Renowned anime director Kazuchika Kise, known for directing Ghost in the Shell: Arise, voiced his concerns over the growing prevalence of isekai themes in
“Recent anime works will show things like a level-up gauge that appears when characters tap the air, even though there’s no in-setting reason for them to have a personal interface like that. I may just be getting old, but it really makes me wonder: ‘What is going on here?’ It just doesn’t work for me.“
My idea on what’s going on here is, people find it impossible to imagine what is entirely alien to them. Fiction uses various tricks to bridge this gap for its audience; by describing familiar experiences in a fantastical context, it draws you into its imagined reality. But for people who exercise little actual agency in their real lives, don’t go outside much, and play a lot of videogames, the traditional material probably isn’t stuff they can relate to as well as people in the past could. A fictional world that has the mechanics of a videogame is a natural direction to go because it will be easier for modern people to imagine than a fictional world where nobody uses phones or computers.
I can see your argumentation being followed by misguided production management, but I doubt it’s necessary or can positively influence world-building.
All kinds of mechanisms and progression can be presented naturally, intuitively, and embedded within the world. I doubt a noticeable number of people are so far gone they can only understand the world through the interface of video game interfaces.
Things that have in the past been used in fiction to evoke familiar experiences to help people relate to it, or to convey something more concisely by building with concepts the audience can be assumed to be familiar with. For instance I’m reading Dracula right now, and while it does a great job of being comprehensible and relatable to a contemporary audience, I imagine it would be experienced somewhat different by someone living in the time it was written, who probably would have had more direct experience with things like the behavior of horses, letter writing, and cultural attitudes towards aristocracy and war pre-WW1. Though the parallels between letters and digital communications probably help a lot, reliance on them and the fear of having those communications restricted or tampered with is definitely relatable.
I can see your argumentation being followed by misguided production management, but I doubt it’s necessary or can positively influence world-building.
I don’t think it’s correct to attribute this phenomenon to cynical marketing efforts, there’s a vast amount of amateur fiction in this vein. Personally a large portion of my dreams center around videogame elements, and settings and scenarios that are partly or entirely explicitly artificial constructions are what I tend towards imagining while awake. Art reflects the minds of artists and audiences so it’s a natural direction for it to take.
My idea on what’s going on here is, people find it impossible to imagine what is entirely alien to them. Fiction uses various tricks to bridge this gap for its audience; by describing familiar experiences in a fantastical context, it draws you into its imagined reality. But for people who exercise little actual agency in their real lives, don’t go outside much, and play a lot of videogames, the traditional material probably isn’t stuff they can relate to as well as people in the past could. A fictional world that has the mechanics of a videogame is a natural direction to go because it will be easier for modern people to imagine than a fictional world where nobody uses phones or computers.
What do you mean by traditional material?
I can see your argumentation being followed by misguided production management, but I doubt it’s necessary or can positively influence world-building.
All kinds of mechanisms and progression can be presented naturally, intuitively, and embedded within the world. I doubt a noticeable number of people are so far gone they can only understand the world through the interface of video game interfaces.
Things that have in the past been used in fiction to evoke familiar experiences to help people relate to it, or to convey something more concisely by building with concepts the audience can be assumed to be familiar with. For instance I’m reading Dracula right now, and while it does a great job of being comprehensible and relatable to a contemporary audience, I imagine it would be experienced somewhat different by someone living in the time it was written, who probably would have had more direct experience with things like the behavior of horses, letter writing, and cultural attitudes towards aristocracy and war pre-WW1. Though the parallels between letters and digital communications probably help a lot, reliance on them and the fear of having those communications restricted or tampered with is definitely relatable.
I don’t think it’s correct to attribute this phenomenon to cynical marketing efforts, there’s a vast amount of amateur fiction in this vein. Personally a large portion of my dreams center around videogame elements, and settings and scenarios that are partly or entirely explicitly artificial constructions are what I tend towards imagining while awake. Art reflects the minds of artists and audiences so it’s a natural direction for it to take.