by changing your Switch’s system clock— although doing so is generally considered to be against the spirit of the game by most players.

Maybe I was manipulated into going on the chase, but I really think I genuinely enjoy the chase. Like, yeah, the predatory monetization isn’t fun, the FOMO isn’t fun, but when I really want to do those daily tasks, I really enjoy doing them. And I don’t think the fun I found in that was superficial or false. I genuinely had fun, and that was real, and that can’t be taken from me.

But even as I had fun in spite of the predatory monetization systems, I also can’t deny that those systems sometimes bred anxiety and resentment.

they call gacha games "soshage" aka "social game" in Japan because if you play one without a social cohort that also plays that you can talk to about the game and share in excitement, the absolute ennui of picking away at the content treadmill skinner box causes too much nihilism

[https://x.com/ToastCrust/status/1556230148545884160]

I’m an impulsive spender. Even before this, I already was. I’ve gotten better at saving money than I used to, a little bit, but I’m still not very good at it. It doesn’t help that I rarely have much of any to speak of. And, the one time I did, because of the pandemic stimulus, I got rid of all of it right away and bought a bunch of anime merch— and a new graphics card.

So, although I went into these games intending to control myself and not spend a cent, it didn’t take long for me to fall victim to these games’ psychological tactics.

In hindsight, I should’ve known it was going to happen. I’m a mark, it turns out. I fit the psychological profile of the sort of person these games are targeting. I never spent what I’d call an absurd amount of money, at least, not all at once, but I did spend little bits here and there, letting myself get nickel-and-dimed for limited items or subscriptions to accumulate more gems or whatever.

It was irresponsible of me to spend my money on something so frivolous, and I knew it, but I didn’t care at the time, and I don’t regret it.

Well… I don’t think I regret it.

If I cared more about our finances, actually went and checked how much money that was, I might regret it now. It was stupid. I knew it was stupid, I knew it was bad, but I nonetheless felt a hopelessly irrational need for it, and I fought with myself to rationalize it.

“I can stop anytime. It’s worth it because this is how the game gets funded, and I like the game. And well, I’m really paying for the art, right? art is expensive. Plus, this isn’t that different from subscribing to final fantasy 14, and my girlfriend plays that all the time. Whatever, if I wasn’t spending money on this, I’d be spending it on a different stupid useless thing, and really if you think about it, isn’t all this time spent grinding just saving me from spending more money?”

I even used my then-budding intent to make this very video as an excuse. “I know this is bad, an unwise use of time and money, but it’s okay, because I’m planning something. I’m going to make a video about this. I’m going to talk about my experience with this. This is all an experiment, in which I am making myself a guinea pig. An experience, that I can turn into Content. Once the experiment is done, I’m going to stop, I’m going to report the results, and then. And then. I’ll tell everyone what it’s really like, to be a gacha addict. I’ll be an investigative gaming youtuber, like for real.”

Pure arrogance.

But, the money is one thing. I may never have spent so recklessly as to bankrupt myself, or to be unable to pay for necessities like my phone bill, but I did spend a ridiculous amount of time. And while money might be in some sense fake, and the loss of about ten or fifteen or even thirty dollars feels relatively inconsequential when you usually have only about a hundred and ten dollars at a time to begin with (you already can’t afford anything really important, so what does it matter to spend a little more?), time is real.

Very, very real, in fact, and I felt its loss, in a way that I never felt my bank balance shrinking. Gradually, my days became shorter because of these games. If you’ve ever seen, or uh, been, a neurodivergent person sitting around all day waiting for a package they ordered, or a phone call that’s supposed to come, or a time when they’re supposed to meet with friends— doing nothing because it’s an incomplete task that’s still pending in their memory, and they very seriously cannot think about anything else until that item is checked off their list?

Soshage became like that to me.

Every day was spent doing tasks in them. And when there were no tasks to be done, then every bit of downtime became not time that I had to myself to do what I liked, but a period of waiting. Waiting for energy to regenerate. Waiting for the daily reset to arrive so I could get my login rewards. Waiting for upcoming limited time events, and so on. And while it’s not like we’ve never felt this impulse anywhere else, we’ve felt it when drawn into other games, or when binging TV shows, or whatever, like, hell, we feel it every time we upload a YouTube video and are just checking the damn studio page to see if anyone commented, I do think that these games very uniquely, structurally facilitated that impulse in a way that few other things do.

And I have to underscore, very clearly, that this was not good. Letting a video game erode not just your time, but your sense of time’s passage itself, is not a good thing. And I think that if we were still mostly a lone shut-in with mostly absent roommates, if we didn’t now live with our girlfriend, and if she wasn’t checking in on us, pulling us away from the games every so often to go out with her, or do important household chores, or whatever, the impact on our mental health would have been disastrous. It is really, really not good to just have your days vanish around you ad infinitum to this… fucking… cursed computer software inside your already cursed artifact of… fucking… doom.

Like, yeah, okay, part of the fault’s on our shoulders. I guess. We already have a pretty big issue keeping track of time, and we’re already prone to poor planning, procrastination, and it already almost always feels like months vanish before our eyes in a matter of days. This is a problem our brain already had. But playing soshage made this worse. And it sucked.

Would we have still lost that time? Spending it on some other more normal video games, or on watching YouTube videos, or binging that one 2000s TV show we never watched all the way through, or hopping on Discord calls with friends, or any other way that we’ve burned through time in the past? I mean, yeah, maybe. But then it would’ve been our fault. It would’ve been on our poor time management, our hyperactive brain, our own self-made distractions that we would probably have been able to disconnect from more easily.

But these games are different, I think, in that their distraction is structuralized outside our control. So in that case, it’s not just our fault, it’s not our daily tasks that we made up for ourselves and then got overfocused on completing like it is normally— it’s the game, creating a system of demanding attention and focus that our existing frame of mind was perfectly suited for it to hijack.

And I don’t like that these games did this. I really, really don’t.

But even despite that, I don’t hate any of these games. I hate the monetization, sure. I hate the way these games are structured around the monetization, around demanding your attention to desensitize you to the monetization. Even so, I don’t begrudge the time I spent playing these games. In the same way I don’t begrudge the time I spend with any art or media.

I got into these games because I was curious what they were like. I knew the risks of engaging with them, and I still did so, anyway. And even despite everything negative I mentioned, the positive aspects of the experience are there, and they still mattered to me. I developed emotional attachments to these characters and their world on the basis of my chronological and financial investment in them, and whatever else I might say about it, I can say it was something new, something hitherto unknown to me. Collecting them, their cards, their trinkets, their items, their stories, choosing favorite characters to whom I prioritized allocating the resources the game drip-fed to me. And I felt the weight and the cost of their growth, artificial and arbitrary as that cost may have been. And that was, and is still, really enjoyable to me.

Maybe I was just making my life that much worse for the sake of anime girls. Then again, it’s not as if I’m any real stranger to making my life worse for really stupid shit that I found worth it, grinding and gathering resources over a long period in the name of building a collection of useless trinkets and a roster of lovely supporters, in pursuit of a hypothetical S-rare reward that might very well never arrive.

In a gacha, you have a pity system, or you can spark a rare after pulling enough times. You can make do with the pulls that weren’t exactly what you hoped for. You can still progress, still see numbers rise, still defeat the boss or finish the happy ending of the story or whatever. You might not get exactly what you’re looking for, but at least it’s gonna give you something. At least it’s gonna guarantee a rare, even if not the rare, or it’s gonna give you a consolation prize that you can use to level up just that little bit more.

I guess YouTube’s shitty grindy gacha that hates you for grinding and never guarantees you a three star is not a high bar to clear, but, I guess it’s the bar we set.

I guess.

So, yeah, the gacha and microtransaction systems are predatory and bad and only really make the games worse. The structure of limited time events also often sucks, since you’re essentially unable to play the game on your own terms— either you’re spending time and in-game energy on playing how you want, but therefore forfeiting the limited time rewards, or you’re doing the limited time quests and committing to the unending drudgery. Getting into any of these games makes your time evaporate in the same way that quarters evaporated in the arcades of yesteryear.

Ultimately, I’ve lost countless hours, entire days, to all of these games. And while I ultimately don’t think I regret that loss of time… do I recommend playing them? No. I don’t really think I can in good conscience do so. And that sucks, because I did find some really good aspects of them that would otherwise make me suggest playing them. I’m not saying don’t, full stop, I’m not comfortable saying outright that these games suck… although, it’d probably be easier for both of us if I did, but. Nah.

All I can say, is, if you’re an adult, do what you want. Do whatever you like, whatever you think you want to. Just… be wary, be vigilant, and if you’re susceptible to addiction or have ADHD or OCD or whatever other relevant risk-aggravating factors, then take that risk in account, and maybe seriously consider that you just… don’t.

I can’t condemn the soshage genre. And I won’t.

If there is anything I find worthy of condemnation, it’s the business model driving these games’ existences, which is not only predatory, but almost certainly unsustainable. It also means that as exciting as it is to experience these games in the moment, they’re all being set up to fail sooner or later. One way or another, every single one of these titles is going to stagnate, both in player base growth and profits, and be unceremoniously shut down, with absolutely no recourse, no official playable version after the fact, and no archival of their content other than what its most dedicated fans leave behind— and even that’s not guaranteed. There might be no fan dedicated enough. Even if there is, archiving all of the content of some of these games might be technically unworkable. And even then, the archives might go unmaintained, or the relevant companies might get trigger happy with their DMCAs.

It’s quite likely that this entire era of games is just going to disappear forever, and while that’s not exactly a unique issue, it is specifically problematic with games like this that demand active upkeep, in a way that it isn’t with single-player games where the only thing that a company has to do is NOT actively choose to remove it from sale. Making a playable version of this specific type of game isn’t totally impossible, since, most of them are functionally single-player experiences that just phone the servers. And in fact, it’s even sort of already been done at least once, with Bang Dream’s Switch version. But for most companies, there’s no financial incentives to do that, so, barring some kind of government regulation mandating this (which is itself quite unlikely), it’s almost certainly not going to happen.

There’s also the labor issues to be considered. The amount of perpetual crunch to get regular content updates out on time that these games almost certainly need. And the obvious fact that many soshage inspire gambling addictions and overspending which are going mostly unaddressed. So, I lament all of that, and I think it sucks that all of these things are normalized, and, y’know, yeah. It sucks. This all sucks!

But what I absolutely can’t condemn are the developers working to make these games good and meaningful experiences in spite of all these issues, and the players who, in earnest, connect with and find beauty and enjoyment in their work, and the fans who connect with each other over it.

> begin section 5

So, uh, here’s the part where I admit that I wrote an entire video essay to win a stupid argument on social media!

…Not the first time, but.

Basically I was inspired to make this video because of some people, who I will not name, making excessively confrontational social media posts along the lines of “why the fuck are you people playing these games, when we all know VERY WELL that they’re predatory profit-motivated skinner boxes with little to no artistic merit, and there’s nothing they have that can’t be found in indie games with actual artistic value!”

So, firstly. Please don’t go harassing any of these people or throwing the link to this video at them if you recognize them. If you know who you are, then… um. I’m not trying to attack you personally. Having an opinion I don’t like isn’t a crime. I hope you have a wonderful day.

But, yeah, that’s the gist of the bad opinion I wrote this video essay in response to. From the soshage antis, or, well, some of them.

And, I think soshage antis— not all of them, but many of them, generally speaking, are being fucking cops.

This sentiment could be charitably read as looking out for the good of the community, trying to encourage people to quit their unhealthy gacha addictions and play different and better games. I think it fails in that, though, and instead comes across as demonizing not only soshage and their developers, but also their players and their fanbases, in a way I find both reductive and unhelpful. And, broadly, it’s more reflective of a moral absolutist trend of online discourse often being perpetually, and frustratingly, unable to move past this immature kneejerk response of Putting The Bad Thing And Everyone Who Ever Touched It into The Bad Box. Which is, y’know— it’s— it’s beyond the scope of this video, but, it’s gross.

Anyway.

More pertinently, I disagree with the insinuation that soshage are in some way inherently invalid as art because of the profit motives for their existences, and that they don’t have anything to offer that can’t be found elsewhere. Firstly, and I think y’all should already be able to guess this, but I’m not a big fan of any particularly exclusionary definition of “art”. I just don’t think that helps anyone. Certainly doesn’t help that historically the people with the most aggressively exclusionary definitions of art are like, the fucking nazis, but, let’s just not mind that.

Bigger-budget titles are not in any way universally measurably worse than mid-budget or indie titles. I’ve seen indie games with terrible writing, I’ve seen triple-A games with some of the best writing ever. It isn’t like, a linear scale where profit motive goes up and artfulness goes down. That’s not how anything fucking works.

Generally speaking, in this capitalist society, most art is made with some amount of profit motive. And, yes, market forces can and often do limit what you’re able to do with the art in question, depending on the nature of the relevant businesses, and that might very well make the final product worse than it would’ve been otherwise. Like, think back to what I said about anime earlier, about how most anime adaptations don’t finish adapting their source material, and often don’t optimally adapt the parts that they do get to show. That’s the result of a confluence of market considerations! Many anime are greenlit by producers not so much because they think it’d make a great anime, but rather because they think the anime would make a great engine for marketing the source material! Which, probably works pretty good on the domestic Japanese audience, and not so great on the international ones, but they definitely don’t care about that.

But, for another, more general, less obvious example: most movies are typically under two to two and a half hours. Now, why is that? You could say that that’s just because that’s how long audiences can stay seated, but like, who decided how long that was? Doesn’t two hours, when you think about it, seem like a pretty arbitrary amount of time for all movies to be?

It turns out that the actual reason movies can’t just be as long as the director would like them to be, is because uhhhh, PROFIT. Movie theaters like movies to only be that long because if a movie is longer, that means they can have less showtimes in a day, and they have to keep the theater open longer, for potentially less money. You have a movie idea that you think really needs to be four hours long to really be the best it can be? Unless you’re like, Quentin Tarantino, or Kevin Costner, or Martin Scorcese, or like, Sion Sono, who made Love Exposure, which is four hours long and also one of the best most fucking deranged romantic comedies of all time, you’re shit out of luck!

Oh, and, uh, by the way, watch Love Exposure, it’s fantastic. Thank me later. Please.

Video games, meanwhile, have almost the inverse issue. A video game whose average total playtime doesn’t last somewhere in the ballpark of, anywhere between like twelve hours and oh, I dunno, fucking AS MUCH TIME AS POSSIBLE! is frowned upon. Which is a problem, because, it turns out that the cost of labor doesn’t really correlate to like, the exact length of time it takes to beat the game? So you can’t charge $20 for a five hour game that a whole team put their best effort into making the best damn five hours they could, because then certain people are like, EUGHH, WHY IS IT SO SHORT-

As a result, you get a lot of game developers trying to make that twenty or forty or sixty or seventy dollar price tag feel justified, by just, like, adding as much stuff to do as possible. Does the game benefit from having all that stuff in it? This many recycled missions or levels, these many sidequests and activities, exactly this big of a open world, etc? Who knows! Who gives a shit about, like, pacing, or quality over quantity, or whether or not any of this shit is actually fun or makes sense for the sort of game this is trying to be? We gotta get as much people playing this game as long as possible!

And in a soshage, you see this phenomenon manifest to the most extreme degree, because the game can never fucking end. In fact it’s bad if it ends, because most likely if it ends that means it’s no longer profitable! To end is to fail, because, y’know, instead it has to fucking grow and grow and grow infinitely as capitalism impossibly expects it to! Which just… doesn’t make any fucking sense! And also ties back into the preservation issue I talked about earlier. But, compounding this issue is the fact that the story not only has to not end, but also continue constantly. The game can’t like, take a break, or anything. It has to get regular updates of Stuff. And not just story stuff, but also like, little extra bits to facilitate the grinding of quests and character routes and just… content. Just content. Just MORE.

For certain types of stories, the sorts of concepts that are ambitious enough to feasibly support that much narrative content, that might work out great! But, it’s not necessarily so great for a story that would be better served by focusing on a few specific characters and having a contained, complete arc, where then, to facilitate a whole live content update experience, you have to invent a whole bunch of new shit.

Incidentally, we can see how the evolution from one to the other plays out in practice, in the Madoka franchise. Puella Magi Madoka Magica, like, the original 12 episode anime series, is a really tightly told story, an intimate one, even, about the relationships between this very small cast of very fucked up girls. It has a few direct sequels specifically focusing on that small cast, and like, that makes sense, there’s some narrative threads to close there, but it’s not really got the bones for a whole expanded universe, and trying to turn it into one is arguably missing the point.

But then it turned into a whole media franchise with all these spinoff stories about other magical girls in the same setting— and of course, Magia Record!

And from what I’ve seen of MagiReco in the anime and bits of the game here and there, none of it is like, bad, exactly. I like how it takes the series in this interesting little urban fantasy procedural mystery bent, which feels both distinct enough to give MagiReco its own identity and also not so far a tonal departure as to feel foreign to the wider franchise. I like the characters, I like a lot of what the story’s doing, or, trying to do, at least, and also the anime is fucking beautiful… or, well, it was, until Shaft kind of did as Shaft does and broke down in the middle of the second season. I only watched like 3 episodes of the second season, so uh. Yeah. I’m sure they fixed it up for the blu-rays, but I haven’t got to it yet.

So, yeah, it’s a thing. It’s fine. It’s just… in context with the mainline Madoka franchise, it’s kind of questionable at best. I won’t get into the various wrenches it throws into Madoka Magica canon, because, uh, that’s it’s own video, but- yeah

MagiReco obviously wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a profit motive for its existence, but it’s clear that everyone involved is genuinely trying their best to tell a good story in spite of that. And the 9th episode of MagiReco’s anime, the one about Sana, is like, one of my favorite episodes of anime ever— it’s just kind of mixed up in a series that is otherwise a huge fucking mess of pacing while the scriptwriters struggle to include a bit of everything from a game whose story is meant to support, like, infinity time gameplay, as opposed to a 12 to 24 episode anime. And like, I’m not saying the story is the best thing ever, or that the game itself was the best possible format for that story, but it was definitely a better one than this!... Apart from the, y’know, the obvious-

So, like, yeah, art generally needs to be profitable, at least for now, and that sometimes results in subjectively lesser results. And that’s unfortunate, but. It’s not inherently somehow less art, or less true, because of that! If you dislike it because of those market force-induced flaws, like, that’s fair. There’s a lot worth criticizing about soshage as a storytelling format. But at the same time, there’s also something to be said for the virtues of that same format! Which it does have!

Like, if you think about it for a second, the whole idea of a game being patched is like, awesome, isn’t it? It has its drawbacks, yeah, but a game being able to be updated and be evolving before you in real time, that’s genuinely, like, cool! Just, on its own, it kinda owns that we can do that! And like, the idea of a game that not just, like, gets technical fixes or a little bit of extra DLC or whatever, but actively transforms in real time as more story and gameplay is added? That’s honestly really, really neat! That, in itself, is an incredible and beautiful thing that’s never really been possible before, and I think that alone is reason enough to say that soshage have merit in existing.

There’s nothing inherently bad about serial fiction, and there’s nothing wrong with a video game that has a serialized story over a long period. It’s what enables a game like Blue Archive to have the scope and breadth it does in the stories it tells. It starts off as silly cute anime girl hijinks, then takes a turn from there into the wild misadventures of JRPG fanatics accidentally awakening a sleeping god, to the weirdly detailed political intrigue of this absurd anime high school society, to a Gurren Lagann-esque space opera about fighting destiny from across the multiverse, all of it carried by the touching thematic throughline of how teenagers are people who deserve freedom and compassion and individual recognition even in spite of whatever bad short-sighted decisions they may have made— and all of that, alongside a genuinely compelling and surprisingly deep strategy game plus a lighthearted sort-of dating sim with some really good girls that have some really neat character designs!

The structure enables these games to present impressively ambitious narratives that feature huge casts of characters and unfold in real time before their players, offering regular doses of new and exciting things, and fostering evergreen fandoms in which people can socially connect to one another over this cool living evolving thing. One can debate the merits of making a game like that, one can say that they don’t enjoy that kind of game, and it’s fine to not enjoy it. But my point is, if that’s the kind of experience you’ve got an itch for, then that’s where you’re going to go look for it!

And this is where I take issue with the widely prevalent assertion by the gacha cops that these games have nothing to offer that you won’t find elsewhere. These games require huge teams of people at entire studios with massive budgets behind them, operating on a tremendously ambitious scale that most other studios can hardly dream of. And, yes, the money at stake, and the need to make money from their audience, means that soshage are undeniably taking less artistic risks than they might do otherwise, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing worthwhile about them that can’t be found elsewhere, or that people can’t genuinely enjoy them and legitimately prefer them over other sorts of games!

Also, like… you can play multiple games? It’s possible to do so! Like, I play other games, I’ve been playing other games for years, and I like lots of types of games! I like small-scale indie games that offer contained short experiences, I like larger-scale triple-A or mid-budget titles like the Yakuza games or the Hitman series, I like the weird, offbeat, experimental, intimate, scrappy and confessional sorts of things you find on itch.io from like one or two people. These games all scratch different itches and have different draws and different things they’re good for!

But it’s not, like, I picked up the soshages and now they’ve replaced all of them! Like, even in the past few months while I was thinking about making this video, I went and played through the System Shock remake! You can like and play more than one game and more than one type of game! You can enjoy both indie and triple-A games, both single-player and online games, the same way you can read fanfic on AO3 and a published novel, watch an A24 movie and a Marvel movie, watch YouTube and have Netflix, or eat pizzas and also salads, or, whatever. You can do both. You can have both!

And, like, yeah, it’s true that a lot of people gravitate almost exclusively to the popular stuff, or, just, the stuff popular in their social circles, and don’t go out of their way to try something else. And I understand the frustration that might cause, if you are, like, someone into the more offbeat or fringe things, and you might often feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle trying to convince your friends to check out the cool thing you like. And I get it. I get how that frustration can twist into being angry at The Popular Thing.

But, like… if you want someone to check out the thing you like, you can just… recommend something? (Like I did earlier in this video! Watch Love Exposure!) You don’t have to tell someone, “the thing you like sucks and you should feel bad for liking it” to say “the thing I like is cool and you check it out”. You can just, leave out that first part. You can just not say that. And also, saying it doesn’t help! Like, the fact that I get annoyed that people are talking about popular things I don’t like and think are overrated instead of the less popular things I do like and think are underexposed, is like, kind of a problem with me? And more broadly, it’s a problem with the fact that getting an audience is like, way harder than it should be. Which, hey, wouldn’t we know about that!

But that’s not just cause to get morally outraged that people like the popular thing. Like, those people like it, and those feelings are genuine. It isn’t their fault that we live in an inherently inequitable society where access to the media and the ability to influence culture at large isn’t equally available to everyone with something worthwhile to say. (Among all the other more serious injustices in the world.) The fans of the popular thing just like a thing. That isn’t wrong. And having contempt for the audience that this thing was sold to, rather than the company selling it, is misguided.

Which, ultimately, is the crux of the issue I have with the gacha cop attitude. This active contempt for not only the games themselves, but also the people who play and enjoy them. It’s stepping over the actual issue, the issue of the monetization model and the way it exploits psychological weaknesses in the types of people inclined to buy in, to instead say, “no, the REAL problem here is that YOU, the IDIOT who plays this game, aren’t experiencing REAL art.”

And I find that sentiment contemptible.

It’s hugely disrespectful to the developers who are working tireless hours putting their best efforts in trying to make the game as good an experience as it can be, who almost certainly didn’t choose to make the game they were hired to work on a psychologically predatory skinner box, and to the audience that genuinely connects to their work.

It also isn’t how you actually address the problem of these games inspiring unhealthy addictions in their players! It isn’t how you deal with addicts in general, actually? Maybe some of y’all never made this mistake as a child who just learned that smoking causes cancer, but telling a random stranger who’s smoking that “HEY, SMOKING IS STUPID, DIDN’T YOU KNOW YOU CAN GET LUNG CANCER FROM THAT, IDIOT”, really doesn’t endear them to the idea of quitting. Like, you might be right, but being right doesn’t make you not kind of an ass.

Setting aside, of course, that a soshage addiction really isn’t comparable to an alcohol or tobacco or any other sort of actual substance abuse addiction, because, y’know, the anime girls are not giving me cancer! They are not increasing my possibility of liver failure! I’m being a very healthy gacha addict! Not pulling for the 2 star Lung Cancer-chan character! Don’t do that!

(I can think of at least one person possibly watching this video who might accept the implicit challenge to draw Lung Cancer-chan)

So um. Yeah. Yeah. If you’re trying to encourage people to stop, that’s not how you do it. You’re just being shitty to the victims of a business model that you yourself admit is predatory, and that doesn’t fucking help anyone.

It’s just being a fucking cop.

> end section 5

So, I guess that’s a good place to close out this essay. Soshage can be good, sometimes. Predatory monetization models are always bad. These two statements can both be true.

I think a lot of the games I played leading up to the writing and making of this video have some genuinely good things in them which I found worthwhile in spite of the psychologically manipulative design choices to engineer me into spending money, which I sometimes fell for. But, y’know, I knew what I was getting into. So.

And I’m maybe going to go on to make videos about some of them! And now, uh… instead of doing long asides in those videos to talk about how the monetization in them is bad, I can just link this video! Hopefully. Maybe this video is part one of the joyce-stick Soshage Series! The like… extended disclaimer! I guess.

[ALSO: if you want a preview of what’s to come in that series, we recently wrote up a fairly long text essay about Bang Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! which, for the time being, is patreon and ko-fi exclusive, and you can find the links to give us money to see that here! some version of this is eventually going to become a video, or part of one, but you wonderful cash sluts get to see it early! also I’m probably going to do this again. please donate to the patreon please donate to the patreon please do that please and thank you-]

At the very least, I’m going to try my absolute best to resist the urge to buy any more pulls in any of these games. I need to try to be better at financial responsibility in general, because uh, I suck at it, so. Yeah.

Uhhhh. Here’s the websites, I guess. Support definitely appreciated! And uhh… here’s the list of people who enable our BS on Patreon, and, standard engagement reminders, like, comment, subscribe, follow on the usual places, do whatever you like, please don’t hurt me,

Oh and um just to be absolutely clear I wasn’t only playing the gacha games, I was also playing the System Shock remake as mentioned earlier, watching the Daniel Craig James Bond movies (among other things), watching Girls Band Cry, reading yuri manga, seeing movies with our girlfriend, writing Letterboxd reviews of the movies we were watching, trying and failing (so far) to learn Japanese, and writing erotic fanfict-

(video cuts out)