Embodied Fate: The Character Economy and the Neoliberal Subjectivity in Gacha Games

Abstract

Gacha game is a new type of video game that gained popularity in the 2010s and the 20s. In popular gacha games such as Genshin Impact, Fate/Grand Order, and Blue Archive, like a video game version of lottery, players pay virtual or real currencies to obtain random valuable items or playable characters. In Embodied Fate, the author conducts a symptomatic reading of the gacha game: to analyze the desire structure of gacha gaming from the perspectives of media studies, ludology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Numerous theoretical frameworks and critical categories are used for the analysis, including database consumption, character merchandising, psychoanalysis, avatar theory and action theory of ludology, neoliberalism, and precarity. By contextualizing gacha games in the anime media mix, it is shown that the production and consumption of virtual characters are the foundation of gacha games’ desire structure. Also, the author purposes that over-possession, the sophisticated dynamics between the player and the character, boost the desire for repetitive gacha gaming. Last, the author puts gacha games in the wider context of late capitalism and shows that neoliberalism creates gacha games and gacha players develop parasociality with characters to resist the insecurity of their precarious lived experience.