The Radicality of VR, the Critical Point of Bishōjo Games: On Project LUX

On September 16, Facebook announced its new-generation standalone VR headset. With a $299 price point that encroaches on Nintendo Switch territory, the running joke that “every year is the Year of VR” finally seems, even now, on the verge of becoming reality. VR appears to be setting out on its road to maturity; it is to become a wholly new medium, one that promises to transform how we imagine the future. The bishōjo games made for this wholly new medium likewise seem to promise some wholly new experience. Yet once we actually strap on the headset, we cannot stop sighing in disappointment: most of the time, the wholly new experiences built on this supposedly wholly new medium give off a distinctly decrepit odor. This forces us to pose the following questions. Is VR really a new medium? Do bishōjo games in VR really bring us any new experience?

Or, to state these two questions more precisely:

1. Is VR inherently innovative—radical?

2. Are bishōjo games in VR inherently innovative—radical?

This essay examines these two questions by following two threads — the history of the imaginaries surrounding VR, and the critical history of bishōjo games — and finally takes the VR bishōjo game Project LUX as its case, asking whether this “radicality” is possible at all.

Why Seek the Radical in Bishōjo Games

Before the argument proper, we should perhaps set the context of VR aside and first address a prior question: why seek the radical in bishōjo games at all? True, for many bishōjo-game players today the pursuit of radical innovation may hardly seem necessary. For them, the bishōjo game should offer the endless reproduction of everyday life, a gentle refuge in which to consume forever amid standardized stories and characters. In the history of bishōjo games, however, the pursuit of the radical was once a genuine current — one might even say an essence — of the form. This pursuit of radicality can also be described as a self-referential movement of “criticism” that bishōjo games directed at themselves.

For the majority of bishōjo-game players today, indifferent as they are to matters of thought, “criticism” may be an unfamiliar word. Yet the moment one utters the household name “ErogameScape” — in Chinese fan parlance, the “eroge Critical Space” — its implications seem to be grasped at once. But criticism is not what most bishōjo-game players intuit it to be, namely something like ErogameScape’s rating system; within ErogameScape, criticism finds its most important expression instead in the long-form review section. This criticism belongs squarely to the Japanese tradition of literary criticism. To bishōjo-game players the name “Critical Space” feels as familiar as something native to their own domain, but the name itself comes from literary criticism. The original Critical Space (『批評空間』) was a journal devoted to criticism, founded jointly by critics including Kōjin Karatani and Akira Asada. It occupies a commanding place in the history of Japanese literary criticism, and its influence was so great that it spawned imitators such as a “Film Critical Space” website that dutifully copied its name and style. The “eroge Critical Space” we know so well is precisely its bishōjo-game replica.

The impetus toward a critical, radical pursuit of bishōjo games, then, has long lain dormant in the heart of every bishōjo-game player, and within the critical history of bishōjo games as well.

The Critical Point of Bishōjo Games

In the history of bishōjo games, criticism is a question that cannot be evaded. Hiroki Azuma is indispensable to that critical history, already thoroughly familiar to readers of theory. The revelatory analyses displayed in his Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals and The Birth of Game-Like Realism left an indelible mark on the critical history of bishōjo games. But Chinese-language readers may be less familiar with another major intervention: the dōjin criticism series he produced in the early 2000s: The Critical Point of Bishōjo Games (美少女ゲームの臨界点).

This critical zine, of which only two volumes were published, assembled numerous bishōjo-game writers such as Gen Urobuchi, Masaki Motonaga, and Jin Haganeya. It also gave birth to the classic definition of “sekaikei,” the keyword that ruled otaku-culture criticism throughout the 2000s. At the same time it cultivated otaku-culture writers such as Satoshi Maejima and left its mark on figures like Shūsei Sakagami, known to the Chinese-speaking world today through Keyの軌跡 (The Trajectory of Key) and TYPE-MOONの軌跡 (The Trajectory of TYPE-MOON). Even names as familiar as Tatsuhiko Takimoto and Makoto Shinkai appear in the zine’s production credits. Looking back today, this dōjin criticism zine fully deserves to be called a “legend.”

The story of how this zine came about is itself fascinating. For readers of theory, Azuma’s most memorable piece of bishōjo-game criticism is presumably his analysis of loop-structure bishōjo games in The Birth of Game-Like Realism. That book originally ran as a serial in Faust, the light-novel literary magazine that burned brightly in the early 2000s. Soon after the serialization began, however, Azuma fell into a disagreement of principle with the magazine’s editor Katsushi Ōta. The reason is jaw-dropping: Azuma was a Key devotee, while Ōta was a Tsukihime devotee (in today’s terms, closer to a Fate devotee). To resist Ōta’s Type-Moon faction, Azuma stepped down from the magazine’s criticism section and independently produced the mail magazine Hajō Genron (波状言論) and the dōjin criticism zine The Critical Point of Bishōjo Games. The first volume of The Critical Point of Bishōjo Games contains a spectrum chart recording in detail the influences and relative positions of light novels and bishōjo games as Azuma saw them. This now-legendary criticism zine exerted a profound influence not only on bishōjo games but on light novels and on the criticism surrounding them both.

The Radicality of the Critical Point

In his famous essay on AIR in The Critical Point of Bishōjo Games, “Stopping Short of Moe, Remaining in Impotentiality” (萌えの手前、不能性に止まること), Azuma states his criterion for bishōjo-game criticism as follows:

Such are my thoughts on AIR — but what exactly does “critical” mean here? Needless to say, we do not ordinarily regard AIR as a work possessed of criticality. It is merely a “tear-jerker” that satisfies otaku desires in due measure, merely a commodity produced according to the logic of consumption and rewarded with success. In the production and consumption of AIR there was perhaps no critical consciousness at all, nor any need for one. I myself do not for a moment believe that the criticality of AIR I discuss here is something consciously advanced by Jun Maeda and the other staff at Key, nor do I suppose that most readers perform the sort of reading given above. In this respect AIR is entirely different from works of explicitly critical character such as the previously mentioned Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer and Neon Genesis Evangelion, or Masaki Motonaga and otherwise’s Kiss the Future (未来にキスを).

And yet, if I insist so stubbornly on the word “critical,” it is precisely because “critical” (批評的 = 臨界的) originally signifies neither censure nor denunciation. It should instead be an adjective describing the whole of those artful creative acts — present in literature, art, animation, games, or any particular genre — which, in attempting to push a genre’s own possibilities to their critical point, unconsciously expose the conditions and limits of that genre.

As the discussion so far has shown, through the analysis of AIR our understanding of the essence and limits of the bishōjo game as a genre has been deepened. In other words, on a level bearing no direct relation to the author’s own intentions or to the player’s feel of play, this work becomes a passage through which a property latent in the genre itself is exposed. It is with respect to this property that I call AIR a “critical” work.

The critical-point theory of bishōjo-game criticism that Azuma displays here is exactly such an act: pushing the possibilities of the bishōjo game to their critical point, so that the essence of the medium is exposed. Many readers will already have noticed that the criticism of loop-structure bishōjo games in The Birth of Game-Like Realism, with its intense attention to the “system” of the bishōjo game — in other words to the architecture/structure of the medium — is in fact another practice of this same critical criterion. And the pursuit of critical radicality in VR bishōjo games, like the critical-point theory itself, is precisely the act of pushing the medium of VR, and the genre of the VR bishōjo game, to their limits so that their essence and architecture may come into view.

The Radicality of Cyberspace

Let us return to our opening question: is VR inherently innovative—radical? Or, put differently, what would radicality mean for VR in the first place? Although consumer VR products and their industry have risen only in the past decade or so, the sociological and literary imagination trained on VR has a long history. In thinking about what innovation means for VR, examining that imagination offers a shortcut. And the byword for that imagination is precisely what we habitually call “cyberspace.”

Cyberspace has long been a household word, yet compared with “the net,” which we use far more often in daily life, it leans much further toward metaphor. For the communications infrastructure that underpins so-called cyberspace takes the form the word “net” implies: not a “place,” but a traffic network of optical fiber and cable. In “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?” Hiroki Azuma argues that cyberspace detached itself from the mesh structure of its communications infrastructure and became a spatial metaphor because of the techno-utopian hopes that the Californian Ideology, which arose in 1960s America, invested in the internet. This curious marriage of communications technology — infrastructure built at the scale of the nation-state — with left-wing thought created a new continent of freedom outside real space; “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” modeled on the American Declaration of Independence, is the exemplary case of the Californian Ideology’s imagined new continent of freedom. And cyberpunk, the type of literary imagination we know so well, was deeply shaped by this same current of thought. In the literary imagination of cyberspace, the control that capital and the system exert over the individual is typically represented as cables, traffic, buildings — infrastructure — while the free base of resistance against capital and the system is represented as a phantasmal cyberspace. These two opposed ways of representing one and the same thing reflect exactly the coexistence of radicality and conservatism within this ideology.

Needless to say, the optimistic fantasy that expected the space of the net to become the new base for a great left-wing counteroffensive was deeply naive. When Azuma serialized that essay in 1997, the internet had not yet spread as it has today, and the critique of this naivety still had to proceed through a certain amount of philosophical reflection. But for us, living now and having watched internet space become an instrument for whipping up nationalist sentiment and for the digital exploitation of individuals, that naivety can be felt firsthand without any reflective analysis at all.

By Hiroki Azuma.

The Short-Circuited Symbolic and Radicality

Even today, after the VR industry’s rapid growth, people have still not truly outgrown the naive imagination of cyberspace. Facebook’s decision to require a Facebook account to log in to its VR devices drew widespread criticism from players and industry alike, and one strand of that criticism remains the same old discourse of freedom under threat. Such critique has still not escaped the structure of the Californian Ideology described above. After the uproar over food-delivery riders trapped in “the system,” even ordinary people with no interest in digital-labor issues have stopped harboring illusions about “the system”; for a critique of VR to go on rehearsing an ancient liberalism is naivety twice over. Does this mean, then, that for cyberspace — and for those of us who would theorize VR and the VR bishōjo game as forms — there is no radical innovation left to speak of? Not at all. What we must do here is precisely turn something old into an innovation, and sublimate something immature into the radical.

What does that mean? Let us return once more to the imagination of cyberspace. The psychologists Sherry Turkle¹ and Allucquère Rosanne Stone² once made the following claim about the coming age of electronic media: in that age, they said, the way people switch back and forth between windows on a screen means that people can shuttle among different personas, and this multiple-personality-like structure of the medium fosters a deconstruction of the Cartesian subject — the birth of a postmodern subject. But this psychology marching under the postmodern banner is deeply suspect. Žižek, in his essay,³ objected that free movement among personas in fact implies, behind them, a subject-position as the empty set capable of donning any mask whatsoever. Hence a theory that poses the plural personas of cyberspace against the subject not only fails to threaten the subject’s unity but reinforces the subject’s structure of desire on another level. Azuma proposed, however, that behind this seemingly naive psychological analysis lies hidden a certain radical possibility overlooked by Lacanian psychoanalysis.

In the accounts of Turkle and the others, Azuma noticed a peculiar logic of the surface. For players of MUDs, for example, when the character represented in written signs is violated, the players themselves feel violated. In online chat, when the other party claims to be a woman and uses feminine language, one simply believes it for the time being, without reservation and regardless of any other factor. What such cases reflect is the information age’s indifference toward what lies behind the screen — toward depth.

In psychoanalytic discourse, surface and depth are always two sides of one another, shaping the structure of the subject dialectically. In a psychoanalytic account of viewing — take cinema — the spectator on the one hand identifies with the image on the screen, that is, with the character, in an imaginary identification; on the other hand the spectator identifies with the apparatus outside the screen (the camera, the director, the gaze of society) in a symbolic identification. In this dialectical relation between the visible image on the screen and the invisible symbolic order off the screen, the subject’s structure of desire is formed. In the information age of cyberspace, however, people have lost all interest in depth. In psychoanalysis, this loss of depth — the loss of the symbolic order, the fall of the big Other — always returns in perverse form. Žižek, for instance, holds that what such discourse displays is precisely a masochistic character: the result of the missing depth is merely to usher in, voluntarily, the return of another “master” by the name of cyberspace. Azuma affirms this mechanism of supplementation of the symbolic order, but points out that in the information age the supplementation no longer proceeds by restoring the symbolic order; it proceeds instead in another form — “the imaginarization of the symbolic = the becoming-image of the sign.” This short-circuiting of the Symbolic, this theory of an expanded Imaginary connecting directly to the Real — a distinctive stance toward (Lacanian) psychoanalysis — is a crucial part of Azuma’s thought. His famous definition of sekaikei, for example — “the direct coupling of the you-and-I relationship to ontological problems such as the survival or destruction of the world” — derives precisely from this critique of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis.

The imaginarization of the Symbolic, the becoming-surface of depth, in fact ushers in a total surface: an ultra-surface = hyperplane. And the new mode of subjectivity born on this hyperplane is what Azuma calls the interface subject.

The Japanese labels read, from left to right: “diminished big Other”; “image” and “symbol”; and “subject (visual subject)” and “subject (linguistic subject).”

The Radicality of the Interface Subject

The critical stance toward (Lacanian) psychoanalysis inherent in Azuma’s notion of the interface subject in fact derives from Derrida. In Azuma’s view, psychoanalysis is on the whole a product of the twentieth-century cinematic apparatus. The shift from the film-viewing model of psychoanalysis to the cyberspace of the information age means that “seeing and being seen” = “the visible and the invisible” = “image and sign” are flattened onto one and the same surface and represented there. And this property of belonging simultaneously to image and to sign is exactly what Derrida called writing (écriture).

In the past, the image was visible while the sign (the symbolic order) was invisible. With the arrival of the information age, image and sign are both placed within the Imaginary, and their distinction is thereby released from the privilege of vision, to be handled instead by a dispersed state of perception. In other words, the distinction shifts from an ontological difference between image and sign to a cognitive difference among the perceptual channels in which writing is processed. The dispersed perception of the interface subject, processing writing across different channels, corresponds on one side to Derrida’s “space between the eyes and the ears,” and on the other to Freud’s “uncanny.”

Freud’s concept of the uncanny designates a fear different from the fear of the unknowably foreign: a fear that arises when what is most intimate and internal returns from outside in estranged form. Its best-known instances include the uncanny valley of the doll, the double, and chance events in everyday life. In one famous example of Freud’s, the uncanny is interpreted thus: you are just thinking of a friend you would rather not meet when that very person appears. The mechanism of such everyday coincidences is that you had already registered the person’s presence unconsciously, but your aversion to him repressed the information, preventing it from rising to consciousness; the unconscious then carried out its own processing of that information and began associating around this disliked friend. So as the distance closes, the unconscious is busy with its associations of the friend at the very moment the friend happens to greet you. This mechanism — conscious experience lagging behind unconscious experience — is what produces the feeling of the uncanny.

In Azuma’s interpretation, this repression of consciousness by the unconscious, this lag of consciousness behind the unconscious, is combined with Derrida’s “space between the eyes and the ears” and elaborated into a media theory of differential processing speeds — among the several perceptions, and between consciousness and the unconscious. In other words, the radicality of the interface subject as Azuma describes it lies precisely here: once the privilege of vision is dissolved, the conflicts generated by differences in processing speed among the perceptions scramble and split the dialectical subject. And it is here, at last, that we encounter the theory capable of interpreting the radicality latent in VR.

Half-Dive VR and the Scrambling of the Senses

Facebook’s release of the Quest 2 at $299 may signal the maturing of the VR industry, but it does not signal the maturing of VR technology. Even today VR technology faces many unsolved problems, among the most representative of which are motion sickness and the performance gap — problems every VR player knows by heart.

Motion sickness names the carsickness-like effect produced, while wearing a VR headset, by the mismatch between a visual sense that experiences the viewpoint as moving and a kinesthetic sense of a body at rest. Its principle resembles ordinary carsickness or 3D sickness, yet only in VR has it become a widespread problem demanding solution. To ward it off, many VR games have adopted teleport locomotion or drastically narrowed the field of view during movement, canceling out the sense of motion that vision brings. VR aims at total sensory immersion, yet to eliminate motion sickness it must restrain its visual effects to some degree: this paradox has made motion sickness the greatest obstacle on VR’s road to maturity.

And yet it is precisely because VR sits between maturity and immaturity, in the special condition of half-dive, that the radicality we seek becomes possible. In visual terms VR is already able to deceive consciousness into believing it is moving, while the unconscious processing of the body’s kinesthetic sense remains a complete blank. This conflict among the perceptions, together with the history of vision’s repression of the other senses, is finally manifested — in intensely physiological form, as scrambling — in the problem-to-be-solved called motion sickness.

Next, the performance gap. For current computer graphics, full visual immersion remains some distance away. The human pair of eyes commands a horizontal field of view of nearly 200 degrees, can detect the pixel gaps of an 8K panel at headset viewing distance, and requires at least 90 frames per second to relieve eye strain and dizziness. Achieving a 200-degree field would require rendering at 8K and 90 fps for each eye; even the newest RTX 3090 can manage only 8K at 60 fps with DLSS — still far from the eye’s limits. To cope within present rendering budgets, the VR industry developed a technique called foveated rendering. Its principle: although humans possess an enormous field of view approaching 200 degrees, the region of genuinely sharp cognition — the fixation point — spans only about 30 degrees, beyond which the eye’s cognitive capacity falls off progressively. This is the cognitive-science account of what we colloquially call “peripheral vision.” It supplies the theoretical basis for an optimization shortcut: by lowering the rendering resolution outside the fixation point, one can preserve apparent sharpness while drastically reducing rendering load — in the ideal case, achieving a nearly identical result with only 16 percent of the original performance. The technique’s current defect, however, is that the eyeball moves while the fixation point stays locked to the center of the screen, unable to follow the eye’s focus. Solving this requires eye tracking, but eye tracking in VR has not yet reached practical deployment: there is neither a price most people can afford nor any broad ecosystem of games built to use it.

This gap in graphics performance means that the VR devices most people can afford serve only the “conscious” portion of human vision, without broadly covering the remaining “unconscious” portion — “peripheral vision.” At the same time, VR’s tracking of head movement is already quite mature. Thus the mutual conflict between continuity in kinesthetic perception and discontinuity in vision — on one side, the linkage of visual change to movement in the conscious portion accords with our perceptual structure and produces a sense of reality, or immersion; on the other, the unconscious portion of vision goes uncovered, and the experience of peering at the world through a periscope violates that same perceptual structure — ultimately produces the sensation VR players know when they move their heads: an objectification of the gaze, as though one’s own vision had become a camera operated by a hopelessly clumsy cinematographer, until one cannot help mocking one’s own “camerawork” = “vision.” This experience lies very close to the uncanny discussed above. Vision may be counted among the subject’s most intimate senses, yet once the headset is on, that very vision is externalized into an alien object.

This objectification of the gaze is also what fits the character of the interface subject most exactly. Unlike the dialectical structure of Lacanian psychoanalysis, in which the visible image and the invisible sign belong to surface and depth respectively, the objectification of the gaze signifies precisely the processing of writing across multiple channels within the surface. This multi-channel processing of vision shatters the dialectical structure of the subject, scrambles the boundary between subject and outside, and epitomizes the radicality we have been describing in the VR medium.

Through the above analysis we have reached a provisional answer to the question “is VR inherently radical?” Judged by the imagination of cyberspace, and by the ultimate goal toward which the VR industry strives, VR is nothing but a contemporary replay of the Californian Ideology that sustained that imagination, with no radicality of its own to speak of. But real, existing VR technology has not yet reached its stated goal; it remains in a state of half-dive. And what produces that state is precisely the repression of the other senses by a visual culture epitomized by the cinematic apparatus. In this immature VR, the difference in channel processing speed between a visual simulation running ahead and the less developed simulation of the other senses ultimately yields an effect in which the perceptions collide with one another and scramble the subject. Perhaps in the near future these “technical problems” will all be solved. What matters here, however, is what VR as a medium re-exposes while they remain unsolved: the relation between subject-formation and the episteme carried by whichever perception holds the upper hand in a given era. This is also what Azuma originally meant in regarding psychoanalysis as a product of the cinematic apparatus.

Project LUX

Let us turn, then, to this essay’s final task: analyzing how a VR bishōjo game can embody radicality in its own expression.

Project LUX is the first VR title from Spicy Tails, the independent development circle led by the famous light-novel author Isuna Hasekura, released in 2017. Before it, Hasekura had produced the WORLD END ECONOMiCA series, well known in independent visual-novel circles. Played in 2020, this 2017 work may feel thoroughly dated: not only are its graphics far behind, it offers 6DoF head tracking without controller tracking, and its interactions are sparse enough that many VR players prefer to call it a “VR anime” rather than a “VR game.” Indeed, the official site introduces the work as “Spicy Tails‘ first VR animation.” But this ambiguous boundary is nothing new to bishōjo-game players long accustomed to calling such works games; it corresponds exactly to the “games like novels” and “novels like games” of Azuma’s The Birth of Game-Like Realism, with which we are already familiar.

To return to the point: although Project LUX looks badly dated in its graphics and systems, its scenario is outstanding. And not merely outstanding in the sense of a well-written story: its most striking feature is that it turns its own technical backwardness around and uses it to construct the entire scenario. In this sense, Project LUX is a work of game-like realism in the fullest sense.

The Objectification of the Gaze in Project LUX

The story of Project LUX runs as follows. In a future world, the vast majority of humanity already lives inside cyberspace. Cyber technology has advanced to the point where people can fully share one another’s memories and even personalities. Lux alone, an artist, has steadfastly refused cyberization, living alone in the flesh in a cottage on a deserted shore. As cyber technology blurs the boundaries of the individual, the capacity of those in cyberspace for creative activity steadily atrophies — and Lux the artist becomes the perfect candidate to produce cultural goods for their consumption. To reach the secluded Lux and commission her work, the people of cyberspace dispatch the protagonist whom the player will inhabit: an agent who enters a prosthetic body, visits Lux in the real world, and presents the commission.

The great majority of the game’s running time is filled with the agent and Lux chatting about everything under the sun and trading flirtatious banter. In this sense Project LUX can be called a quite conventional everyday-style bishōjo game. But the game’s defining feature lies elsewhere: the fact that this everyday flirtation will end in tragedy is shown to the player explicitly from the very beginning.

In that opening, the player does not, as described above, directly inhabit the agent and begin the sweet daily round of banter with Lux. On entering the game, the player first arrives at a trial — a trial adjudicating the case of Lux’s death, in which the defendant is our agent. Yet the role the player performs in this trial is not the agent in the dock but a juror, who uses cyber technology to relive the agent’s memories and establish what happened. This cyber reliving is, unmistakably, a metaphor for the VR headset we ourselves have put on. And here we meet the same structure we encountered in the chapter on VR’s radicality: in this VR bishōjo game the player inhabits two roles at once, in a metafictional form that is itself a metaphor for VR — one, the agent flirting with Lux; the other, the juror silently reliving it all.

At first glance this metafictional structure looks close to the dialectical structure of psychoanalysis: inhabiting the agent is imaginary identification with the visible character; inhabiting the juror is symbolic identification with the invisible gaze. But as the reliving proceeds, the clear boundary this metafictional structure possesses begins to blur — because the reliving that VR presents is simply “too immersive.” “Too immersive” here means that, compared with the visual model of psychoanalysis, the cinematic apparatus, even a technically backward VR game like Project LUX still has the power to drag the player bodily into VR space. The game has no controller tracking and no haptic feedback, but it does have free 6DoF head tracking, and its interactions and flirtations with Lux are actively choreographed around movements of the head. The psychoanalytic dialectic of the visible and the invisible is here undone by the simplest thing imaginable: the “kinesthesia” of the head. However much the player may try, by vision alone, to consciously maintain the boundary between the two inhabited roles of juror and agent, after selecting topics of conversation with Lux by moving one’s gaze, turning one’s head left and right to feel her voice in spatial audio, even leaning one’s head into Lux’s small hand — the player can no longer prevent the transcendent, juror part of the self from sliding down into the surface space of flirtation with Lux.

The Scrambling Between Two Identifications

This descent of the transcendent level — an objectification of the gaze, a scrambling of the dialectical subject — climbs to a still higher pitch as the truth of the case gradually unravels. The commission from the people of cyberspace, it turns out, was made in order to harvest from Lux’s works the energy generated by an individual’s passion, for use in waging war within cyberspace. The agent’s job, therefore, was not only to commission Lux’s creation: through the technology of shared memory and reliving, he was also the instrument by which the people of cyberspace surveilled and tracked her. On discovering the truth, Lux breaks down. She realizes that whatever the war’s outcome, she will be forcibly cyberized by the victors and turned into electronic livestock, milked endlessly for creative energy. Her singularity — her being herself — will be destroyed by electronic copying, shared and relived by the people of cyberspace. Rather than lose what makes her irreplaceably herself, better to die and let death inscribe that singularity into history.

And so the broken Lux chooses the path of suicide. Before shooting herself she embraces the agent — which is to say, she embraces you, the player. What Lux cannot accept, in the end, is not the destruction of her own singularity, but the destruction of the singularity of her memories of meeting you — of this relationship that might perhaps be called love. The memories Lux shares with you are unique and unrepeatable; but once the agent returns to cyberspace they will inevitably be shared with others, experienced by them as if the memories were their own.

“How disheartening, to think that someone else might peer into this feeling that belongs to you and me alone.”

These are the words Lux speaks before her life ends — words that force us to put a question to every player whose tears fall at this heartrending scene: you who are crying — are you the agent, or the juror?

Analyzed this way, Project LUX reveals an ingenious structure. It first places the player inside a metafictional structure, as a juror on the meta level coolly observing the interactions of Lux and the agent. Then, through the non-visual interactions of the VR medium and the depiction of flirtation with Lux, it draws the player helplessly into an intimate everyday life with Lux, until the juror’s task is forgotten and the player slips down into the agent on the object level. Once the player is fully immersed in that everyday life, it deftly pivots the story into tragedy — using the weight of that tragedy to intensify the player’s emotional bond with Lux, while continually reminding the player, through self-referential lines of dialogue, of the juror’s task. Amid the everyday of nuzzling a beautiful girl and the tragic love that follows, the player is thrust at every moment into the dilemma of not knowing whether the emotions welling up should be regarded as the agent’s or as the juror’s. The player laments that the love between self and Lux ends in tragedy; yet the chief culprit behind that tragedy is none other than the player. The player has no one to blame but the player.

Self-reference destroys the hierarchy of logical levels; multiple affiliations on a single surface scramble the dialectical subject. The structure perfectly reflects the radical character of VR as a medium.

The Narrative Trick in Project LUX

Project LUX does not stop there, however. If, at the game’s single choice — whether or not to stop Lux’s suicide — the player chooses correctly, a hidden ending opens. In this ending the agent, returned after the trial to his long-frozen flesh-and-blood body rather than a prosthetic one, reunites with the “revived” Lux in the cottage by the sea.

The Lux of the suicide scene, it turns out, was merely a prosthetic body remotely operated by the real Lux. Resistant though she was to cyberization, living on alone in the flesh proved too lonely; she had therefore prepared the prosthetic body needed for cyberization, without ever quite taking the final step. And the reason the agent could know of Lux’s substitution scheme without its being exposed, through memory sharing, to the jurors and other watchers, is this: in the suicide scene, as Lux embraced the agent, she wrote the plan on his back with her hand. And the form that memory sharing takes in this game — the form, in other words, that VR presents — does not include, within touch, the part that is “being touched.”

What this means is that Project LUX exploits precisely the character of VR as a still-immature medium to construct an exquisitely clever narrative trick. On the one hand, the VR medium grants the player a sense of whole-body immersion; on the other, it cannot yet simulate every perception completely. This half-dive character, suspended between immersion and non-immersion, produces the player’s blind spot regarding “being touched” — and makes possible a narrative trick unique to VR.

The Asymmetry of Touching and Being Touched

We call this narrative trick unique to VR because it embodies an asymmetrical relation between touching and being touched. A doubt may arise here: doesn’t Project LUX lack controller tracking and haptic feedback — where, then, does its “touch” come from? Project LUX indeed has neither, so it indeed lacks the vibrating “haptics” we usually mean. But the touch at issue here — just as ASMR can arouse a tactile sensation in the ear through sound alone — is a touch excited by other senses: in other words, a visualized touch.

Here let us return to the nature of VR, and to Azuma. His “Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?”, cited repeatedly in this essay, has in recent years — more than a decade on — been reinterpreted as a theory of the touch panel. The core of this touch-panel theory is the inseparability of vision and touch, a property Azuma names tactile-visuality (触視性). Azuma observed that when the developers of the GUI (graphical user interface) first proposed it, they often described it as something that would let one “touch” the computer’s core — the code. Needless to say, code, having no body, can never be “touched”; but that the GUI’s developers reached for this “metaphor” reflects precisely the inseparable, mutually complementary character of vision and touch. Here we can recognize exactly the same logic as the interface subject. The invisible depth = code = the Symbolic is flattened into the surface = image = the Imaginary, so that code can be manipulated intuitively in visualized form. Dragging a file on the desktop into the recycle bin with the mouse, for example, is the process of representing “del C:\Desktop\text1.txt” in visualized form. If in the age of mouse and keyboard this tactile-visuality was not yet conspicuous, the touch panel is its more immediate embodiment. In other words, for those of us living in the age of the touch panel, touch does not necessarily require feedback like “vibration” to be accomplished: vision’s power to complement touch makes possible a touch realized within vision.

VR is absent from Azuma’s theory of tactile-visuality, because in his eyes VR is merely the culmination of visual culture. But VR, on our account, is a medium in which the several perceptions scramble one another — and it therefore embodies this property even more fully than the touch panel. Oculus has already implemented purely camera-based hand tracking on the $299 Quest 2, and applications and games supporting it are steadily appearing. The experience of “touching” in mid-air in VR displays, more than mouse and keyboard, more than phones and tablets that still require a physical panel, the scenario in which a purely visualized touch becomes possible. Hence, although Project LUX has neither controller tracking and feedback nor hand tracking, by the principle of tactile-visuality there is no difference among leaning into a small hand via head tracking, cuddling up to a 3D “paper-doll” girl via positional tracking, and “touching” in mid-air.

Yet while Project LUX can produce a kind of “touching,” most VR systems still cannot reproduce the sensation of being touched on the back—the sensation on which the narrative trick depends. Devices like haptic suits are, to be sure, under steady development, and may arrive before long. What matters here is how the work reflects and exposes the present immaturity of VR. In this ingenious narrative trick, visualized touch has arrived before the medium can reproduce the sensation of being touched; that imbalance creates an illusion of technical maturity and hides what is still missing. The 3D paper-doll girl can feel that you have embraced her; you cannot feel that she has embraced you. This asymmetry of touching and being touched, this division of tactile processing across channels, is exactly where Project LUX embodies the radicality of the VR medium.

The Critical Point of the VR Bishōjo Game

We can now, at last, answer this essay’s final question. Are bishōjo games in VR inherently radical?

VR as a medium remains in the immature state of half-dive; and within that immature medium the VR bishōjo game Project LUX — released early, and made by an indie circle of limited technical means — is technically more rudimentary still. Yet this work is acutely self-aware both of the character of the medium it inhabits and of its own technical shortfalls. By turning those insufficiencies and immaturities around and weaving them deftly into its scenario in the forms of metafiction and the narrative trick, it satisfies the player’s desire to cuddle up to a beautiful girl while at the same time throwing the player’s subjectivity into disarray. So intricate and so radical a structure not only exposes the essence and limits of the VR bishōjo game as a genre; it also brings to the surface a VR-specific, asymmetrical tactile-visuality that Azuma himself overlooked.

Taking all these features together, we can say without hesitation that Project LUX fully deserves a place as a critical point in the history of bishōjo-game criticism, and as a milestone for the VR-game criticism that may yet come. Perhaps the most fitting title is exactly this: the critical point of the VR bishōjo game.

References

• Hiroki Azuma, Why Is Cyberspace Called Such?+ (サイバースペースはなぜそう呼ばれるか＋), Kawade Bunko, 2011.

• Hiroki Azuma, “The Birth of the Tactile-Visual Plane” (触視的平面の誕生), Genron β 21, 2018.

• Hiroki Azuma, “The Birth of the Tactile-Visual Plane (2)” (触視的平面の誕生（２）), Genron β 22, 2018.

• Hiroki Azuma, ed., The Critical Point of Bishōjo Games (美少女ゲームの臨界点), 波状言論, 2004.

• Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche” [The Uncanny], trans. Noritada Sudō and Hiroshi Fujino (不気味なもの), in The Complete Works of Freud (『フロイト全集』), vol. 17, Iwanami Shoten, 2006.