After playing Mystic Messenger and reading the paper titled “Investing Time for Your In-Game Boyfriends and BFFs: Time as Commodity and the Simulation of Emotional Labor in Mystic Messenger” by Sarah Christina Ganzon, the biggest question on my mind was, why are there so many women who enjoy the game and are big fans of the game when the game reinforces so many negative stereotypes about the role of women in society? Personally, as I played through the game, I found myself continuously annoyed by the roles I was being forced into filling and the time that the game was demanding that I invest. From the start, it made no sense to me why I, the main character, needed to listen to the anonymous stranger named “Unknown” and sit in another stranger’s apartment to help with issues that did not concern me. I admittedly did not make it very far into the game because I became fed up very quickly and gave up.
Ganzon’s paper dives more into the specific ways in which Mystic Messenger replicates the gender roles women are often expected to fill. At the beginning, after being forced into living in a stranger’s apartment, the player joins a group chat for the RFA, a charitable fundraising organization. The men in this group chat then force the player into effectively taking over as the new secretary for the RFA, simply because the player is a woman. Throughout the game, the player is then required to take time out of their day with a moment’s notice to tend to the emotional needs of these men. Most disturbingly, the paper mentions that if the player chooses to pursue a relationship with Jumin, he will lock the player in his home. Ganzon then writes, “ If one chooses to escape, flirt with someone else, or ask someone else for help, one gets a bad ending wherein the player gets killed after escaping or one wherein Jumin keeps the player character forever confined in his mansion as a sex slave.”
It is shocking to me that this game was created by an all-female game company and gained so much popularity among women because its story and the emotional labor it demands from its women players seem archaic and somewhat offensive. I would personally be completely unwilling to provide the amount of emotional labor that the game asks from me to real-life people, let alone to fake virtual characters. The gripes that I have with the game also seem consistent with the values women hold today, supported by statistics showing that the percentage of young single men in the United States has been increasing. This has been attributed to causes such as women choosing to date each other, women being more selective with the men they choose to be with, and women being tired of taking on the role of being their emotionally distant male partner’s full-time therapist. One Saturday Night Live sketch titled “Man Park” even pokes fun at this phenomenon by depicting how emotionally reliant men are on women to function. It is difficult for me to understand how Mystic Messenger was able to garner so many fans when it stands in such conflict with the shifts we have observed in women’s attitudes about the roles they do and do not want to fill and society.
I think that while this game does reinforce certain gender norms and emotional labor of its players, I personally didn’t find it shocking that it was created by an all female game design company. I think a possible way that this game tries to cater towards its audience is creating an atmosphere of fantasy where the main character is at the center of all the romantic attention in this game, and requiring emotional labor does not necessarily mean that the creators endorse emotional labor in the game, since there are comments made by characters throughout the game asking the player about their level of commitment and what they want to achieve in the gameplay.
In today’s culture, I can see why it seems bewildering that the game was so popular. To Amy’s point, I do think the big selling point is the fantasy of having the attention of so many characters. The game itself is also relatively old, and grew popular in an era of dating sim/visual novel games that had similar story set ups. I think fans of the game willingly walk into the fantasy of the game, and by not thinking too much about the roles as you mentioned, they can enjoy the story more.
Hi Rachel, something I mentioned in my own response to this game is that I think that perhaps a reason why this game leans so far into the stereotypes of women is that in Korea, from my own experience, I’ve seen that socially, people who stray too far out of the norm or what is expected are often ostracized by their peers. I wonder if this game being born out of Korea where societal norms particularly regarding gender are a little different, and given the time of release of the game, are reasons why this game might reinforce such stereotypes.