Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion
Recently I was invited to check out TinierMe, a North American beta port of a popular Japanese 2D MMO. I've talked a lot about the role of fashion in 3D MMOs, but I've yet to really examine a 2D one. These browser-based platforms typically feature avatar customization even more prominently than other virtual worlds, and while they're often associated with teens in the west, they're the social networking method of choice in Japan, even more than Facebook.
Though it may seem unassumingly cartoonish, TinierMe reveals a lot about what fashionistas respond to across platforms, so keep reading for all the adorable details!
You can do the things most would expect from a browser based social network including playing games, talking to others, and decorating your personal room, but given my history of fawning over Japanese fashions it should be obvious what I'm most interested in.
Because of TinierMe's Japanese origins, the fashion is heavily based on anime and recognizable style subcultures like Lolita and Visual Kei. Even better, they've managed to have several official tie-ins to anime licencing giant Funimation and to Vocaloid, a synthesized voice program represented by characters like cult favorite Miku Hatsune. Though the names may be unfamiliar, many of the styles are very recognizable to avid virtual shoppers-- the doll-like Lolita style in particular has become incredibly popular in SL, in spite of some initial misunderstandings about its origins.
Another popular Japanese import into TinierMe are the Gacha. Gacha machines are very familiar to SL fashionistas, since they've become a very popular marketing tool in Second Life shops everywhere. The general premise of gacha (or gashapon) is that a customer pays for a random chance at an item. They pay less than the item's value, but there's no guarantee of what they will specifically get.
Gacha machines in SL have become something like fashionista slot machines: fun, frustrating, and incredibly addictive. The downside of gachas is that in pursuit of that one perfect item, you can often end up with duplicates or, worse, items you don't want at all. In SL, these items are usually sold transfer (unlike almost everything else in the shops) so that people can get together and swap their unwanted items for more desirable ones. The solution in TinierMe, however, adds an extra layer to the gacha experience by allowing you to combine two unwanted items into a random (and frequently harder to find) new item. The whole thing is a little like an Xzibit meme-- "'Sup dawg, I heard you like gacha, so I put a gacha in your gacha..."
The shopping experience in TinierMe is incredibly engaging (and adorable), but admittedly once you've done that the platform can feel rather limited. As much as avatar customization and socializing are at the centre of this 2D world, it obviously doesn't allow for the same creative freedoms as platforms like Second Life, or the same directed gaming experiences as more focussed MMOs. That being said, I do plan to keep dabbling with my super kawaii TinierMe avatar and those addictive little gachas-- it's still way more fun than Facebook!
Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.
thank you for the nice smile. your post helped put a heavy day of mixed emotions into perspective
TinierMe is incredibly cute and as a former (and closet) Habbo Hotel junkie, i may need to explore TinierMe =)
Posted by: Ener Hax | Tuesday, February 08, 2011 at 06:26 PM