VRChat: “There are more Japanese creators than all other countries combined”
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Part of that comes down to sheer numbers, but I feel there’s cultural differences that go into it too. Having lived in Japan I found that relative to the US, the average person is more likely to be decent at drawing/doodling or have interest in other forms of art.
I don’t have any special insight to why that’s true (if my experience is representative of reality — n=1 and all), but my hunch is that it might come down to an overall less self-defeating and more supportive attitude towards self-expression through art… in the US it’s common for people to completely dismiss the possibility that they could ever create anything of value, citing things like lack of talent. There’s also a consistent undercurrent of a disparaging attitude towards artists which also doesn’t help.
With those cultural differences, it’s easy to see why one group could end up with a higher percentage of creators than the other.
i.e. being a "sports fan" is more socially acceptable than being someone that actually plays a sport enthusiastically but not at a high level.
The money part is real too, though. It gets baked in early. I've had to try to shut out that nagging voice in the back of my head myself.
I do agree though that there is a stronger social pressure to be enterprising. For young Americans I think the obsession is social media or youtube
One thing I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of “avatar worlds” where people just go in and pick premade avatars, but these are almost nonexistent—or at least not widely used—by Japanese audiences. The main exception seems to be worlds specifically designed for trying on sample avatars, rather than adopting them as-is.
Seeing a Japanese singer I really enjoy listening to post clips of her Valorant gameplay with her own music playing in the background was quite jarring. I couldn't imagine something remotely similar happening with a pop-singer in the West. The closest analogue that comes to mind would be D&Diesel with Vin Diesel, where he played D&D (the nerd that he is) for a youtube video with the Critical Role cast.
I wonder if it might also be related to Japan's stronger laws against slander/libel and lack of fair use. I've seen many cases of harassed Japanese creators being able to drag their abusers into court in ways that seem very alien here
At least most of my more recent friends love it. But it's a bit off-putting.
A lot of my older friends don't think watching mediocre streaming shows or football is a waste of time though, no, that's "enjoying the fruits of hard work". Whatever.
In the US, there are more ways to express yourself, so art becomes less of an obvious outlet.
That doesn't mean we do more art. I am considered unusual because I sketch, badly. I think it's this "why would you do something you're bad at?" attitude in our western culture that kills it for us.
hell, i had full health coverage when i was an unemployed foreigner in japan.
surely that has an enormous impact on the vitality of the creator community.
I think you might be right. The Japanese seem to have a different attitude toward competence. It's just more expected that you get good at doing something. Cruise the bars of Japan and you're going to find a lot of girls who are pretty but not particularly intelligent, just like anywhere else in the world. But some of these approached me and tried to get me to give them English lessons. They wanted to learn English. I've been giggled at by the same kind of woman in the USA for even knowing more than one language.
It's not ok/safe to share in the USA unless you are amazingly talented and conform to generic norms.
Maybe artists in Japan are more conformist so it's more safe to share, maybe they don't have to mirror popular standards so it's more safe to share.
It's also impossible to make it as an artist in the USA because of health costs. I could hardly justify jumping to working for myself and I had six figures of work a year lined up because insurance went up so much and coverage at the higher rate was way way worse. It really requires parents/spouse boot strap your career.
It's more common to know someone's name if they break out into more mainstream music, such as Kenshi Yonezu (he's done music for Ghibli, My Hero Academia and Square Enix...but some of his most famous work is under the name Hachi). There have been many others who have had that trajectory. Ayase (half of YOASOBI), Reol, Giga and Ryo (Supercell) come to mind.
I think there's also just more of a societal emphasis on craftsmanship and honing skill as its own end. The US has been smoking the capitalist crack pipe for so long everything is either about consuming or producing something of value for others to consume.
In Japan there is a presumed collective endeavor to creativity. That starts in school and continues into the professional world: mangaka will plagiarize from each other in the pursuit of a collective storytelling lamguage (a concept introduced to me by Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga, a great humorous short read on simple realities of the industry with practical advice). Someone who makes a bad drawing is given a lot of leeway to be "pulled back in line", for better or or worse. The professionals complain that everyone copies from everyone else overly much, and the pressure at the top level to continuously put out high level work is deadly intense, but it creates the high standard of uniformity.
But the US culture guarantees a lot of awkward standoffish scenarios because, if you make art, it's positioned relative to the worst framing of your ambition, and this typically means you are viewed as a speculator, someone who is plotting a way to cash in without doing something for others. It's far more acceptable to say that you are an art teacher than an artist because then it locates you within the structure of the firm and the state, which is the "hidden" collective tendency in US culture: be as individual as you want if it builds the nation in balance sheet terms, otherwise you are a failure. Thus the observation from earlier in the thread that a sports fan is more deserving of respect than an amateur athlete - the fan is a consumer, they are participating in the market.
There's certainly more respect (and legal backing) for privacy in Japan, which makes things like producing uncommon, off-color, or even transgressive art less risky. People can't just take pictures of you in public and post them online. You're not expected to become an artistic personality, either. Your art (and perhaps a pseudonymous personality) can stand on its own, even when you make public appearances at physical markets, without any of it leaking out into your non-subculture life.
You're also not expected to turn the effort into a massive commercial effort. Some doujinshi are only produced in tiny runs that are meant to be distributed to friends, and maybe a handful of interested customers. That means that the production standards are more forgiving, the investment is smaller, and the barriers to trying again if a particular effort doesn't go so well are lower.
(Open Brush can be used to create content for platforms such as VR Chat as well as being a way to create explorable spaces and artworks in it's own right)
Its three years old so things have slightly matured.
It's going to wander into entirely different problems (one with a much more uncanny valley), but i'm curious to see how the field develops when facial animation systems start being able to parallel people's faces more.
And if the answer is no, how far away might it be?
(I'd be curious to play with it myself if such a thing exists and is publicly available, but the main reason I'd like to know is to keep an eye on how soon we might see faked video calls joining faked voice phone calls in the toolbox of financial scammers.)
My guess as to why is that full 3D must have been extraneous cognitive load to viewers - xkcd wouldn't have been as popular as it is now if it had been drawn somehow by Rembrandt himself. It owes its success to Randall Munroe's minimalist art style. That kinds of things.
Plus, ultimately, the anime aesthetic is a 2d thing. It's a lot harder to make a 3d model look good in a 2d art style, as a ton of anime over the years have shown.
In Japan, the market for 3D models and other VR/metaverse assets has steadily flourished. Within VRChat, it’s fairly common for users to purchase avatars from platforms like booth.pm and then customize them to their liking—sometimes as simply as changing colors, and other times by adding clothing, accessories, or other elements. The market itself is quite approachable: some avatars are used by thousands, or even tens of thousands, of people, while others cater to much more niche tastes. Either way, there’s something for almost everyone.
Originally, the focus was largely on avatars themselves. Over the years, however, we’ve seen a noticeable shift toward clothing and accessories. Looking at booths in recent Vket events, roughly 40%—if not close to half—of the offerings now fall into those categories. Tools such as ModularAvatar and Mochifitter have made applying and adjusting these items easier than ever, lowering the barrier even further. More broadly, many Japanese users don’t seem to find working with Unity particularly daunting, and that comfort level has helped form the foundation of the ecosystem we see today.
While comedy and roleplay certainly appear from time to time, many people treat their avatars as genuine representations of their identity. This doesn’t mean that identity is fixed—some users switch between multiple avatars—but there is often a strong sense of attachment. The avatar functions not merely as a surrogate in a virtual space, but as something that defines how they present themselves within that world.
This emphasis on originality, combined with a general avoidance of ripped game assets or avatars based on existing IPs (at least compared to trends outside Japan), appears to have played a significant role in shaping this distinctive Japanese VR culture.
>「早く結婚を」「子供を産め」 20代の頃から有権者に言われ続けてきたけど40になってもまだこの言葉をぶつけられる事にため息出ますわ。何歳になったら言われずに済むようになるのか。
> 3次元では国と結婚してるし、そもそもプライベートは２次専だって言ってるでしょ！！何度でも言うぞ２次専なの！！
Translated by ChatGPT to be
> “‘Hurry up and get married,’ ‘Have children’— I’ve been told these things by voters ever since my twenties, and even now that I’m 40, I still get these words thrown at me. It just makes me sigh. At what age will people finally stop saying this to me?
> In the 3D world, I’m married to the state, and besides, I’ve said that my private life is strictly 2D-only, right!! I’ll say it as many times as it takes—I’m 2D-only!!”
V-ket is one of the largest virtual conventions on the platform, hosted out of - wait for it - Japan. (The winter edition is currently on-going, if anyone wants to check it out.)
There are some artistically impressive avatars out there.
tbhimo, this is beyond bad omen to VRC and VR at large from profitability angle. To me it looks the exact path that Twitter went down.
Twitter and Mastodon "went down" this same path. Once bunch of Japanese users figure it out, it's over for a webservice. The system will be pinned at capacity while hemorrhaging non-Japanese users, and any attempted improvements super-proportionately hurt metrics such that the operation only grow in expenditures.
Facebook never had this problem(they still have/had plenty of pornography, anime and not, even literal records of child abuse, just not key presence in/from Japan), and is in fact has been a tumbling snowball of cash.
Those content creators aren't malicious, and there still would be tons of non-monetizable values in the system, but the system that are shaped in this form is set up to be a money pit. My gut theories as to why are that maybe Japanese populace has sixth sense about incurring losses, subconsciously doing for the sake of it, and/or that Japanese people have significantly higher dopamine tolerance that systems that are just right in Japan are way too overwhelming to anyone else - a prime example of the latter being Elon Musk, who appear to be in an incomparably better cognitive state on literal abused substances than he is just browsing Twitter normally.
But whatever the mechanisms might be, the way I feel about "content from Japan > all others combined" situation is it's a "get the plane ticket now if you had cathedrals and national parks to see before you go" indication for the system.
Avatar creation requires a strong understanding of 3d modeling tools and some level of shader coding in many cases.
World creation is also 3d modeling, plus scripting to generate games, doors, etc, if the world has interactivity.
It’s quite lucrative if you’re good at it.