Feeling betrayed?: Imagined alliance and consumer entitlement in the otome game market

• In Event: Consumers and Consumption Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

Cultural sociologists have often treated production and consumption as analytically separate domains. In response, a growing body of scholarship has pushed back against this bifurcation, arguing instead for an approach that examines production and consumption as interrelated processes that jointly generate diverse yet structured meanings of cultural products. Engaging with and extending this latter perspective, I present a case study of otome game consumption, an empirically and theoretically understudied form of consumption situated within a distinctive gendered market.
Rather than foregrounding authors or authors’ intentions, as many prior cultural-sociological studies do, this case illustrates how consumers themselves actively construct the figure of the “author” - in this case, the figure of the “development team”. I argue that this construction is rooted in a collectively perceived sense of sisterhood, through which producers are symbolically incorporated into imagined alliances on the consumer side. As otome game players make sense of their own consumption practices, they simultaneously interpret how the production team understands and positions the consumers, too.
This dynamic is sustained by a gendered market script that underpins the otome game industry. Originating in Japan in the early-1990s, otome games have been historically branded as a “by-and-for-women” romance simulation game, responding to women’s unmet needs to play games within a male-dominated game industry. Today, this positioning has attracted an ever-increasing female player base that values the genre’s “female-oriented” content—particularly its well-crafted male characters, narrative design, and, most of all, the affordances that enable high-quality romantic experiences. This market positioning, while being a successful marker of its monetization, nevertheless intensifies consumers’ expectations of the game and its development team.
I examine this unique consumer-producer tension in this industry by looking at a distinctive dataset: female otome players’ complaints and defensive commentaries over otome games they have played and/or chosen not to continue playing. I pay close attention to their discursive practices through which these female players assert moral claims over a production process to which they have no formal access, yet over which they believe they have a legitimate say.

Author

• Yijie (Coco) Fang, University of California, Santa Barbara