‘Otaku’ used to be a subculture in Japan. Coined by columnist Akio Nakamori in 1983, the term describes an individual – typically young and male – who is feverishly devoted to anime, manga and computers. Socially withdrawn and obsessive in their consumption, these gaming enthusiasts guard against the often-disappointing contours of reality by retreating to the realm of fiction. Now, with the combined market value of these pursuits estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, they’re firmly mainstream.
Infatuation with animated characters is common for ‘otakus’ – they rarely have the guts to talk to real girls, or if they have, they either failed, or worse, been humiliated. Designing an otaku-friendly ‘galgame’ (narrative romance video game) today is simple: throw in a bunch of cute female characters with different breast sizes, hair and eye colour, long legs with black or white stockings, and a pair of cute cat ears or a bunny tail. If a combat system is included, players can buy weapons and skins to upgrade their ‘harem’ (unlocking racy ‘fan service’ content). These games often use the gacha monetisation system, a model which incentivizes players to spend real-world money in order to roll the dice and win a randomly-generated item for a limited time, such as your favourite girl. The pool of items rotates regularly to keep players hooked. Big spenders are called ‘whales’.
Otakus, however, have begun to feel threatened by the rise of their female counterpart – ‘otome’ (‘maiden’) games. Otome players can date different types of men – ‘daddy type’, ‘puppy type’, ‘dominator’, ‘submitter’ – and enjoy the vast spectrum of virtual love. At first, these games were designed for young girls who were shy yet longed for a relationship, but that didn’t stop mature whales from joining, women who felt trapped in marriages and had the money to spend on handsome ‘paper hubbies’. Reports have emerged of female players forming ‘wife gangs’ and celebrating their paper hubby’s birthday on a giant outdoor screen, in the city centre, at prime time. Social media wars are started over whose lover is better. A young colleague told me that she once hired someone to cosplay as her favourite paper hubby to celebrate her own birthday. The veil between the digital and the physical, it seems, is increasingly porous.
In 2014, female gamers made up only 25 per cent of the gaming market, but now account for half of all players worldwide. The industry has taken note, paying close attention to the fact that female players are likely to spend more on virtual skins and physical merchandise, and have a higher retention rate as well. This shift was illustrated in January 2024, when Chinese developer Papergames (叠纸游戏) released their 3D otome game, Love and Deepspace, and global sales reached half a billion yuan in the first month. Iconic games such as Genshin Impact (developed by the Shanghai game company miHoYo, whose slogan is ‘Tech Otakus Save the World’) are featuring more and more charming male characters to appeal to female players, which is seen as a betrayal of its origins. Many male players refuse to play with male characters – going so far as to deliberately drop them dead – and vow to boycott the game until this supposed mistake is rectified. What they don’t grasp is that they need to outspend female and gay players to regain some bargaining power. Petulantly railing against the ‘pink tax’ won’t get them what they want.
Otakus are also frustrated by what they see as a societal double standard. Otome games are almost always rated 18+, which means that paper hubbies can walk around half naked (if you buy him a virtual towel that costs more than a real one) and flirt with the player at will, while otaku games (often rated 12+ to attract more schoolboys) are constantly complained about by worried parents when they see female characters wearing gossamer-thin clothes or showing too much cleavage. Under pressure from censors and regulators, game developers are having to choose between abandoning the teenage market (pocket money), or giving female characters more clothes. They usually opt for the latter.
Although the 18+ rating gives otome games more freedom, older gamers are not satisfied with their subtlety – which usually stops at foreplay – and desire more graphic content. ‘Doujin’ culture is flourishing in the otome fandom, with erotic drawings using elements from the games’ plots circulating around the wife gangs and found on sites like Lofter, or social platforms such as Bilibili and Little Red Book. Some players will go as far as editing sound fragments of intercourse together with snippets of the games’ audio. To get around the automatic online censorship of adult content in China when they upload this chimeric content, they ingeniously add background music.
The estimated market value of the global games industry is around $280 billion, equivalent to the publishing industry and the film and TV entertainment industry combined. miHoYo is now the largest single video game studio in the world, and its aforementioned Genshin Impact was once the world’s top-grossing mobile game (in September 2021, with total revenue of $341 million; it eventually conceded to Honour of Kings, developed by Tencent). When Apple CEO Tim Cook visited Shanghai in March this year, he met with miHoYo and Papergames. The latter is developing a special project for the mixed-reality headset VisionPro, which is sure to invigorate those 3D paper hubbies with still more life. miHoYo and its overseas subsidiary Hoyoverse, meanwhile, have a grand plan to launch a virtual fantasy world for a billion digital habitats by 2030. Apple, given their competition with Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, won’t want to miss out on the potentially vast Chinese metaverse.
While not everyone has a VR headset or game console at home, almost everyone has a mobile phone. Chinese mobile games have savvily ridden the smartphone wave. Ten years ago, few could have imagined playing a complex open-world game like Genshin Impact on a smartphone. In 2017, miHoyo’s founding team gambled that smartphone hardware and systems would leapfrog and upgrade fast enough to load large open-world maps and render real-time 3D animations (which require huge amounts of memory and computing power). The payoff has been huge. Now the game is the key demo for testing the performance of every new smartphone model in-store. All Chinese smartphone manufacturers optimise their products to run the game smoothly. Since the game’s official launch in 2020, it has been one of the most profitable projects during Covid’s three-year period of constant lockdowns. Rumour has it that the end-of-year bonus for miHoyo employees in 2022 was the equivalent of 16 months’ salary.
For games (especially otome games), voice actors are crucial to their success. If the character’s voice is not convincing or charming enough, the fantasy immediately falls apart. Players often joke that some characters’ voices can ‘make your ears pregnant’ because they really know how to groan and gasp. The younger generation of voice actors often choose games and animation over traditional media like films because they prefer to create the character from scratch (‘give the paper person a life’), rather than simply dubbing a real person. Top male voice actors hog the jobs for the four biggest otome games, where there are no fancy visual effects or other distractions to steal their thunder. Their voices are the centre of the universe for gamers, and fans would likely follow their performances in radio dramas, audiobooks, movies, reality shows, and even poetry readings. Chinese fans are infamous for their loyalty, and they demand no less from their idols. A voice actor for the otome game Light & Night, Li Yuantao, was caught preying on female players and cheating on his wife. Angry fans could not tolerate their faithful paper hubby being tainted by the immoral actor and formed a group to complain, forcing the game company to fire him (which led to an avalanche of dismissals from his other acting commitments). The company took the loss and hired a top voice actor with professional excellence and moral integrity to ‘purify’ the character. All was forgiven.
Writing the plot, dialogue and archetypes in otome games requires literary skill. The A/B/O trope from Western fan fiction is a typical blueprint: Alpha is socially dominant, physically built and a natural leader; Omega is submissive and gentle, calm and a peacemaker; Beta is well balanced between these two poles. With little twists here and there, capable writers can bring a freshness to this formula. Some clichés like ‘gap moe’ (affection born from when a character behaves contrary to their assumed or surface-level traits) and ‘asceticism’ never fail. Chinese women also have a soft spot for the ‘handsome/tough/tragic’ (美强惨) male leads. ‘Genderswap’ is the latest trend among teenagers – in Light & Night’s nod to Journey to the West, the player can become a female version of the Monkey King. And, while the ‘daddy type’ used to be popular with younger women, women in big cities have lately enjoyed more financial independence and are starting to prefer the ‘puppy type’. 撒娇 is a very common ‘girlish’ behaviour in East Asian culture, but it is hard to find the exact English translation – imagine combining the words ‘coy’, ‘sweet’, ‘whiny’, ‘cute’ and ‘flirty’ together. It appears this dynamic, of dating a much younger man, is becoming a fad among middle-aged, middle-class women. One of my forty-something friends has just decided to take her postgraduate entrance exams with her young boyfriend, who is still a college student, so that she can experience the real campus romance that she never had.
The ‘sapiosexual type’ is more sophisticated than its predecessors and becoming prevalent with highly educated women. Creating these characters convincingly is no easy task. Otome game companies often hire female writers from top universities with diverse backgrounds, equipped with knowledge from a range of disciplines. ‘He’ should be able to comment on a Shakespearean sonnet or quantum physics in a magisterial way, if prompted. Just as the male literati of the Song Dynasty wrote love lyrics in women’s voices and asked beautiful female performers to sing longing to a small group of male friends, otome games are about women writing romance plots designed to please women – paper hubbies and their voice actors are just a conduit to make the experience more believable. However, a big no for female writers is to insert any form of personal experience into the plot. If they get caught, it could end their career. One player famously noted: ‘It feels like being pushed second-hand goods when you are expecting a virgin.’ In short, what paper hubbies absolutely cannot have is: history with other women.
The rise of otome culture and the virtual world in general almost certainly correlates with the rapid decline in China’s marriage and birth rates. When entertainment and the dopamine they release is so readily available and instantly gratifying, the real-world effort of marriage and child-rearing often does not seem worth it. I know many divorced women who live with their parents so that when they work overtime – which is quite common in Asia – the parents can take care of the child. They have lost their own names and have been called ‘somebody’s mother’ since the child was born. One friend confided that the only ‘me time’ she had in a day drowned in a heavy workload, parents’ nitpicking and the child’s crying, was playing an otome game. Her paper hubbies never mansplain; they read her bedtime stories in the most enchanting voices and comfort her during her period. Even if you choose the wrong option in a dialogue box and say the wrong thing, you can always start over. This option is not always available in a ‘real’ relationship.
The older generation might disregard this as simple escapism, but when promises of stability and prosperity are shattered, the incentive to adhere to generational norms disappears. When relationships and marriage demand far more than one can afford, avoiding them altogether becomes the logical choice. Technology sits poised to shape this social transition. If tech leader Sam Altman aims to replicate the AI-human relationship at the heart of science-fiction film Her with the latest ChatGPT leap, if the coming artificial uterus allows humans to reproduce without intercourse – while future sex takes place in the mind, enhanced by an implant or interface – then who says women can’t have ‘Him’ around as the perfect companion?
Image © Omer Flores
