I started an otoge and it's changed my outlook on life.

The other day my friend was working at the Ikemen Series booth at Anime Expo, and curious about what that was, I downloaded the app for one of the games from the series on my phone the next day.

That was a week ago. And since then I've slowly reconfirmed why I had never before downloaded games on my phone.

First off: I don't play video games. I like other types of games just fine—I would never say no to Cards Against Humanity—but I just haven't developed the skills for video games. We never had game systems in our house growing up, and the only time I would play video games as a kid was when my family went to Target to buy something, and I'd stand there playing the Donkey Kong demo at the video games/CDs/books section. (Mostly I was interested in the Goosebumps books.)

As a kid I never practiced playing fighting games with my friends. I never played RPGs with expansive worlds and developing characters. I never learned how to shoot at armed opponents to kill them. Despite being conditioned to believe that the arcade (or "game center", as we called them in Japan) was the place where you received the magical pen that would turn you into a Sailor Scout, I never bothered to find out where the nearest ga-cen to my house was.


Fast forward to the present, and I'm left with zero hand-eye coordination, patience, and understanding of how video games can bring joy to people. How can you call it fighting if you're just taking turns attacking each other? How can you possibly remember all the sequential button combinations for your character's unique attacks?? And how can you possibly keep your eyes open the whole time your character is progressing toward the right of the screen, without going completely blind?!

Having fashioned myself into one wherein a complete button masher emerges whenever social situations require me to play a video game, I clearly wasn't going to suddenly start playing mobile games just because I got a smart phone. That was a number of years ago, and to this day I basically use my phone to make phone calls and send/receive text messages. If I need to do something more involved, I am happy to wait until I have access to my trusty laptop.

So when I downloaded one of the Ikemen games (of course I would choose『イケメン幕末：運命の恋』, since it's set in the Bakumatsu era and I know a hair more about that period than...the Cinderella world?), I had no idea what I was supposed to do. For those of you who, like me, don't know what the Ikemen Series is all about, it is comprised of a number of games in the "otome" (maiden with a suggestion of virginal) genre that's basically a dating sim with different storylines based on how you develop your character. As I began playing, I quickly figured out that there were all these phrases I didn't know, that weren't entirely intuitive: What in the world is a 幕末スタンプ? What's with the different types of points? What's the difference between 自分磨き and おめかし??

But then, what kind of a newbie actually reads the how-to guide.

It took a whole week for me to realize that, yeah, I actually do need to read the Help page so that I can figure out what I'm supposed to be doing in this otome game (a.k.a. otoge). I still didn't know what a 所持両 was, or how to get more. I was still iffy on how to up the 魅力 and 素敵度 of my character. I was only just beginning to figure out how to recover my character's 体力. But most important—how do I get my app to figure out that I am on California time, not Japan time?!

I'll write more about my three devastating back-to-back errors in another post, but today I want to focus more on how this otoge is changing my outlook on life. More specifically, my love life.

First, I am reconsidering the significance of 自分磨き . It's literally "self-polishing", but it's more along the lines of self-improvement or personal development. In the game, it takes 20 points of 体力 to do a round of 自分磨き. You can accumulate up to 100 体力 points, and as you use them up, you can start accumulating 1 point every three minutes (i.e., 20 points every hour). The goal, I suppose, is to log into the game periodically to use up those 100 points, so that you can engage in this 自分磨き, which of course ups your 素敵度 (the degree of your... prettiness? loveliness?). You can also get money by engaging in 自分磨き! And to top it off, you're ostensibly competing against another player every time you do this.

I don't do 自分磨き in real life. I wrote an entire dissertation chapter on this idea, but I confess I haven't made time to do any of it myself (getting pretty, learning new skills, exercising, etc.)—because I am too busy just doing what I need to get by, that I don't have time to be polishing myself. But, if this otoge is so darn popular, does it have a point about how 自分磨き is important when it comes to finding (and keeping) the love that you want?

Second, I am wondering about the importance of diversifying one's wardrobe. In the game, you're supposed to accumulate in-game currency (or purchase points) so that you can buy up all sorts of stuff—including avatars (i.e., clothing items). Today in the game I bought two different outfits (which is unheard of in my real life). And of course, the more wardrobe items you have, the higher your 魅力 (charm) points are. Spend money, get clothes, be charming. Huh.

I haven't exactly updated my wardrobe since... gosh, I don't know. By now I might not have things from undergrad, but I still definitely wear the same clothes I wore in my first job out of college. And that Project 333 capsule wardrobe? That's basically my closet, all year round.

But is that not what I'm supposed to be doing? Am I supposed to be spending reasonable amounts of money periodically, so that I can add new and exciting items to my wardrobe and up my charm points? Is that how being lovely (and lovable) works in this world?

My one-week assessment of『イケメン幕末』is this: I am not cut out to play it. I don't understand it, and the interface just doesn't do it for me. Maybe if you regularly play mobile games (and especially otome games), this thing makes perfect sense. But for me, it confuses me to no end.

But the game has, for better or for worse, got me thinking about what is normalized about what straight women (primarily) in Japan (and elsewhere?) are being encouraged to do as part of their strategies (!) for having a relationship with the men (however fictional) that they like. Log in, spend money, get clothes, be loved. Log in, spend money, get clothes, be loved. And so on.

I'm not so sure how my story with—and in—this game will develop, but I have a feeling it will be filled with confusion and frustration. All I know is that, while the characters in the game are pretty prettily designed, the real-life Hijikata Toshizō would have legit made me all starry eyed, even 150 years ago.