/jp/ - Otaku Culture

About a month ago I started my long fall into the rabbit hole of obscure otaku bullshit that is ukagaka. Ukagaka are programs that run these things called ghosts, which are desktop buddies that have anime avatars. This is the database of published ghosts: http://ghosttown.mikage.jp/.. Some ghosts are still being published and updated, and even the ukagaka programs receive regular updates, but it seems that their heyday was in the early-mid 2000's, which is where most of the ghosts in the database are from. The only limits with what you can do with ghosts are your artistic limitations, how much you understand how to write ghost code, or how deep you pockets.

Now I mentioned that ukagaka is "otaku bullshit." Besides the fact that there's almost no documentation outside of Japan, most of the ghosts are based on or around otaku topics and hobbies. The main unifying feature of ghosts is that they're "fake AI", so they'll talk while active. Most ghosts have a specific topic or set of topics to talk about, like music, games, anime, and of course, 2ch. There's quite a few that have a very specific topic that they talk about, such as Ace Combat or Phantasy Star Online. It might be stretching it to call them doujin works on their own, but it's an interesting facet of the culture that is barely known, compared to stuff like maid cafes for example.

Currently, I've been messing around with a ghost called Hinoki the Chopsticks. There's a very very tiny amount of documentation on ghosts, but one person did make a pretty thorough guide to the inner workings of one, and they included a generic template ghost (it's kind of confusing because the "brains" of a ghost is also called the ghost, while the visuals are called the "shell"). Using that ghost, Hinoki's shell, and a lot of Google Translate on the files of other ghosts, I've started learning the in's and out's of these things. So far I've been able to make a daily fortune gatcha (but I can't figure out how to make a lockout) and a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors (but I can't figure out how to make a rematch option).