Why do people have that sense of attachment to someone whom they only know through the persona that they play? Why do people feel similar grief as though a friend is about to go away, even though said person probably hasn't met these people and have any form of deep connection other than what technology provides through vicarious interaction.
I guess an answer to that would be in the similar vein as explaining why people get so involved in celebrities in the other side of the [entertainment] world. In many ways, VTubers are not really that different from celebrities in general, they both keep a persona that they use with their respective audience, and have a private/personal life that is often of the curiosity of their fans, but is usually well-guarded. The only difference is that the persona of the celebrity wears the same physical ``face'' as their normal person, while the VTubers wear an animated avatar/model for theirs.
In terms of the depth of the interaction, it tends to be extremely one-sided, where the adoring audience observes their celebrity/VTuber, occasionally sending some short messages/fan mail to their celebrity/VTuber, who may (or more often, may not) answer in short, using language and register that is more of a platitude than a well-thought out advice.
Now, there is nothing wrong with that, as long as the fans remember that it is just one avenue of maintaining some superficial kind of human contact. In pandemic times, when getting trapped at home is the norm, we takae what we can in terms of socialisation to ensure that we do not kill ourselves psychologically through a lack of support. Even I, a sometime self-proclaimed hermit, need to go talk with someone at some level just to ensure that I do not go completely insane from being isolated. Humans are social beings; they've always been social beings. Call it will of God, call it evolutionary advantage, the conclusions are still the same.
I suppose the main difference between a VTuber and a celebrity is the perceived closeness. Messages to a VTuber may be reacted upon nearly immediately by the VTuber on the livestream, while that to a celebrity may take a while, if it ever happens at all. That short turn around time naturally increases the perception of closeness with a VTuber as compared to a more conventional celebrity.
For now, VTubers are a little more close than celebrities to their audience. But what happens when the VTubers start to have more live viewers than what they are acccustomed to? Will the larger number of live viewers who may want that kind of attention/interaction eventually be the downfall of the intimate environment that the VTuber had? Will the VTubers be able to maintain their successes as they scale up larger?
To answer that will require a little bit of history from the speedrunning community. Back in the early days of the Games Done Quick series of speedruns, events were small, initially literally being held in the basement of someone's house [in Utah] for a week. Interaction over IRC was the norm, with good conversation and commentary. ``Chat'' (the Internet streamer's equivalent term for the audience) was well-behaved, and it was cosy. But as the Games Done Quick series of speedruns get increasingly popular (attracting more than a million US dollars of donations per AGDQ/SGDQ event), ``chat'' became more and more relegated to the background, partly because ``chat'' was getting too large (messages flew at rates exceeding one per second) and unruly (trolls and spammers started to rear their ugly heads to disrupt the chat). A wall was built and maintained between the speedrunners and the chat at the event. There was little cosiness left; everything was very corporatised, with strong rules, structures, and with them, increasing impersonality as the relationship transformed to that of one that is more transactional in nature.
Will that happen to the VTubers, whose increasing popularity comes from the parasocial aspect that allows the audience to feel as though someone cares, even if a little? Will the trolls/spammers eventually make things unpleasant enough that the entire VTubing experience just becomes an increasingly one-sided ``improv performance'' affair no different from how one turns up at a ticketed show to sit quietly and watch the performer/VTuber do their thing?
Is the corporatisation mechanism that (say) Games Done Quick have done the only way to tame the entropy that naturally arises from popularity?
For better or worse, Hololive Productions/Cover Corp (and other VTuber agencies/companies for that matter) will need to figure this out for themselves, because they are rapidly reaching that threshold where their policies can make/break how they can grow/maintain their offering.
Actually, on a more strategic note, all companies/organisations need to consider how they need to manage change and scaling. The way to manage a small and tight community/company is very different from managing a large one where it is more likely that people do not know each other than know each other, and of course there is the morass of the medium sized community/company where it is not quite here nor there.
Marc MacYoung shared a quote from Heinlein's Time Enough for Love:
Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty", "meaningless", or "dishonest", and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.I begrudingly have to agree with this particular observation. Here's a scenario: I meet someone for the first time in a formal setting. Without a common understanding of titles and associated etiquette, no one can make any move safely; at best a faux pas is made, at worst an enemy is made because of a perceived ``disrepect''.
Painfully, this means that it is somewhat important to not create unfathomable titles like ``Technoking of Tesla'', and it is also as important to not partake in job title inflation. I mean, there is apparently an International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO). According to that list, my field/domain of expertise is either 251 (software and applications developers and analysts), 252 (database and network professionals), or borderline 212 (mathematicians, actuaries, and statisticians).
The lesson to take away here is that if we want to interact with people beyond a certain small [enough] size, there exist social rules that need to be followed. For new types of social situations beyond the traditional face-to-face one (like the ``chat'' of VTubers/speedrunners/other livestreamers), new rules need to be created to ensure that faux pas cannot be easily committed; however what rules work and what don't are still in development, and depending on how the direction goes, may even affect the draw of such new social situations in the first place.
That's all I have for now. Till the next update.
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