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ABSTRACT
Upsetting familiar daily routines, cultural traditions, and seasonal events, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted social and cultural life in many places around the world. In Japan, the absence of cultural and seasonal events, which play a central role in the annual calendar, and which serve as an important source of cultural identity, was painfully noticed. In search of adequate substitutes, many people have turned to digital spaces. How do these spaces cater to the need for familiar routines and cultural customs? How did users appropriate these spaces to reclaim everydayness? In this article, I consider these questions in the context of the widely popular game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo 2020) and its related YouTube videos. Drawing on metadata and user comments for 282 Japanese-language YouTube videos that reference the game, I show how players and users interweave the game space and the YouTube space in various practices of recasting cultural customs and seasonal events. The interactions on YouTube further show the degree to which Let’s Play seriality is used as a way of reclaiming everydayness. As such, the analysis highlights the important role commercial digital spaces play in terms of stability and as discursive spaces for negotiating crisis.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my reviewers and the editors of this special issue for their invaluable critique and suggestions, Anna Yeadell-Moore for her timely and thorough copyediting and Shunsuke Mukae for his help with the data collection. Part of the research that went into this article was funded by the JSPS in the context of the project ‘Exploratory Research on Play and Communities on Video Streaming Platforms’ (22K18155).
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Requests for self-restraint by various governing bodies (City of Kyoto Citation2021; Ministry of the Environment Government of Japan Citation2022) have led to a widely observed change in the custom of Cherry Blossom Viewing, which demonstrates the impact of the pandemic on cultural and social life in Japan. A survey among 3139 participants, between the age of 15 and 79, carried out by the marketing company Intage (Citation2021), suggests that the share of people who did a Cherry Blossom Viewing decreased from a total of 40.9 per cent in 2019 to 25.8 per cent and 21.7 per cent in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Likewise, the budget planned for Cherry Blossom Viewing decreased from 5400 Yen (about 40 USD) in 2019–2700 Yen, or about half of the pre-pandemic budget, in 2020. Another survey by the company Weathernews (Citation2021) further suggests that that younger generations increasingly choose to view the cherry blossoms in solitude or in pairs, instead of enjoying the custom together with larger groups of friends, family or colleagues.
2 Let’s Play videos are commented video recordings of videogame play. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler and her colleagues define Let’s Plays as ‘self-recorded gaming videos in which the respective gamers, the “Let’s Players”, comment on their journey through the game as well as on various aspects of it’ (Radde-Antweiler, Waltmathe and Zeiler Citation2014: 17).
3 The two measures correspond to two alert stages with, among others, the following conditions. Providing cause for activating the mambo, stage III is recognized if the weekly number of new infections exceeds 15 per 100,000 population. Stage IV, which is cause for activating the state of emergency, is recognized if the weekly number of new infections exceeds 25 per 100,000 population. This information is taken from the Japanese cabinet Covid information website (Cabinet Secretariat Japan Citation2022).
4 A case in point is the Tanabata festival. Of Chinese origin, this festival is celebrated in many regions of Japan, and it is customary nowadays to write a wish onto a small slip of paper and hang it on bamboo. The festival is referenced in the game only in the shape of a purchasable bamboo item resembling the colourful Tanabata bamboo seen during the festival.
5 A similar culture of showing one’s creations or strategies has emerged around sandbox games like Minecraft, but also in the context of games with a wide range of strategies and character-building choices, such as the Dark Souls series.
6 The list of the top-100 videos was created by my student, Shunsuke Mukae, between November and December 2021.
7 As computational methods for analysing YouTube video practices and user engagement are still relatively scarce, this project draws on my own past experiences with this approach (Mühleder, Becker and Roth Citation2019; Mühleder and Roth Citation2021).
8 I have selected these terms based on evidence found in a preliminary screening of the comments. The original approach included additional keywords, which did not yield any results and were thus excluded from the final data analysis workflow. Please also note that the filter is only used to narrow down the dataset – as the same comment may appear for two different sets of keywords, there is some overlap between the results of the filtering process.
9 For transparency, I should add that there is a small overlap between the different datasets, as some of the videos have appeared prominently in the results for multiple keywords. While potentially skewing the quantitative results slightly, this does not disqualify the subsequent qualitative analysis. The overlap is as follows: Corona – Christmas: 2; Corona – Top100: 3; Kodomonohi – Top100: 1; Setsubun – Valentine: 1; Countdown – Shogatsu: 4; Shogatsu – Valentine: 1; Christmas – Top100: 1; Hanabitaikai – Top100: 3. All other videos were exclusive results for each search.
10 The Cherry Blossom is celebrated throughout the country, and the blooming degree and predicted trajectory are reported on daily in a wide array of media before and during the season.
11 The fact that only 11 similar comments appear in the main dataset on cultural events suggests that such caring attitudes are more likely to emerge in the context of parasocial relations to successful YouTubers.
12 Both users use the word ‘癒やし [iyashi, to heal, to cure]’, which I have translated here according to the respective context.
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Martin Roth
Martin Roth is an associate professor at Ritsumeikan University (Japan) and a research fellow at Stuttgart Media University (Germany). He works on the politics of videogames, digital space, and Japan. His first monograph Thought-Provoking Play is available from ETC Press. Martin also edits the review section of the journal Asiascape: Digital Asia and is co-editor of the journal Replaying Japan.