Hyperrhiz

Hyperrhiz 21

Buzzademia :
Scholarship in the Internet Vernacular
Fall 2019

Hyperrhiz 21

Being Mii

Anastasia Salter
University of Central Florida

Citation: Salter, Anastasia. “Being Mii.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 21, 2019. doi:10.20415/hyp/021.let08

Abstract: “Being Mii” is a visual essay about the future of telepresence (VR and social media) through memes created on Nintendo's short-lived social platform Miitomo. The essay is composed entirely of screenshots and “Miifotos,” internal meme-esque compositions using the Mii-avatars, which can be automatically generated from photos and thus offer the potential for an eerie self-echo and endless remixing towards the creation of spreadable media.

Keywords: mobile games, social media, virtual reality, avatars, self representation, commercialism.

Introduction

With Facebook’s recent acquisition of the Oculus Rift, CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared: “After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face -- just by putting on goggles in your home.”[1] What will Zuckerberg’s new reality look like? We can get a slightly terrifying glimpse of his envisioned future through rival Nintendo’s Miitomo, an app released on iOS and Android devices on March 31, 2016. The app similarly envisions a version of Neal Stephenson’s “Metaverse,”[2] a place where everyone would co-exist as avatars embodied in varying degrees of style and presence based on the financial means of the user. This imagined reality is like Club Penguin or Second Life taken to the nth degree—and while the tech for that is still expensive and mostly the domain of a few early adopters, the ideas behind it are everywhere.

“Being Mii” is a visual essay composed entirely of screenshots and “Miifotos,” internal meme-esque compositions using the Mii-avatars, which can be automatically generated from photos and thus offer the potential for an eerie self-echo and endless remixing towards the creation of spreadable media.[3] Any image (including screenshots and movie stills) can quickly become a selfie, which Jill Walker Rettberg describes in part as a tool for understanding ourselves.[4] The app is thus a creative tool centered on the self, but within a walled and carefully regulated space in which all praise and interaction is fuel for an economy of the augmented self – clothing is purchased by gaining reputation, which in turn is earned through likes, comments, and increasing one’s friends count. The gamification at work in this virtual system is counter to its use as a place for meaningful play, and that dichotomy makes it ideal for a brief cautionary tale on the choice we make when we invest in a platform.

Given Miifoto launched to the US public in 2016, the same day this essay was made and to some extent shared in fragments of Miifotos through the platform itself, these screenshots reflect Miitomo at its earliest state: the platform has since evolved, struggled, and ultimately been deserted (closing in 2018). However, this project captures that moment of creation, potential, and unease that must accompany our reaction to this type of media space that feasts on our social capital and networks while making it temptingly easy to put ourselves at the center of meme-tic behavior. It takes the incredibly disposable, ephemeral form of the Miifoto and uses it to ask what is lost and gained as we go virtual, entering Baudrillard’s “desert of the real” wherein we experience a “hyperreal” that appears to point to real selves and homes but is in fact a model without “origin or reality”.[5] Is our Mii (existing only at the whim of Nintendo’s arc of app profitability) us? And if so, what does it mean to outsource our self-modeling to someone else’s platform?

Being Mii

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jeah. Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. NYU press, 2013.

Rettberg, Jill W.  Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How we use selfies, blogs and wearable devices to see and shape ourselves. Springer, 2016.

Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash, Bantam Books: New York, 1992.

Zuckerberg, Mark. Facebook post, March 25, 2014, accessed April 1, 2016.

Notes

  1. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook post, March 25, 2014, accessed April 1, 2016. facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101319050523971
  2. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, Bantam Books: New York, 1992.
  3. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. NYU press, 2013.
  4. Jill W. Rettberg, Seeing ourselves through technology: How we use selfies, blogs and wearable devices to see and shape ourselves. Springer, 2016.
  5. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.