Asoblog

» see asoblog.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The Japanese online game market in 2006 belonged almost entirely to people under twenty-five, and Asoblog was the site for everybody else. NHN Japan put it up on 15 May 2006 under a subtitle written as an equation, オトナ×アソブ×ブログ, where the first term is the one that mattered: オトナ, grown-ups. The company that ran Hangame in Japan had gone looking for the players who were older than its own audience and had jobs.

The positioning NHN gave the press on launch day was a safe place online where busy grown-ups could play without effort and get to know each other through the games. The mechanism for that was negative: Asoblog matched you with an opponent automatically and had no chat. The reasoning, in NHN's own words, was consideration for the adult demographic that was not used to chatting. Read that as a company that had worked out what keeps thirty-eight-year-olds off game sites, and concluded it was the text box full of strangers.

There were no avatars either, unlike Hangame, which had built its whole economy on them. What you got instead was a 名刺, a business card carrying an icon and a line or two about yourself. The site also shipped a script that checked your browser and refused anything that was not Internet Explorer 6 on Windows, which in Japan in 2006 was not an unreasonable bet.

~ the dossier ~

~ the blog wrote itself ~

When a game finished, your blog page opened on its own with the result and your impressions already recorded in it. The launch release states the benefit plainly: you never run out of things to write about for a daily-blogging event. Asoblog had taken the hardest problem in personal publishing, which is that almost nobody has something to say every day, and solved it by generating the something.

Behind that sat roughly thirty games by early 2007, the usual Japanese parlor set of shogi and mahjong, with nine pachinko machines alongside them. The signature original was サラリーマン大富豪, Salaryman Daifugo, added on Christmas Day 2006, which took the card game where the winner becomes the millionaire and recast the joker as 社長, the company president.

The site called itself neither a blog nor a game site. Its own login page says so in as many words, and then calls itself an entertainment site where everything is free and easy to play.

~ a shop where everything cost nothing ~

The currency was called チップ, chips, and you could not buy any. They arrived from how you did in the games and from how many people came to read your blog, and you spent them at an exchange counter on prize draws. The item shop was stranger still. Every blog skin in it was priced at 0円 including tax, with an expiry listed as 無期限, no limit. The terms of service reserved a right to introduce paid services later and NHN never used it.

The one thing Asoblog did police was identity, and not in the way you would expect from a site full of adults. Your login ID was your email address, and the terms let NHN revoke your registration outright if that address turned out to be free webmail. A disposable address was grounds for being thrown out. That covered the entire safety architecture: no age gate and no content filter, only the email rule.

A free webmail address was what most of Turkey was carrying in 2006, because MSN handed you one on the way in. Almost everybody I was online with at the time had exactly the sort of address the rule was written to exclude.

~ three months of notice ~

On 5 March 2007 at two in the afternoon, Asoblog posted that it would close in early June. The reason given was that consolidating game content and game communities into Hangame would let NHN Japan as a whole deliver a fuller game service. New registrations and friend invitations stopped on 12 March at 15:00. Maintenance ran on 2 April and after it came up the events stopped running and bug fixes stopped happening. An export tool shipped that spring which would save your blog to your PC, titles and bodies only. The closing date was finally pinned on 9 May.

By then the users were making their own arrangements in public. Two weeks before the end the front page was still carrying new posts at a rate of twenty every four hours, and one of them reads, in full, that the author is heading to Hangame for now, and that their ID there comes from a Miyazawa Kenji story. The farewell page says the service ended on 6 June 2007 and that the member database has been cut off from any outside network, to be erased completely after a while. Under that are two buttons, one to Hangame and one to Cururu, the sister sites that got to keep going. Asoblog had 100,000 registered members and Hangame had 19.31 million.

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