This week I played Mystic Messenger, a Korean mobile visual novel game, released in 2016. I gather that a more literal translation of the Korean title might be “mysterious messenger,” which make sense because the premise of the game is that you download an app, which you don’t know much about, but which jumpstarts this narrative journey full of its own mysteries. Thus far, there have been no mystic elements to the story; photos the characters send have an urban contemporary feel, with recognizable markers of the everyday like public transit, ear buds, or ketchup bottles. Gameplay consists of selecting responses as you participate in the app’s chatrooms, get messages, emails, and phone calls from the characters in the game world, synchronized to your time zone, as if it were happening in real time. The most extensively used element is the chatroom, and a note on its aesthetic because it’s exceptional: in addition to drab bubble text, characters might send an animated emote, chibi image of themselves; they can briefly shake the screen with an angry face that blips in and out as an overlay of the chatroom; they also sometimes send their text in a bubble shaped expressively as a cat or a fluffy cloud, as if written on a cute stationary sticky note; finally, they will also send photos. In addition to the phone calls (recorded in Korean, but with English text to translate on screen), these emotive speech acts go a long way in both making the characters come to life and just in general making it fun and engaging to follow along. In the previous visual novel I played, clicking through text as it endlessly populated at the bottom of my screen in a uniform font would get tedious.
Interesting visualizations in the chatroom. (source)
The narrative and gameplay has three levels. The first, most openly marketed level, is the romantic simulation: there are 6 characters and you can play through to gain the love of one of them. The second level is that you and the 6 romanceable characters are part of an organization that is organizing a big charity party; to get a good ending, you must convince at least 10 guests, whose contact info you collect over time from the romanceable characters, to attend through choosing the right three replies to the potential guests’ emails. The third level is that you are slowly figuring out what happened: the person who had your organizing job before has died or at least disappeared under mysterious circumstances and the way you join the organization is also rather mysterious. So, on the third level, I assume you solve these mysteries. Before I realized the game would not save in the middle of the introductory segment, I ended up accidentally restarting the game 3 times. To keep from being bored, I really tested the different choice routes and got a bad ending right off the bat, thereby discovering that the person who adds me to the charity organization is a malicious-seeming hacker (and if I refuse to follow his instructions he threatens to end me or enslave me and the game ends—very dramatic—I expect more of this as this level of the story unfolds).
Main game screen, demonstrating the different mechanics. (source)
A word on the monetization. 3 romance routes are available from the get go; 2 you need to pay 80 hourglasses for; and for the last one you have to pay 300 hourglasses (there are also some additional dlc-s and one more romance route since the release, which all have an hourglass cost as far as I can tell, in the ~100 range). A guide I read claimed that by playing through each romance route in order, you win enough hourglasses to play the next tiers. This seems reasonable: you can pay money to play exactly the romance route you want right away, or you can invest your time to eventually get there. The other major application of the game’s hourglass currency is that you can pay 30 to unlock all of the chatrooms for one day; therefore, you are able to override the game’s scheduled gameplay and play them all at once or go back to ones you missed because you were not available to play when they opened up. Unlike the other visual novel I played, here money feels like a luxury rather than a necessity; I may be missing the 1am and 3am chatrooms, but I get a brief overview of the main points the characters discussed without me (I just miss sending replies and winning photos and their favor from giving the correct replies). Furthermore, every few hours I earn a randomized bonus and I’m slowly but steadily gaining hourglasses, making me feel like eventually I’ll be able to unlock things while still being free to play. Overall, the monetization feels less predatory as compared to the other visual novels I’ve played so far.
Main monetizated interactions. (source 1, source 2)
Initially, Mystic Messenger does not seem like the best game to discuss with this week’s readings. Rehak argues that “our extension through various media is predicated on the body as root metaphor” and “the body becomes an inescapable aspect of fantasized experience” (21). And in fact, the readings have to do with identifying with an on-screen body. In Mystic Messenger I do not have a game body because the game is in first person perspective. I can however pick a little picture to represent me in the app, much like in regular messenger and email apps. I will elaborate on this aspect in more depth.
The game offers 5 pictures to represent you, or you can upload your own. 4 of the pictures match visually in design with the romanceable characters, and the last is more stylistically exaggerated: an anthropomorphized unicorn with a giant head and enormous eyes. The other 4 only differ in hair color and hair style; 3 have luminescent pale skin and 1 has vaguely tan skin. Overall, I think these 4 pictures are conventionally attractive—light skin, young, thin. As Shaw notes, we can understand some of the creators’ intentions through analyzing the available images. Much like in Martey and Consalvo’s analysis of Second Life, light skin is normalized though these avatar choices. In picking these beautiful characters, players would be gravitating toward beauty like the Second Life players. The game does offer some counter choices, with the tanned character, the comical unicorn, and the choose your own options. I wonder if these singular alternatives only work to emphasize how they stray from the norm and highlight the normality of the 3 light skinned characters.
In order of the game, the first 4 avatars. (source)
To understand why people choose the avatars they do and whether they identify with them, Shaw argues we must use ethnographic methods, so I will try to breakdown my own choices and compare them to the relationships between players and avatars of Mystic Messenger found online. I was not concerned with the questions Martey and Consalvo tackle because I did not expect my choice in this single-player game to affect me functionally or socially. The unicorn suggested that the characters would not take the avatar as a representation of me, which set aside questions of social narrative and whether I would want to embrace or resist the group dynamics of the characters. These questions would not be influenced by my dress.
The unicorn avatar. (source)
I first lingered over the unicorn and considered the chose your option (until I remembered I blocked the app from accessing my photos and cameras; I tend to deny permissions unless I know how the app is explicitly using these things). The reason I moved away from more conventional characters I think has to do with my relationship to femininity. My preferred expression of female-ness tends toward the androgynous end of things and I mostly dislike overt markers of femininity, like pink, flowers, makeup, nail polish, jewelry, skirts, and long hair. Interestingly, I do not find the counter of these things any less feminine because I have a pretty firmly feminine self-conception, I just find things like big baggy pants and short hair have a much more interesting potential for femininity to explore for me personally. Given my relationship to femininity, I often find like Shaw notes that “texts meant to hail us as audience members can if fact distance us from them" (77). Mystic Messenger is in the otome genre of games targeted to women and the avatars reflect conventional femininity. This whole genre of games has initially alienated me because I do not get much from conventional femininity and I would have kept on not playing them were I not interested in why people like them for this class.
In the end I skipped over the unicorn because its long flowing hair and long eyelashes were too feminine for me. I briefly considered the darker skinned character with the shaggy hair because I felt her skin color and less polished hair style suited me better, but I felt reluctant to claim the darkest available skin color. In the end I landed on the blonde with short hair because her hair style looked like mine. Crucially, what I was so obsessed with was not that the character represents my body, but that the character represents my values related to femininity. The blonde was an imperfect choice for my goals, but I treated her from then on as just a picture because one needed to be there to represent me. I did not identify with her or imagine her as a character in the game; she might as well have been a bunny rabbit, in the words of Shaw’s test subjects. But, though the on-screen “body” did not matter to me, much like Shaw concludes about her subjects, the not mattering was a result of not having something that might matter. If there were a character design that I found genuinely cool, would I have identified with her and would it have improved the gameplay? I don’t think my avatar being a placeholder for me makes the game less enjoyable, and that much is supported in Shaw’s findings as well; nevertheless, finding a cool female character, something I feel passionate about because so many representations have been inadequate for me, would have been really special.
Example of a player-uploaded image as an avatar. Could certainly be the actual player, but interestingly, looks like perhaps it is a Kpop star to me. Is this an idealized self? (source)
Screen grabs of Mystic Messenger online reveal that some people definitely put up a photo of themselves into the game. Ultimately I decided I do not like this because then you don’t match the aesthetic of the game and it doesn’t feel like you are a part of the game world. Although I could’ve put up an image that did represent all the things I wanted it to, it would’ve broken unity with the game for me.
I’ve also encountered fanart of the romanceable characters with a specific avatar from the initial 5 options, suggesting to me that some players do get attached to a specific image as a character and/or as a self-representation. I searched online if there was an “What your Mystic Messenger avatar says about you” article, and I did not find one, but I can see the choice being something that unites people in a common understanding/vision about the game. People like to choose identifiers, from clothing to objects and avatars. They like taking personality quizzes.
Fanart of Jumin, the game character, his cat Elizabeth III, and “Red MC” the avatar (source)
This brings me to back to a discussion of Rehak. Although he is interested in the difference between a camera-body and a game-body, he does elaborate on how the camera in both movies and games hails the viewer, giving them “a sense of literal presence, and a newly participatory role” (19). Although my physical presence in the game is very limited, the camera-like function of making the game like just another messenger app on my phone, fusing the game world with my real world through the phone interface, having the characters address me constantly, hails me as a participant in the game. Seeing them react to my responses is pleasurable and I can recognize myself as a bodily participant in the game. (They also constantly ask if I’ve eaten, or if I’m sleeping, showing concern for and calling into being my physical existence.) At the same time, the reflection is never perfect and never will be, especially for games like this where your response is a selection out of two or three options. But there’s something fun about that failure to match. The potential of my physical self existing differently is evoked. (There are some overlaps here with Munoz’s disidentification as discussed in the Shaw.) As Rehak describes it, “"players derive pleasure from avatarial instability. On the most basic level, avatars enable players to think through questions of agency and existence, exploring in fantasy form aspects of their own materiality" (21). More succinctly, my non-self in the game allows me to "toy with subjectivity, play with being" (21) in a way that is harder in real life. Moreover, going beyond the acknowledgment from Shaw that players can enjoy roleplaying their avatars rather than identifying with them, Rehak’s statement prompts me to consider the fun of the physical experience of my body as part of the game. Yes, there are many moments that remind me that the game is imaginary and allow me to play with my identity because I can be someone else in the game; however, there are also interesting, fleeting moments that hail me as a material being that are very interesting. For Rehak clearly these moments can happen both in the third person and in the first person. In the third person seeing your avatar die and recognizing it as an extension of the body may have an effect. It’s also interesting though, how the first person can play more directly with that visceral-ity. It’s something I want to explore more later.
As a final tidbit: reminding me of our discussion about the goose, people sure got a big kick out of imagining the unicorn as an animal character in the game world. Perhaps the real work that remains to be done on avatars and identification is what we do with animals (and furrys).
