ai sp@ce

~ the obituary ~

ai sp@ce opened to the public on 15 October 2008, after three closed betas that scaled from 1,010 testers up to 6,060. It was run by a production committee with Dwango at the head of it, and the code was written mainly by a studio called Headlock. Dwango is the company behind Niconico, which matters more to this story than the development credit does.

Three visual novel franchises rented out their casts to it, among them Key's Clannad and the Navel series Shuffle! What they supplied were specific named characters with existing fandoms, lifted out of games people had already spent dozens of hours reading, and that transplant was the entire pitch.

You made an avatar, and then you chose one of those heroines as a chara-doll to share a room with. She lived in the room as something between a companion and a tenant. The system called her personality development aitune, and she picked up traits over time depending on how the two of you spent it. You could dress her, and you could teach her motions and dances.

It was free to get in. Money went through Niconico Points at roughly a yen apiece, and what the points bought was clothing and furniture rather than power. Nobody was being sold a better sword.

~ the case file ~

~ living with a chara-doll ~

The world was laid out as three themed islands, with an Akihabara built in the middle as the place everyone passed through. Putting Akihabara at the center of a virtual world aimed at visual novel readers is not subtle, but it did the job a hub has to do, which is give strangers a reason to stand in the same place.

Da Capo II supplied another part of the cast, and the mix is the interesting thing about the design. A player walking through that hub was moving among characters from games they had not played, owned by publishers who competed with each other, all of them licensed into one room for as long as the committee kept paying. A world built entirely from borrowed characters holds a lease rather than a deed.

~ the account you needed first ~

You could not simply sign up. Entry required an existing Nico Nico Douga account, which meant the population was drawn from the start out of people already living inside Japan's video site rather than out of the general internet. Niwango, another Dwango company, wired the Nico Nico Anime Channel into it so that players could push recordings of their sessions back out to the video platform. The launch was capped at 53,000 simultaneous users, a number chosen by whoever had to size the servers.

That gate explains both why it worked and why it was always going to be small. Every person inside already shared a reference set, so the place never had to explain itself. It also meant the ceiling was fixed at something well under the size of Niconico, and a licensed cast is a recurring bill against a fixed ceiling. Service ended on 30 June 2011, two years and eight months after it opened.

No version of this was ever within reach for me. The account requirement alone settles it: Niconico in 2008 was a Japanese-language site with a Japanese payment layer behind it, and the fiction on offer was built for people who could already name the heroine on sight. Turkey in 2008 was watching anime through fansubs on forums, a different world from paying a yen a point to buy a dress for a character from a game nobody around you had read.

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